All the ways in which we numb out and protect ourselves from shame,
get in the way of authenticity, and they get in the way of authentic belonging.
And yet, when it comes to that piece about racialized trauma,
racism is not about belonging.
Racism is not about not fitting in or not belonging.
Racism is about dignity.
And so where are the spaces where we can experience safety,
physical safety, as well as psychological safety and agency?
Because when you combine physical and psychological safety with agency,
this in the capacity for authentic self-expression,
for taking up space for the dignity of mattering,
and a byproduct of that dignity is belonging.
Welcome to Therapist Uncensored, building on decades of professional experience.
This podcast tackles neurobiology,
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Your session begins now with Dr. Ann Kelly and Sue Marriott.
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thank you for coming back and joining us at Therapist and censored.
We are thrilled to have you and could not be more excited to introduce you to
our guest today.
Linda Tai is a trauma therapist and educator who specializes in brain and
body-based modalities for addressing complex developmental trauma.
Her work centers on healing with a special focus on experiences of
adult children of refugees and immigrants. Welcome,
welcome to the show.
It's a pleasure to be here, Sue.
So I would love to hear, if you don't mind context a little bit,
you were born in South Vietnam? Yeah.
Yes. So I was born in South Vietnam just after the fall of Saigon,
so at the end of the Vietnam War.
And my family are former Vietnamese vote people.
So I'm a former child refugee, and my parents are also refugees.
And you know, it's taken the entirety of my life to actually
grasp the context within which the circumstances
of my becoming into this world arose.
I felt so bereft in the world, you know,
I had parents where we didn't even speak the same language as each other because
I'm living in Australia with them,
and yet they speak Vietnamese and I'm having struggles with mental
health issues with addiction.
I felt this huge gulf between us and yet this immense desire to try and make
sense of myself and of them and of my life.
And it was well into my thirties that I was able to go, oh,
you know, traditional set psychology says, what's wrong with you? Yeah,
trauma informed psychology says what happened to you.
And that being its own journey, right? That what happened to you.
Yeah.
And then culturally informed psychology says what happened
to your people? And liberation psychology says,
and what continues to happen to your people?
And to be able to have discovered Alaska where I live these days
on the traditional lands of the Dene Athabascan Peoples of the Middle
Tanana Valley,
has allowed me enough bandwidth to be able to unpack all
of that because there's so many layers to the context
that no one explained to me.
I experienced an immense series of light bulbs going off
when I discovered Galbo mate's work.
And then when I discovered Bessel VanDerKolk's work specifically,
the body keeps the score. And yet when I read,
the Body Keeps the Score. It was so evident to me that I was a trauma survivor.
I had all the symptoms,
but I didn't have a trauma that I could pin something onto.
And then when asking my parents about it,
I discovered all of the refugee trauma that was there for us.
And yet growing up in our household, there was simply benign neglect.
And so a part of me has been feeling like I'm looking for a
trauma or traumas or abuse that perhaps doesn't exist.
And it's only been in the last couple of years that I've actually
unpacked the impact of racialized trauma and the ways in which the
invisible wounds of racialized trauma has impacted me
psychically, psychologically
impacted how I move through the world as well as my worldview,
which has then given me pause
and has made me very passionate about sharing
about this into the world. And it was emergent today, right?
Just earlier in, in our interview where I started going through,
you know, traditional psychology and then trauma informed psychology,
and there was a pause and you interjected. And I was like, no, no,
there's more around culturally informed psychology and liberation psychology.
And yet I never learned about that in graduate school.
And so many of our listeners who are professionals don't learn about it in
graduate school or after graduate school.
And so I feel in so many ways that we're all at this
cutting edge
where it's messy and we're having these conversations,
and yet there are pioneers in this field who are leading us that little bit
further.
And it comes back to the liberation psychology ethos that
centers the first person narrative, the testimonial
as of utmost importance
when we are exploring the voices of those who
inhabit bodies that are marginalized by society.
Because we don't get researched, not by us,
about us, for us. And yet when we start to speak up,
we then get met with, where's the research behind this? Oh,
this is just your lived experience. Oh, we can dismiss that.
