Episode 7: Damien Riggs ponders lived experience and psychology in context.
Aileen:
Hey, Anita. I listened to your interview with Damien and I can just say that it was so refreshing and I was so impressed with how brave you were in the interview. I think people who's listening is going to really enjoy the thought provoking conversation.
Anita
Thanks Aileen! I could really feel the difference in myself in this interview, and I think it was because the other interviews I've done, we hadn't released the podcast yet. And I was scared, you know, I was scared about what it was gonna be like to be visible. I'm not used to being visible in my opinions. But now, because we've already released a bunch of episodes, by the time I interviewed Damien, I wasn't scared anymore. So I think it felt, I felt more able to relax and just be myself, which is interesting because actually it's the topic that I feel much less able to talk about. You know, I don't have a lived experience of queerness or gender diversity. And we spoke about gender diversity in the end mostly rather than queerness. So yeah, I felt maybe in a sense it was easy because I could be the person who doesn't know in the interview as well, and I could position myself in that way and position him as the expert. In a sense, it's hard to know how to position yourself in relation to these aspects of diversity because yeah, I don't have lived experience. I have had trans people in my social life. I have worked with trans people, but it's not my lived experience of myself or my family members. But on the other hand, it is something that I have engaged with a bit and, and I worked for a clinic where, you know, it was in inner city Melbourne and, and we really needed to upskill and get our heads around gender diversity and how to work in affirming ways. And so I did Damien's training and I also did some specialist supervision and, and there was a lot of conversation about gender diversity in that clinic. But the funny thing is, when I'm reflecting on that and, and when I listened to the interview, a couple of things strike me. One is that I think maybe I didn't value that experience as much as I should have because it was in the private sector. And that's a little bit confronting to realise that sometimes I don't value the things I've learned in the private sector in the same way, like it's not as real as if I worked for a community organization that was focused on queerness and gender diversity or a public mental health clinic. And the other thing was I wonder if it feels safer to position myself as someone who doesn't know anything in these areas of diversity where I don't have lived experience.
Aileen:
Yeah, it's very interesting because if you didn't tell me this, I wouldn't know. I wouldn't have, I didn't pick up that from the, the interview.
Anita:
Mmmm.
Aileen:
I have two questions for you. The first one being, why Damien? And it sounded like you enjoyed the interview . You sounded so much like the person that I get usually from our conversation. So I enjoyed this interview a lot and not only, in terms of joy or relaxed, but also on how challenging you can be while safe. Right?
Anita:
I think I've seen Damien's name around for a long time,, so I'd read his articles, you know, a long time ago, like it feels like maybe 20 years ago. And his name had sort of been around consistently. So it was a name that came to mind when I started thinking that, you know, let's do one episode focused really on queerness and gender diversity. Also I wanted to talk to someone who was not so much in the private sector. He does have his own psychotherapy practice, but he works as a professor and academic so I just wanted a different perspective as well from a university and a teaching perspective. So I think that's why I reached out to him. And yeah, I did really enjoy myself and I have enjoyed interviewing everyone, but I think I enjoyed being able to feel like, oh, this is actually a fun thing to have a podcast and it's a safe thing to be visible. And you sort of can sense quickly what challenge people can take. And I think I could feel that he was up for a real debate. And for me, I love that, I love a real intellectual, engaging with ideas and a challenge. That's like a really enjoyable form of relating, and I could see that he was the same. So I think that's why I was a bit more challenging.
Aileen:
It was so healing and so refreshing to, to see his, his positioning about race and culture and his own whiteness. I really enjoyed that part.
Anita:
Yeah, me too. And I think it is that feeling of like, oh, we're not expecting something impossible from people to expect them to think about their positioning. It was nice to have that conversation, I think with a white man as well and to not be met with defensiveness, but actually to be, to be engaged with. Like, to be up for it! And to think how you can be of use.
Aileen:
I really enjoy it and I want to hear what everyone got to say and how much they enjoyed it, and I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I did.
Anita:
Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Damien Riggs. Damien is a professor of psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide and lives on the lands of the Parama people. He has worked in psychology, research and practice for over two decades with a focus on family diversity. I'm not gonna lie, I feel slightly overwhelmed trying to summarize Damien's enormous body of work. That I found when doing background research for today, as is published extensively both books and articles. I know that one big area of interest is working with trans kids and teaching mental health professionals to provide gender affirming care. I did one of your courses about five years ago. Damien has also researched on subjects including surrogacy, foster care, queer and gender diverse families, human animal relationships, and critical race studies. Would you add or correct anything to that bio Damien?