When it doesn't fit our preexisting unconscious
projections about how the world works and what is security and what is not
security. And it's one of the, just,
I'm so delighted to talk with you to help us expand our ideas about that.
But if we could go into it, which is racialized trauma,
can you say more about what you mean about that and kind of your personal
experience of how that's impacted you?
So here's where I just wanna pause and acknowledge the works of Dr.
Kenneth Hardy and Res Manum amongst many others, but they've,
they've been my two main teachers in this field.
When we look at racialized trauma, it happens within a context.
That context also happens over time. And this is where,
if I just name some of the invisibleized wounds of racialized
trauma, and this is Dr. Kenneth Hardy's work, it's an assaulted sense of self.
It's internalized devaluation, learned voicelessness,
psychological homelessness,
complex and ambiguous grief or loss,
survival orientation and rage.
And within that I would also add internalized
idealization of the characteristics of those in power.
And whenever I do my PowerPoint presentations and draw upon Dr.
Kenneth Hardie's work, I actually put up that list and people sit there and go,
wow, I get that. As a complex developmental trauma survivor,
I get all of those things and assaultive sense of self internalized
devaluation,
internalize idealization of the qualities of the person in power
learned voicelessness, you know, psychological homelessness,
complex and ambiguous grief and loss, survival, orientation and rage.
And then I say these according to Dr.
Kenneth Hardy are the invisibleized wounds of racialized from.
And that's where we hear that gasp. And that's where for many of us,
we then become aware of how so many of the conversations that
we have around race, around heterosexism,
around cis genderism, around ableism,
around sexism,
how it's so easy for us to default to our subjugated selves,
how it's so easy for us to default to that part of us that so deeply
knows these words.
And part of the work of allyship is being able to recognize this,
do our own work around those parts of us that are wounded so that we can hold
out or hold forward those parts of ourselves for which this
conversation is about whether the conversation is about whiteness or the
conversation is about ableism, or the conversation is about the patriarchy.
Or if the conversation is about transphobic,
because it's so easy for us to to go pear shaped,
we veer off the train, tracks it, it goes wly.
And for me to pause and go, wow, where does this work land for me,
for me to recognize that so much of my core wounding around shame?
And while I love the work of Dr. Brene Brown,
like I got so much out of that for myself as well as for my clients.
I worked in a dictionary recovery for over 10 years.
And we learned that all the ways in which we numb out and protect ourselves
from shame, get in the way of authenticity,
and they get in the way of authentic belonging.
And yet when it comes to that piece about racialized trauma,
racism is not about belonging.
Racism is not about not fitting in or not belonging.
Racism is about dignity.
And so where are the spaces where we can experience safety,
physical safety, as well as psychological safety and agency?
Because when you combine physical and psychological safety with agency,
there's then the capacity for authentic self-expression,
for taking up space for the dignity of mattering,
and a byproduct of that dignity is belonging.
And you had mentioned a Kenneth Hardy quote before we got on that was really
meaningful to you. Would this be a good place to.
Yes. Oh, thank you for that reminder.
Yeah. He says so many brilliant things and they rattle around inside of me.
And one of the things that he says is that when we inhabit a body
that's racialized by society,
we are too busy defending ourselves. We're always defending ourselves.
It's that assaulted sense of self. And so we don't get to then define ourselves.
And when we do define ourselves,
we're defining ourselves in terms of who we are, not rather than who we are.
And even when we are defining ourselves in terms of who we are,
other people are then trying to compartmentalize us or figure
us out in relationship to the categories, the stereotypes.
So there then exists the opportunity or the possibility within myself to lean
towards the stereotype because stereotypes arise for reason.
And we each inhabit various aspects of that stereotype.
And part of my task is to lean towards that stereotype
without feeling like I then need to defend myself.
I get what you're saying,
especially in context with a quote that if we're pressing against something,
I'm gay, but I'm not X, y, z.
It's still a disownment of potentially parts of ourselves.
Would you be comfortable saying how that applies in your case?
Like if you were to lean into it,
like what do you get the benefit of moving into in yourself that you might
otherwise miss or not even know?
Sure.
So when I was defining myself in terms of who I am, not,
what that butts up against for me is white proximity as a survival
strategy, male proximity as a survival strategy,
and internalizing qualities of whiteness and maleness
and rejecting aspects of my own cultural identity.
That's the painful part.
The parts of myself that I gave away in order to survive.
Where it's giving away aspects of identity, of culture, of language,
of food, of heritage,
that I actually never got the chance to fully inhabit as a result of the forced
displacement of being a former child refugee.
And the complex and ambiguous grief that arises
as a result of acknowledging and recognizing all of that.
And then leaning towards what could open up for me.
And then there's also the stereotypes of Asians as being smart,
as having the answer of being emotionally
unavailable and not being able to be trustworthy.
'cause I say no when I say mean yes. And say yes when I mean no.
And I ardently stro for such a long time to not be that Asian,
and I strove not to be the Asian who couldn't speak the language and
only had Asian friends and only hung out with other Asians.
And in the process of that,
I lost my asianness that I never got to
experience or inhabit my Vietnamese ness.
You know, Jake Caspian Kang talks about this in his book,
the Loneliest Americans,
how as a result of assimilating ourselves in the
hopes of getting closer and closer to whiteness,
we then not only distance ourselves from ourselves and our own
cultural heritages,
we also distance ourselves from other black and brown bodies while at the
same time not ever being white.
As you were going there. I just felt so emotional actually.
And the words that came to me were like finding home, you know,
like as you began to refind these parts of you that you had disowned, but then,
you know, this is part of the trauma is like, but that wasn't home .
And I just think you've spoken so brilliantly about that idea of like the
loss of something that, and it's the absence of,
and like how can you grieve something that you didn't, that didn't happen.
So I can feel it as painful, but yeah,
that is an interesting concept of how do you grieve something that didn't
happen?
We have to name it because we can't grieve something,
we can't mourn something unless we name it.
And we live in a very concrete society where grief is typically framed as I
had something and now it's gone,
and now I can wrap up my head around your grief
and then help you with solutions for that.
.
Yeah, we're gonna fix.
We're gonna fix that right up.
Uh.
. Yes. And when it comes to these unnameable losses,
it's a grief over something I never got.
And yet in my work with adult children of
alcoholics,
that's where I actually then started to recognize the grief for the inner child,
the grief for what we didn't get,
and the pervasive weight,
the vastness of that emptiness and the
loneliness. The loneliness,
I mean across all forms of attachment disruption is
loneliness.
My understanding of as a cisgender white woman, I don't know,
but the trans experience,
like not having an i this identity that was recognized in the world,
even recognized by yourself as a child,
the concept of it has to form. And in some ways,
the only way that it ever forms is that by it being
like manifest out there, which is some of your work, is like,
let's form it so that you can get to the grieving.
Yes. And let's form that community.
And even just the idea or even the feeling of it or the,
it's like you, uh, we talked about emergent,
it's like the way that I'm thinking, I'm not sure if this is right, but like,
it's, it's not a thing you can point to. It's like you said,
is this is ambiguous loss.
So it's like it begins to form as like there is something there, but I,
how do you name what that is?
And even without the name as it takes form,
then there's something that you can feel that is missing or there,
or that you can relate to. But there is something about it being,
it needs to be manifest in the world in order to even know that it's not
available. , no, I feel like I'm talking in circles, but I think you're,
are you following ? Am I on the right track? Yeah.
Yeah.
Help me out. Help me out. .
No, I, there's so much joy in the struggle, right?
There's so much joy in going yes, you too.
You are trying to touch something and it's not there,
but you know it's there because you keep reaching for it,
knowing that it's supposed to be there. And yet it's so elusive.
You know, that piece, the piece about if I'm always defending myself,
I don't get to define myself as children.
One of the developmental actions of attachment is to be able to push against,
because when I push against you,
I know that I am real because you are pushing back.
And if I can push against and have that be distinct from pushing
away,
then I learn how to set boundaries and have boundaries as well as how to let go.
Because I know the difference between pushing against that.
It gives me a sense of being real and pushing away.
And when it comes to racialized identity, which is, you know,
there's so much in terms of child development that's here in,
in amongst all of this that I'm hoping that I can form solidarity with,
with therapists and with folks who are working their way through their own
childhood stuff, right?