Damien:
You know, what you've just made me think of is that whenever that training was that you did with me, like there was a two or three year period where I felt like all I did was train people. I probably would do run like 15 or more sessions a year and now, and that these were like, I wasn't soliciting this work. I have a job. And now I never do that anymore. And I wonder what has changed in our discipline that independent providers, not that, again, I wasn't set up as an independent provider. But what has changed? Is it that the profession itself is doing a better job of teaching people, so people are feeling like they're getting the training they need and don't need to seek out people? Is it that people have set up shingles offering this and are soliciting this, and so no one's coming to people like me anymore? I wonder what has shifted in those five years that I'm just not receiving those requests anymore. Is it that people feel competent, 'sos I always say, you know, in that that three year period, looking at the broad numbers, I trained around 5,000 people. Now that is certainly not all mental health professionals in Australia, but maybe, I don't know, maybe a critical mass happened and people were like, between me and other people and other trainings, they were like, we've got enough now.
Anita:
It's obviously not everybody who's a psychologist, but I wonder if it's a good majority of people who are engaged in thinking about working effectively with trans kids, Yeah, I really don’t know. And I certainly felt more confident after doing that training, talking about transness. Like for a period I was working, uh, in higher education and I felt more confident including, case examples, for example with trans kids. But it didn't seem like it was particularly mainstream when I was doing that. Like I had comments, for example, someone would come up to me at the end of a lecture. Not that I gave a lot of lectures, but if a lecture working with children and say, oh, thanks so much for including that. Really appreciated that representation. So I guess even the fact that someone would come and say that to me made me think, oh, this isn't very mainstream still.
Damien:
Maybe you're right, maybe it has become more mainstreamed, but I also wonder slash worry about I wouldn't teach now today what I taught five years ago. So if people are sort of going, well, I, I did that. Um, and that's done and dusted. Uh, it makes me wonder about, you know, the perception that knowing about, or a potential perception that knowing about trans people's lives once was enough, rather than it being an area that is constantly changing and constantly shifting. And, and, and also you need an ongoing relationship to trans people's lives, not a just once off stepping in.
Anita:
And I think that's probably the case with so many areas and particularly areas of diversity, it's not like, okay, I've got that bit of knowledge and I've thought about that for half a day or a day. And I'm done now. Okay. I'm competent. And one thing I wonder about is, what is the kind of learning that people need to be able to become more competent? Because seminars, like the kind of seminar, that I did when I did your seminar, that was really useful. Also, if I'm working ongoingly with trans kids, then how do I keep thinking about it, in a way that's kind of nuanced and handles the kind of individuality of that client.. I do feel like some more spaces of kind of just wondering and trying to grapple, I suppose.
Damien:
You’re right in terms of, you know, we're talking about working with trans people, trans young people. That's one of a hundred different areas of population groups. And then you've got, you know, training on different modalities and training on different diagnoses and different treatment plans and different approaches to case formulation.
So no one can be across everything. But, you know, for me, I guess being really grounded in the space, not, and certainly not just exclusively working with trans people, but other points of diversity is it, to me, it's an ongoing way of living as a person who isn't trans, to be connected with community. And obviously that happens through research, it happens through friendships, it happens through relationships with clients. You know, so it is that ongoing work and commitment that sort of continues to fuel my knowledge. So that's what I mean when I say I wouldn't teach today when I taught five years ago, because I'v lived the space for another five years, and so there's different things that I would wanna say and different ways I would want to frame knowing about trans people's lives.
Anita:
I was thinking a bit about, when you become a psychologist, do you sort of take on a responsibility to be engaged in learning about all different people's lives? Like when you are reading, do you try and read a diversity of books that help you to understand lives that are really different to yours, or, you know, choose movies that open your mind up to different realities. That's a big thing to take on. But on the other hand, if you don't, if you, if you have like a really narrow kind of life where you're socialising with people like you and watching and reading and consuming stories about people like you, then. How, how do you actually work with people? You know that that's a very different experience, going to see a psychologist who perhaps has that kind of life than someone who is very interested in the range of human experience.
Damien:
And this is something I was speaking to someone about the other day. We were talking about a topic that, by their assumption I would know nothing about. It was about midwifery and perinatal care and women's autonomy in the birthing space. And they said, how do you know about these things? And I said, well, 20 years ago, 20 plus years ago, when I did my undergraduate degree in psychology, I also did a minor in women's studies. And I know I would not be the academic and practitioner I am today without that. So it meant from day one, I was learning about, you know, Skinner and I was learning about, you know, very classical psychology concepts and learning about, you know, foundational feminist ideas. So that meant that every time I learn something and have done for the last 20 years, learn something new about psychology, the lens that comes in is feminist, the lens that comes in is…You know, I was very fortunate in my first year of women's studies to be taught by Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson. So an Indigenous standpoint becomes a part of how I think about, you know, reading psychology. And then not at that time, but more latterly, working alongside trans people.
So these lenses are always there as someone who isn't First Nations, as someone who isn't a woman, for someone who isn't trans. So I do think it still is the case that you are lucky if you get someone like you in a lecture who talks about trans people and someone goes, oh, thanks for addressing that. Or maybe you get a standalone lecture on trans people. But that doesn't introduce you to a way of thinking. And that's what I feel like I was blessed with by doing women's studies alongside psychology.