Is that as someone who inhabits a racialized identity,
when I'm busy defending myself, I'm pushing against and the,
and yet that's how I know that I'm real.
And so can I define myself by pushing against and being met with
community
yet met with a container and we talk about containers all the time
in, in therapy.
Can I be met with that rather than be met with
confusion, judgment.
, aggression even right aggression. Yeah, that isn't, that isn't true.
That isn't right. Uhhuh.
Minimization, denial analysis,
as well as aspects of other people's
unresolved aspects of self that also emerge in the moment.
And it gets so messy and pushing against one another. You know,
in the mental health field here, as therapists are struggling, you know,
this notion of shame and shame being kind of the quick go-to
that can stop relationship, we had sort of spoken about that. Yes.
Because oftentimes it outbeat to push against so that you push against me
so I feel real, what happens I push against.
And other responses are I get pushed away or
I am still pushing because there isn't a container.
So I'm trying to find that container.
So then I get even more vocal and physical with my pushing
in an attempt to get a need met for feeling real.
And yet when it isn't met with enough pressure,
what emerges in that space of not being met is shame.
And so that then becomes part of that assaulted sense of self and
internalized evaluation as well as internalized
devaluation. I'm then constantly assessing what's wrong with me,
the ways in which I'm not enough or I'm too much, right?
The two core wounds, I'm too much, I'm not enough.
How can I shift reshape who I
am in order to get my attachment needs met?
But beneath attachment is physical and psychological safety
and dignity for self-expression. And so then I'm,
I'm actually always assessing is it okay for me to be me?
I believe there's our own individual work to do,
but then there's also the communal and the community.
And my own journey has been one where by the
time I was a young adult,
if Fox actually had asked me about my Vietnamese heritage or ancestry,
I would've looked at them really blankly and said, I don't know
in that a whole bunch of shame would've come up because there's also within
culture shame about how I've get judged and assessed by other
Vietnamese people about the ways in which I've lost my roots.
And then I'm a big walking ball of shame and I'm not able to step into that
space. And yet at the same time being able to slowly unpack that
has been where, you know,
I have such gratitude for the 12 step groups I've been a part of
'cause that is shame, resiliency. In the words of Brene Brown,
I'm sharing my story to those who've earned the right to share my story about
addiction.
And then in adult children of alcoholics and others raised in dysfunctional
families, even though my family was not alcoholic and there wasn't abuse,
I still had all those symptoms.
And so I got to share my story with always who earned the right to hear my
story. And yet the longer I stayed in those groups,
the more that I saw that there were aspects that weren't being talked about
around race and also around war. We don't talk about war and the impact of war.
And yet it got me further along in the journey.
And then I discovered the work of adult children of Holocaust survivors.
Not that I would ever wish to conflate what happened to my people with,
you know, what happened to Holocaust survivors.
And yet there are threads of that that landed for me in my experience that
caused me to go, oh, my parents are trauma survivors.
I had no idea. And I'm living the aftermath of what that means.
And so with each stage of the journey or each layer of the unfolding,
there are parts of myself that begin to open up so that when I
work with other folks who come to me and they say,
I'm adamant I'm a white person and that has been my narrative my entire life,
I can actually say, yeah, I get that. And where shall we begin?
Because the temptation within a society that has an
insecure attachment relationship to time and to productivity
is to want to fix and provide the solutions right now.
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I just am hungry for these concepts.
Say more .
I got so much,
so much juiciness from white bodied people,
which is a phrase I I take from res manum, you know, white bodied folks.
And I learned so much from white bodied
psychotherapists and psychotherapy modalities and
attachment theory helped to make my world make a lot more sense
and yet it did nothing to repair the relationship between myself and my parents.
And I actually, uh,
Kai Ching Tom was actually the person who raised to my awareness like
very searingly that psychotherapy is
derived from white colonizers, settler paradigms and lenses and approaches.
And when I heard her say that I was actually deeply
immersed in Brene Brown and Dr.
VanDerKolk Bessel VanDerKolk and Stephen Porges and Peter Levine
and Bonnie Badnock and the attachment researchers of the
generation before them.
And yet to pause and to tap into a universality of
what secure attachment could possibly mean caused me to
recognize and this is Este Perez's work, right?