Anita:
I think this is a really interesting point when we think about two things. One is sort of the redesign of psychology courses. It's not a process I've really engaged with, but I'm aware it's going on and then looking at. The change around competencies as well and thinking, well, how do we get there when we, when the way that we have studied or when psychology has been taught for, I don't know how long, at least a couple of decades, where we're not sort of talking about the sort of philosophical underpinning of the information that is being taught, like how, what actually is, um, our assumptions about how we can know about other people? Um. If we don't ever kind of talk about that where, you know, what kind of knowledge is valid in our discipline, then how, how do we then start to challenge it to see that okay, actually some of those foundational assumptions mean that some people are going to be much less well served by the profession at best, and potentially harmed. Do you have any thoughts about that?
Damien:
For me, again, like I remember I did a topic undergrad that was called Meta Psychology, which was about the history of psychology as a discipline. And you know, when you think about the history of psychology as a discipline, it's really about saying, we're not medicine, we're not psychiatrists, we are this unique thing that does its own important thing that no one else does. And you see that reflected in psychology training. So you are typically exposed only to topics that are taught within psychology. If you compare this to social work, social work first year students do two core social work topics, and then they do a topic from psychology, they do a topic from sociology, they a topic from policy studies, a topic from law, a topic from disability studies. Because social work recognizes it's a discipline formed in relationship to many other disciplines. So you already have students being exposed from the get go to the idea that that social work is more than the sum of its parts.
Whereas when you are only taught psychology topics within the discipline of psychology, you are being taught that it is it in itself enough, doesn't need to have a relationship to sociology or women's studies or policy. 'cause it stands on its own. And I think that teaches students to not look beyond the confines of psychology.
Anita:
It sounds like your study in psychology, as you said, you did the minor in women's study and psychology when you were studying it was quite behaviorist, your undergrad we probably studied at similar times, I'd say mine was a bit more CBT oriented, so it sounds like maybe you were drawn to sort of these other areas of studies, but you sort of wanted to end up in a job where you are with people helping them, which kind of helped you to persevere with the behaviorist psychology. Is that fair to say?
Damien:
I think, well, no, I think it's, it's more accurate to say that I was very disenchanted with behavioral psychology to the point where I was going to leave and just do women's studies. And I was very fortunate that the head of discipline at the time said to me: stay, but continue on this path of exploring beyond the confines of what we offer.
And so that's how I came to do that meta psychology topic because I thought, right, the university I'm at isn't offering me what I need to grow because you know, I was still a kid trying to figure out how to map women's studies across to psychology. So I'm reading Carol Gilligan, I'm reading, you know, feminist scholars, but who are psychologists trying to marry the two, but they're largely American.
And I'm like, how does this fit for me? And they're largely women. And so what I did was go outside my university and do courses cross institutionally and I did meta psychology, I did one on discourse in psychology. And so these were things that my university wasn't offering. So by doing that, I sort of fell into discursive psychology and I went, oh wow. This is what makes sense to me. This is how I have a relationship to psychology. There's more to psychology than behaviorism. So that's how I managed to stay related to psychology, and my desire to be in that space.
Anita:
That's so interesting. , Would you believe I read a little bit of your PhD.
Damien:
Oh God. (both laugh)
Anita:
To have a look at it and it was about race in Australia, which is an interest for me. And again, it was sort of like, oh, I would never have imagined I could do a PhD in this kind of thing at that time. And I was enrolled briefly in a PhD, around that time. And I decided to drop it and do the Masters and just get out and start practicing.
But, I was thinking about whether I could have done that PhD and there's an issue around, you know, I don’t know that I had the intellectual confidence, but it also made me wonder a bit about lived experience and what it was like for you and whether that's changed over time in terms of you doing a PhD about race. And whether I could have done that PhD as a brown woman, whether it would've been accepted in the same way, or it would've been seen as too personal. And maybe I would've approached it in a personal way, whether that's about how other people would've seen it or that I would've actually approached it a little bit differently or communicated it differently. I mean, I have no idea how you communicated it, obviously. But yeah, I'm just wondering what was that experience like for you to talk about race in Australia, and do you think you could have done that same….obviously the landscape has changed so much. But I wonder if that would change, what people would've seen as a good topic for you to do as a white queer man.
Damien:
It is funny because, yeah, so these sort of pro institutional topics led me to the book Changing the Subject, which was published in ‘84, which is sort of a foundational text of discourse in psychology. And I was very fortunate to find out that if I went and studied at Charles Sturt University, Jane Selby was working there, who had been very involved in that group of people.