That relationships is a relationality with all,
with all things with life itself. Yeah.
Not just our relationship with our parents, it's also our,
I think she keeps it mostly to people.
And living here on indigenous land,
there was something that healed for me that I didn't realize was missing
secure attachment to the earth, to nature,
to the seasons and the rhythms of nature and the seasons,
how to grow food and where it comes from and how to tend to the earth and how to
hunt and fish
and grow and preserve and take what I need and
only what I need.
And right in there that small bit there is to recognize that I
had learned a survival oriented relationship to my needs.
That when I experience a need, I go, no, I don't, I don't have needs.
What are you talking about? And when that need becomes overwhelming,
I then go into fight or flight about that need.
You're either on my side or you're in my way.
And then I project that onto other people and I dismiss other
people and their needs as being needy and or I
mistake love as you being able to attune to and connect to and fulfill
my needs without me needing to ask for it. Because if you loved me,
I wouldn't have to ask.
So relating with my own needs and the needs of others,
the needs of the planet secure relating with ancestors
and not just ancestors who are bloodline ancestors,
but there's also professional ancestors.
A religious ancestors are spiritual ancestors and the teachers of my teachers
and my ancestors with a capital A, right?
The elemental ancestors of earth and wind and fire and and warmth
and water.
And when I'm up in the mountains of Alaska on all fours and drinking from
a mountain stream with just my mouth making contact with the
water and my hands and legs on the earth,
I'm connecting with the ancestors who are caribou
and grass and the rain from the rainbow
or through the rainbow that becomes the stream that then moves on into the river
valley. That becomes a glacier, right?
These capital A ancestors.
And then there's secure relating to culture and there's an ancient
technology that wes it way through all cultures. Its soul movement,
storytelling or stories and silence.
So to relate securely with these aspects of culture and cultural
heritage as well as the rituals,
which are the containers for song and movement and story
and silence that mark the passage across the course of
a human lifetime
as well as the containers of language and customs and food and
ways of being and moving in this world.
They give us a sense of kinship as well as
ancestry and ancestral lineage.
And then there's secure attachment relating to my body and to bodies
to touch to a for kind and sensuous relationship
with life around me. In the words of Francis Weller,
where I can feel
the Jew on a fiddlehead fur and smell it
and smell the air that that Jew has passed through and
the earth that that Jew has emerged from this sensuality
and living life through our senses as another way of knowing
and relating. And then there's with the body,
it's also secure relating to pleasure, to rest, to sleep,
to joy, to work and to time.
Because all of like this decolonized perspective on secure attachment
is a cosmology. It's a worldview, it's a way of being.
And within that,
particularly that secure attachment relating to time which becomes disrupted
within our capitalistic societies,
I then know my place in the bigger scheme of things.
And when we don't experience place where
we belong in the greater scheme of things,
then we become really busy trying to find our place and secure
our place. And we live in a world that says, Hey,
let me give you legitimacy with these letters after your name,
with this next certificate,
with this pay rise and a job title change with a
change in role for some of us, you know,
becoming a parent is actually a way of becoming more legitimate in the world and
in the eyes of our parents. We might get given more legitimacy in the world.
And yet that striving for legitimacy can be born from
a sense of not having experienced place.
And so I feel ever so grateful for my journey of having been displaced and
uprooted in such a way that's proximate and yet distant
meaning that I was two years old that has allowed me to
experience the reverberations and aftermath and work through them
in such a way that maybe perhaps it might be an offering to
someone out there in the world.
One of the things I love about how you speak about these things as a disruptor
is that you are able to do it in a way that other people
aren't resourced enough. Or another way of saying that is,
as you were describing, kind of the achievement and you know,
all of us on the rabbit wheel and that that's all that we know,
that's where we've been pointed.
So there's a way that you really hold that and acknowledge that as you're also
striving to disrupt that, that there you're kind of saying,
and I hope I can be part two of saying like, there's more, there's other paths,
there's other ways and those ideas and those,
the pointers and the it has to form and that,
that's I think some of seems like your journey is like to help
this alternative mode of relating and being and finding oneself
and coming together to create that as a possibility.