And so I did that. Did my honors there rather than here in Adelaide. They either applied to places in Adelaide, got offers, but I thought, no, I wanna go and work with Jane. So I did. And it's interesting you say what you say because at the time I was reading, you know, and I was doing Indigenous women studies and I was like, right, so I can't go and do an honors thesis, which then became a PhD thesis, on people who aren't white. I have to do a thesis on white people's responses to engagements with enactments of racism. And so I did that and there was moves within the honors program to not allow my honors thesis, 'cos I wrote about myself. My data were myself. As a white person and my enactments of whiteness, and there were moves in a very, you know, traditional honors program to say, this doesn't count as an honors thesis. This person is talking about themselves too much. It's solopsistic, you know, and so I suspect what your thoughts about what it would've meant to do that work at the time as a brown woman would be quite similar in some respects to what I faced. Because people would say, you are both making yourselves too much of the focus.
This is not how we do psychology. You should recruit subjects, you should run experiments. You should do X, Y, and Z. But there was a shift by the time, you know, even a year later, 'cos of course I moved institutions to do my PhD, where I don't know. That was the beginnings of the formation of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association formed by, again, Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson. There was this shift towards recognizing that actually white people need to be talking about whiteness. That's what we have to do. We have to stop talking about brown people. We have to start talking about ourselves. And so I think I did this at a time when I was really lucky that this was possible. I think it's interesting that I think you're probably very right about your experience at the same time as a brown woman in Australia if you hadn't had access to what women overseas were doing.
So I think of people like Amina Mama, who did her thesis around the same time as you would've been doing it, was a black woman talking about race in psychology, in the space where it was mainly white women - white men speaking about race in psychology. And so I think there were people doing this work. There was Beverly Green, for example, in the United States, psychology, big feminist figure, African American woman. So there were examples. It just depended if you were being allowed access to that knowledge. Again, we go back to training and what your training looked like and whether that that training included the voices of people who weren't white, who weren't men, whether you would've had access to go, oh, I can do that. There are other women doing this. I can do it too.
Anita:
I kind of wish I had looked further afield. I think by the time I was doing the Masters, it's pretty, overwhelming at that point, just trying to get the Masters done so I can also see why I didn't. But yeah, that's really interesting and one of my reactions to what you're saying too is like, oh, you know, this stuff has been talked about for a while now. I guess I haven't had these conversations outside of psychology as much, but it's interesting how new some of these ideas would feel still if you talk to a room of even experienced psychologists, I think. Like even talking about whiteness or, and how that is in the discipline, it still feels like a very risky thing to do.
Damien:
Oh yeah. I mean, I think of, you know, like the Richards book, he's a white man, but you know, it's a good book on racism in psychology. The first edition was published in ‘97, so before, I think before either of us started studying. So it's like, yes, he's a white man, but it’s is a very good book. And talking about how from the get go, psychology has been a eugenics project. It's been a racist project. It's been all these things like people have been saying these things for decades and yet somehow this is some is not part of the everyday conversations we have as a discipline. And obviously since then, people, you know, I think of Pat Dudgeon writing about, you know, racism in psychology in Australia from the get go and how intelligence testing is very normed against First Nations people. Like she's been saying that for decades as a First Nations woman. So it's, you know, these things, these conversations have been going on forever and yet some people still come across the conversations and go, oh. This is new to me and I'm like, how is this new to you? I think part of it is about training, but we've already had that conversation.
Part of it is about the life that you live. You said before, let's give the example of a white heterosexual man. If most of the people you are surrounded by are those people, you're not going to have had these conversations. Because white people aren't taught to see whiteness. Someone challenged me on this the other day, I was talking about curriculum redevelopment and I said, oh, I kept saying, we need to talk about these things to our white students given 95% of our students are white. And the person said, well, we've got to speak to all students. And I said, well, yes, but white people aren't taught to to look at our whiteness. So we have to talk specifically to our majority white students about whiteness. That doesn't exclude the rest of our students 'cause they see race all the time. Cos they're forced to.
Anita:
And they'll be very relieved to hear you try to get that message across that whiteness is a thing.
Damien:
I was like, we need to talk about whiteness. So I think it is about, you know, to practice in a context of diversity. If that doesn't reflect something about your life, this is going to be an uphill battle. If you don't have a relationship to your own positionality in terms of diversity - cos white people are diverse too and are part of diversity - but you don't also have a relationship to diversity beyond whiteness. All of your applied knowledge will be book knowledge. If you're not related to communities, if your friendships aren't diverse, if your, if your training hasn't been diverse or you haven't explored further training that's taught by people who aren't just white, or aren't just straight, or aren't just cis, then there's always going to be a limit to the experiential aspects of your skillset.
Anita:
And I wonder if it's about pushing psychology towards medicalisation for legitimacy. Cos it felt like that was very much what was happening when I was studying, is that we really want to be recognized by the medical profession as being very similar to them. Because we have these randomised control trials and we have these 12 session interventions that can fix these diagnoses. And by trying to develop that sense of equivalency, then that was how they hoped to kind of get power. Funding. And it's such a strange thing when I look back sometimes. I would say, you know, we'd be learning CBT and I remember saying to one of my lecturers, I don't think thoughts really do come before feelings. And they're kind of like, yeah, I know. So at the same time, they're teaching it. It's sort of like some kind of pretending is going on that let's pretend that this is enough, because this is what we need to do to be recognised as medical, as legitimate, but we sort of also know that we're not medical, that this doesn't actually capture the reality of people's lives or, or the reality of suffering. And what we really need to do in their therapy room, especially with complex clients.
Damien:
But it's also kind of what I think of, without being rude, is the naivety of psychology. That it has this idea of what medicine is and it becomes the aspiration. But if you look at medicine, it itself is aspirational. We have all these television shows that people love watching, where the patient comes in and, oh, what, what do these symptoms mean? Why do we love those shows? Because medicine is a guessing game. There's some things, you come in and you've got a bone sticking out of your arm. Okay, it's probably a broken bone. And we think about this in terms of women's health in particular, and the struggles that women face in getting diagnoses. Cos women are not treated seriously. Women are treated still as histrionic because this constellation of symptoms could be lots of different things. The default is, well, it's the woman's being histrionic, not, we need to actually delve into this and figure out what this is. It's because medicine itself is an imperfect science.
So psychology trying to be this profession that it thinks is perfect where medicine itself has gone through these shifts and flows of recognising, we ourselves are not a perfect science. We don't always get it right. We misdiagnose, we under diagnose, we over diagnose. Depending on who the population is, depending on the color of the person's skin, depending on the person's age, medicine can miss or over diagnose. So it's this chasing this elusive being as a discipline, psychology does that doesn't exist.
And again, it's that thing of why do we have things like the medical humanities, or the sociology of medicine. It's because you need to know all the different things to understand what's going on. I think, I don't know, I've got a million examples in my head, you know, but of, uh, I think of stories like - Kitty, what was Kitty's name with the bystander effect?
Anita:
I don't remember.
Damien:
So we've got this whole social psychology literature on the bystander effect, you know, founded on Kitty….Genovese, her experience of being murdered and people watching out their windows - not watching, no, people have gone back to that research and said, actually, some people did watch and some people did act. But you know, we've also got the history or the legacy of Kitty potentially being a lesbian woman or a woman who enjoyed intimacy with other women, which just gets erased when you talk about bystander effect. Often people don't even know Kitty's name, but then they don't know about those things. So this is a very specific story of bystander effect.
Anita:
Wow.
Damien:
I’m thinking of examples of, you know, which you probably know well of, of the many African American women whose bodies were operated on to identify surgical techniques that would then be applied to save the lives of white women in terms of obstetrics and in terms of gynecology. And these women's lives are erased in the history of medical science. So it's about if you don't know those things, and that's just two little examples swimming in my head, then you think that the knowledge you've been given bystander effect, how to treat PCOS. You don't recognize that these treatment plans you are offering or able to provide, sit in these really long histories of oppression, discrimination, marginalisation, resistance agency….this is why we need these expansive approaches to our education.
Anita:
So through your career then you've been pushing against psychology in a sense. You know, even saying that in your honors thesis, people were unhappy with the way you were doing it. And I wasn't as daring as you. I don't think I would've imagined doing something like that. I guess one of the things I'm wondering about is what, what that's like for you in a relational way. So in terms of researching and speaking and writing about these areas that are politically sensitive and about people who, you know, you're quite immersed in people's lives, queer and gender diverse people, for example, but others will often treat in a dehumanizing way for political lens, as we're seeing a lot at the moment, of course, with trans people. And that sometimes that rubs up against your lived experience in a greater or lesser extent. So I guess I'm wondering about when you're doing that, how you sustain yourself, because it can also be quite disconnecting, to face opposition, I suppose.
Damien:
I mean, I think to answer that, first we have to go back to the first part of your question, which is why was I daring? Well, part of that's whiteness, isn't it? Because I, you know, white middle class boy, yes, gay, but you know, I wasn't often told, no, I wasn't often told I couldn't or shouldn't do something. So, you know, doing it, there was no thought in my mind that someone might say no. And when someone did, I thought, well, and. You're not the boss, you know,
Anita:
Maybe there's a personality element to that as well.
Damien:
Possibly, well, I think Autism's part of the story as well.
Anita:
I don't mean personality disorder, I just mean personality.
Damien:
No, no, no, no, no, I’m saying that, I think Autism's part of the story as well, part of it is whiteness of just being like, you know, it is not about having the nerve, it's just, or the audacity. It's just about thinking, well I'm allowed to do this 'cos no one's ever said I'm not allowed to do things. And part of it is about Autism, I think is about being like blithely unaware. My particular flavor of Autism, I think is blithely unaware, you know, that other people might have thoughts and feelings about what I do.