Because I don't know that it's a possibility when you look up and the carrot's
right in front of you and you just keep going 'cause that's where you're
supposed to go. But I love the gentleness that you talk about it so that,
you know, wherever we find ourselves on this path,
even under-resourced parents who are also traumatized,
that you know,
there's a way of like seeing them and telling the truth about what happened,
but also really kind of holding them in the, in the same, at the same time.
It feels like what we need as a culture to be able to name it
without blowing it up. Is that right? Or is that me being too, um,
soft about it? You know what I mean? Like, am I saying,
oh we should all be nice as we try to do these things,
which I don't want to be saying , that's not what I mean,
I'm good with, uh, blowing things up if needed.
But there's something I guess about aggression and assertiveness pushing
versus pushing away.
Look, something I say all the time is right message, wrong.
Delivery is wrong message, right message, wrong timing is wrong message.
And in amongst the world of social justice voices,
there are times when my nervous system is up here and I'm full of passion
and yet it's very easy for other nervous systems to misinterpret my passion as
aggression or aggressiveness.
It's very easy to misinterpret excitement as I'm gonna be overwhelmed by that.
And there have been times when my nervous system is down here and
I'm pacing things more slowly and there are other nervous systems in the space
that are like, come on, I want you to ramp it up, like give it to me with a,
with a passionate delivery. And so I get,
and I hold with so much love that we each
have different nervous systems.
And to be able to just hold that and to find the
resource that you need for you, the resource that I need for me,
so that I can continue to be myself and know
that I am enough in this world as I am.
And I hope that it can be okay that today I have a gentle delivery
and that it doesn't get misinterpreted as, you know,
a weaponizing of calmness and a lack of passion for the topic.
I also get that for many folks out there being able to hear some of the things
that I've said today in like with the nervous system I'm currently inhabiting is
actually the delivery that is meeting
your nervous system.
And if that is what you learned from today,
I mean this is something I I've I've been cognizant of for a while,
is that when I learn how I learn, I can learn anything.
And as someone who started out teaching meditation and teaching yoga,
I was taught that teaching is the art of observation.
So when I learn how you learn, I can teach you anything.
And more importantly, when I learn how you learn,
I can teach you how you learn and then you can go
and learn anything you wanna learn.
So let me just ask a point of clarification.
So when I said a moment ago about the balance between disruptive and
did,
did I come across as saying that there was anything wrong with your delivery?
Mm-hmm. Okay. No, because.
When you went there I was like, oh no, that's not what I meant. ,
but . See how it happens? .
So I just wanted to check it out. ,
it's like that would be terrible .
It's like you're .
No, not at all, Sue. Not at all. Okay.
Okay. Yeah.
Good, good, good. Yeah, that's, that's wonderful. Well,
I love this dance and I know that many people that are
listening are just as moved as I am and you know,
what are next steps? Where would you direct people?
You know the folks that are just excited and like, yes, that.
If I land into emergence and I speak into that, which is emergent for me,
what my invitation would be would be to invite you to step into that
emergence for yourself, right? Whatever emerges for you.
Because when we can name that which emerges,
what happens is then the world will present us
with the next piece.
And the world is actually always presenting us with the next piece.
We just don't see it because we're not in alignment with emergence.
I love your answer by the way,
otherwise there's just a new carrot and you took the carrot away and it
is like, no, the carrot isn't here, it's more of tuning in.
And I really get that it's our responsibility.
There's not just something to sign up for or something to go do that really
is this practice of, you know, we talk about it on the show,
it's like secure relating related to like come back to yourself like being
your right size. You don't have to be bigger,
you don't have to stand on your tippy toes, , you don't have to run,
you don't have, you know what I mean? You don't have to shrink and huddle.
It's like, what is your right size right now?
So I think a little bit of different language, but the same thing,
it's like what's emergent for you, the listener as you're hearing now.
Like it's right there. There's, you know, there's no way someone that we have,
you know, out here of a disembodied voice can tell you.
And that's what I so admire is you didn't take the bait of that question and you
were able to pull it back in. It's like it's inward, it's, there's not gonna,
I'm not gonna give you a link or a book or a program.
So thank you for that.
And I think that that's very consistent with the conversation and the message.
Like it's, it's more of a discovery, like discovery. What's next?