I like doing what I do, so I do it and occasionally I might come up against someone's, it often stuns me when I come still after all this time, come up against someone who goes, you shouldn't be doing this. You shouldn't be saying this. What right do you have to, you know, object to psychology, object to this whole decades worth of knowledge enterprise and I'm like, oh, I didn't know I wasn't allowed to do that.
So, you know, part of it is being blithely unaware of some of the rules that that operate. I have respect for authority, I have respect for my elders, I have respect for other people's work. But I don't operate from a premise that it can't be challenged respectfully. I don't operate from a premise that I can't know things in different ways to other people and might bring something useful to the table.
And so I think I am fortunate that, you know, whiteness and Autism in some ways shelters me from not often stopping and thinking about what could be the consequences of my work. There are certainly times when it does happen, where I can see that I'm getting access, not getting access to something or that I would like to have access to, to further something I'm doing. And I realise that's about people's prejudices. And so I sort of work with that. When it becomes evident to me, I'll find ways to work with that to identify it, to name it, to challenge it, or just to circumvent it.
I don’t know if that answers your question, but it's, it's about having a weirdly outsider relationship to all of these things. I remember my, you know, having done my master's in psychoanalysis, having spent years in analysis, my analyst said to me a few times, you know, every time you talk about men, you say they, not we. And I'm like. I have an outsider relationship to all of these categories that I'm a part of because they're kind of like, 'cause I'm just an odd person.
Anita:
Mm. And it sounds like you're cool with that. Like that's fine for you. Yeah. Well that's interesting. I need to channel a bit of your Autistic white man, okay with being an outsiderness maybe.
Damien:
Well, this is the thing though, isn't it? Is that, you know, I can say all of that and it probably is true. So I certainly think it's true as I say it, but it's still a white thing, isn't it? That when, when you are the fish in water, you don't have to think about the water, do you? And whether you become aware of the water and go, oh, that's cool, whatever, I don't care about it. Like it, you still got the privilege of being the fish in water, you know? Whereas for other people, you are the fish out of water and you're constantly seeing the effects of the water on your life and how it controls and regulates your life. So having a, you know, blase relationship to the water, like maybe I do, is not as easy.
Anita:
Yeah, I think, maybe I'm like trying to figure this out for myself because, and maybe it's a power thing because I think when I try and draw attention to the water that we're swimming in, people are very upset with me. So I don't know whether it's a matter of framing or delivery or whether it's simply a matter of power that people don't like it when you kind of draw attention to their power, because they’ve been quite happy with it.
Damien:
It's interesting, cos again, like I was talking to a friend the other day, trans woman about, Palestine and Zionism and I was writing something about that was sort of critical of Zionism and she said, I like the way that you just state things as though they're bleedingly obvious. Like you're not being contentious. You're just saying, why aren't we thinking about Zionism in this context? Surely that's appropriate. And I said, yeah, but again, you know, the fact that I can just say that in this very straightforward way, as though it should be obvious to everyone who's reading it is a product of my relationship to Zionism. You know, like, I'm not Jewish, I'm not Israeli, so I'm an outsider, again, able to say, well, surely this should be obvious to everyone. Whereas if I was a Palestinian trying to say those things, I would probably be met with the responses that you are met with, which is you are invested, you are partial, you’ve got an ax to grind here. So it's always about your relationship to power as to, in terms of how people take what you say.
Which is not to say that I don't get people saying, you know, how dare you say that about white people. How dare you say that about straight people. I do get all of that, but I think the ferocity of it is different to probably what you encounter. It's less often that it's a personal attack on me. Rather they take it as a personal attack on them, and I'm meant to somehow say, oh, but I didn't mean you, or I'm just talking about white people in general. Whereas I suspect when you say things, people will take it as you making a personal attack on them, which maybe you are, because you are allowed to say, white person, shut up and listen to the rest of us. You know, like, mine, is it a personal attack? Potentially. But people don't hear it as personal 'cos we're both white. So they go, oh well you know, we're both part of the problem here, aren't we?
So you're not really, you know, you can't really critique me without critiquing you. Whereas when you raise the critique, you are actually someone saying, no, you are the problem.
Anita:
Mm, yes. Yeah, I did co-facilitate something once where, usually a white person would do it and apparently the conversation was better, without me being the person to say the words. So that's interesting. I mean, I think me being there opened the space for people of color in the room to speak about their experiences, which is great. But it made the white people more defensive.
Damien:
It's interesting because last year we had Kimberly Wanganeen come in and do some training for us. First Nations woman, she does training on cultural competency and for half of the session she had a colleague, a white man, come in and co-facilitate. And she did it for that exact reason. I think she said, you know, sometimes white people listen to white men in particular in ways they won't listen to me. Sometimes I need a break from the heat. Sometimes I need someone to back me up, and so I really appreciated that because my first response, with all of the different histories we've talked about was, why is there a white man in this room? I just want to listen to Kimberly, you know, because I do value Kimberly's knowledge. But when she explained that, I thought, right, I'm the outlier. I'm the white outlier who wants to hear Kimberly and doesn't want to hear a white man. Most people, most of the audience that Kimberly comes up against do want to hear from the white man.
And it's funny when I, which I don't really do, but if I went and spoke about trans people to a group of people in a very abstract way, I have done this at psychology conferences before they go, oh yes, appropriate white cis man talking about trans people. That's what we're used to. If I come in and start with, my oldest child is trans, which is true. Most of my friends are trans. I work only with trans kids. My knowledge is not treated as impartial, in the same ways that your knowledge will be treated as impartial, because there's still this, you know, stamp of whiteness, of being a professor, of being x, y, and z. But, you know, there is still a questioning of my investment in the knowledge that I'm sharing.
Anita:
Well, that's interesting because I would've thought that these days there would also be a questioning of like, why are you talking about it and not a trans person?
Damien:
Not in psychology.
Anita:
Mm. Okay.
Damien:
I don't think we're at that point yet. I agree with what you're saying, but I don't think we're at that point yet where people are. I think with students that happens. Yes. I think students are much more savvy, and particularly when I have trans students that I'm teaching, they do say, thank you for bringing this stuff up. But they also very quickly, and rightly so, move to say, I want to assert my knowledge as a trans student - I'm not, well, maybe over mine, which is fine, but at least saying trans voices matter. Which, you know, I think I do in my teaching by talking about trans people, voices showing trans people speaking, same as I show, you know, black women speaking. Like I want to make sure that my voice is not the central voice. But yeah, I do think when it comes to professionals, that's still not the default thinking that it should be trans people speaking and not me.
Anita:
Yes. It'll be interesting over time. I feel like there hasn't been a lot of interaction between the discipline, and the lived and living experience, you know, the growing of that as a profession. So, yeah, I don’t know if you might have more knowledge about that and whether those areas are starting to interact more.
Damien:
Well, something that sprang to my mind, and I don't know if this is contentious or - I've never given this any thought before - but before we started speaking today, we had a brief conversation about lived experience. And what it made me think of was a few things. So there's people like my colleague, Gareth Traharne in New Zealand who's been doing a lot of work on having trans people coming in, teaching courses, being paid appropriately, being recognised for their knowledge and how that impacts training, and that's great. I'm a hundred percent behind that. But I do know people are a very small part of the population and we've had this same history within psychology around First Nations people. That has definitely happened. You know, we should be having First Nations voices in our courses. It's now part of accreditation. It's now part of training and competency. But we know about burnout. We know about over utilisation. We know about - this again, psychology loves to be given the authority to stake a claim. Well, I had a lecture with this person and they told me this is what First Nations people do. So now I'm authorised to practice in that space.
No, you're not. So we know that that doesn't always play out well in psychology. So we've got all these things going on. We've got this, you know, defaulting to, well, I've heard one person speak, so now I know how to do the work. We've got the small population being repeatedly asked to do work that doesn't necessarily clearly flow onto benefits for them and their lives. It doesn't necessarily make for better practitioners holistically. So what does that mean for this idea of lived experience? And something that to my mind when we spoke about this briefly before we started today was, what is lived experience?
I'm not gonna sit here and say, I have lived experience of being trans, but if 80 to 90% of my interactions in my life are with trans people with similar percentage of things that I consume, social media, television, media, books is written by trans people. What does that say to my lived experience? Is my lived experience solely cis? Is my lived experience also partially trans? You know, that's the world that I move in. Now, that's not to say that my speaking can replace the speaking of trans people. It's saying that when we think about a, a world where everyone has some knowledge about trans people, some competency around working with trans people or First Nations people, or whoever the group may be - it has to extend beyond that group to give us that knowledge. There has to be some of us who are brokers of that knowledge alongside, not in replacement of, but alongside those communities. And I think that's why I did a lot of that training five years ago. 'Cos the trans people were doing other things. They weren't interested in doing that. They didn't trust a room full of psychologists to step into.
Anita:
Which is fair. That's a huge issue. I wondered about that.
Damien:
Which is fair. There was someone, there was me, who was trusted by trans communities to go and do some of that work. Who was trusted enough by mental health communities to come and deliver some of that work. And I'm, my role is always, you know, this is my 101 from being enrolled involved with critical race and whiteness studies, is my job should also always be to become obsolete.
Anita:
Yes. Yeah.
Damien:
If I can have done that training for that period of time, and now I'm obsolete because trans people are running that training, or trans psychologists are running that training, well perfect. That's how it should be.
Anita:
Yep. Yeah, totally. It's sort of like an ongoing negotiation and process I suppose, and particularly 'cause trans people are so marginalised at this point in time, and there are a lot of safety issues. So perhaps it is where you're doing all of those things at once, where maybe you're supporting trans psychologists as practitioners or, or who maybe want to be doing some of the stuff that you are doing, but also giving them the option to not do it and say, okay, we're cool with you doing it. And yeah, those variety of things at once.
Damien:
And this is the lived experience stuff. That like if you don't have those connections and relationships with the communities you're speaking about, you are never going get the feedback from someone saying, actually, this is great, thanks for doing this. We are glad you are doing this. Or - you are doing that really wrong. You need to shut up and listen and let us do it. If you don't have those relationships, you're just operating in a vacuum. So I feel like if we were, you know, I don't think it's necessarily gonna happen though it's certainly happening in the pockets that Australia becomes, like the US: trans people are like, we can't do this work anymore. Actually, it's not safe for us. Or we just don't want to, we don't trust any of you, but someone needs to be doing it. But I would step back in and do some of that work again. You know, because I can have those conversations. I'm having those conversations. So I think it's about lived experience at its at its root is about literally that being your life.
But we can't, I don't think it's always the work of saying. Because this is your life. You are the only person who can do the work. It's all on your shoulders. Some of us have to be living that as well in a relationship to the person whose life it is.
Anita:
Yes. Yeah. It is such a load for people, to have to take on everything. Like if they're a small community, having to deal with marginalisation in their lives, uh, and then also educate people about that marginalization, educate and uninterested or perhaps invalidating audience about their lives. That's a lot to expect from people.
Damien:
And again, I'm, I'm not saying any of this to say: and other people should go out and do this.
Anita:
Absolutely.
Damien:
I’m saying that what people should do is look at their lives. What do my friendship circles look like? What do my collegial circles look like? What am I reading? And if you're like, Hmm, I'm really only reading and engaging people who are like me, that's where you start. You don't leap into putting up a shingle and go, oh, Damian said I should also be running this training. No, what Damien said is look at the relationships you have and what you can rightly speak about through those relationships. And if the, if all you can speak about is what you already are, maybe you need to revisit how you're living relationships. And then in long down time, down the track, you might be able to shift what you can talk about.
Anita:
Yes. And it depends. I mean, you know, even when I was living in the Northern Territory, and working with Aboriginal people, I would put up a shingle and say, I'm gonna train you because there's so many amazing Aboriginal psychologists, Aboriginal to Strait Islander psychologists out there already doing the work, and that would be really inappropriate. That's my understanding anyway. But yeah, and the other thing I just want to draw out of what you're saying is that you can't get it right all the time too. You get it wrong sometimes and you listen to the feedback. You've got to get the feedback from people, whose lives that's concerning. And you've got to listen to that. So if you're not, if you're trying to talk about a particular group and you're not getting feedback from that group, then that's a real problem as well.
Damien:
And this is, this is the, the question about, you know, praxis I guess is the word. What your life looks like and how that relates to what your professional work looks like. Cos if you go and run, I don't know, let's say your example of training about First Nations people, it's almost certain that everyone in the room will not be First Nations and they're going to say, thank you so much, Anita, for giving me this knowledge. That's for my practice. They're not going to know to say, actually, you got this wrong. You need to have the relationships and my trans friends tell me, often enough you are a bit off the mark there, Damian. Whereas if I didn't have those friendships, if I wasn't reading what I'm reading and engaging in what I'm engaging in, I would be working with mainly cis audiences who will go, oh, thank God, like you did, said, oh thank you. You helped with my knowledge. And I'd go, oh great. I'm great. Pat myself on the back, keep doing the same thing over and over again. It's about the relationships you have where people can call you out and say, no, but that's not quite how it goes. Or - that's very simplistic, Damien, or that overlooks this. Like you have to be able to have that, that, that relationship. Otherwise, you're in an echo chamber.
Anita:
So much food for thought, and I'm aware that we're pretty much out of time. I was wondering if you want to say anything about what sustains you in doing this sort of work.
Damien:
Oh goodness. What? Sustainability, I don't know. I think it's funny, some of these things I have talked about with clients and their parents recently, you know, a number of moms in particular saying, you just know so much. And I'm like, yeah, there's a lot I don't know. But also this is my life. There's not a line between me going out somewhere in public talking to you on a podcast, talking to a client about trans stuff and then going off and switching off and doing something else. Like it's, it's odd. You know, we talk about work life balance all the time, and I think I have a great work life balance, but there's not a demarcation between my commitment to trans people's lives in my workplace and my commitment to trans people's lives in my personal life.
It's all one and the same. So what sustained me is that passion, those relationships, the love that I give and receive to those people in my life. That then informs, you know, the care that I have for my research participants, for my clients. That's it. Just my life is better for those relationships. So it is, that's what sustains me, is those relationships.
Anita:
It's been so lovely to talk to you, Damien. I feel like we could keep going. I didn't even get to sort of like the profession over time and what you think is needed, but, you know, maybe I'll pick your brain another time.
Damien:
It's been a true joy. Thank you.
Anita:
Thanks so much.
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