I don't know what's next for you.
Yes. And I love that word discovery and the process and the journey of
self-discovery. So many people come to therapy and I see this with my clients.
They want me to get to know them and I name that and I
then name, you know, therapy is the process of you getting to know you.
It's a huge difference. And within all of this,
whether the conversation is about racism or sexism or ableism or transphobia
is the opportunity and the possibility of the invitation that
white bodied folks, that cisgender folks, that heterosexual folks,
the able-bodied folks that you'll actually get to know more about yourself
in this process. Mm-hmm. .
You know, the person on the treadmill that's successful.
You don't even know what you're missing. When we work with, you know,
white men who have,
are just part of the patriarchy in the sense that they've absorbed it and
they're injured too because they haven't had the benefit of the feedback right
away or the immediate pressing back in the way that many of us have.
I mean, it's pain no matter what direction it is that you're coming from,
it's not the same. It's not like, you know, it's not equating anything.
But I like that position because there's compassion all the way around
with the limit of, you know, stop the intrusion.
I I didn't wanna get on a roll . No, no. So I stopped myself .
Those.
Masters out there, .
.
That defeat, that defeats what I was trying to say. But it is, but it's,
I really do mean that um, you know, that we're all injured by it.
So I'm glad for the inclusive language at the end round. It doesn't,
even if you heteronormative able bodied the script, if you fit the script,
it's still uniquely a loss of so many parts of you.
Yes.
And the willingness to become transformed by
the process of what you'll discover about yourself or what one discovers
about oneself. That's the joy in allyship. Yeah.
And that's the difference between performative allyship and true
allyship. And it's a process. It's a process.
It's my parents turning around and saying to me,
I wanted to grow as a result of bringing you into this world.
And that willingness to grow means growing pains and discomfort and
the willingness to reckon with that.
Mm-hmm and to not know and to let go of all of these things that
have shielded us and buffered us and privileged us and protected us.
It is. And I'm so grateful that you invited me onto your show,
Sue .
Well I cannot tell you,
I've been really excited about this and I just wanna sort of sit at your knee
and just keep listening. But there are ways,
you have many things that you do to spread this incredible wisdom. Uh,
we speak just briefly to that and let us know how to tap in those of the
listeners that would like more.
Yes, I have a website, uh, www.lindatie.com.
Please sign up for the newsletter.
I don't do one of those sales pitching newsletters.
I do one of those newsletters of what I'm up to and what I'm unlearning and what
is nourishing me and you know, the things that I offer into the world,
some of which is paid for and some of which is free to the public, uh,
some of which is sponsored by other agencies or organizations.
And so there's ways in which to connect and keep in touch with me.
And in the newsletters I also celebrate the work of other people out there.
So it's not one of those,
here let me sell you something and tell you all about ,
how awesome I am in terms of my expert knowledge.
, it is not a sales funnel , right?
Is that the fancy word?
That's the fancy word. That's the fancy word. You know,
click here to get this free something or another and then you put in your email,
you know, it's, yeah, it's terrible. Yeah.
It is terrible.
. Well it is, it's the, it's it's the carrot again. The carrot,
the carrot, the carrot, you know, so that's wonderful.
So we'll we will put all of that in the show notes and any other resources that
you share with me,
go to therapist and sensor.com and then there's a search function and you can
put anything that you wanna know about. But Linda Tai,
t h a i is who has blessed us with her experience and
wisdom and we also wanna acknowledge that it is a real gift for you to
share your story.
That it's not something that you have to do and really appreciate that.
Alright everybody,
thank you very much for joining us and for sticking through this beautiful
conversation and we really encourage you to share it with someone that you feel
could benefit. That's all I'm gonna ask is just, just share the word.
Alright, thanks for listening. We'll see you around the bed.
We'd like to thank a long-term sponsor of our show, AG one.
I've been taking it daily for quite some time now,
which for me is amazing 'cause I forget things a lot.
But I make a real effort to take AG one regularly because it basically gives me
all the good things. It has high quality vitamins, whole foods sourced,
superfoods, probiotic, and adaptogens,
which serve to calm down your overeager stress response system. You know,
we would like that.
I feel good about recommending that you try it and encouraging you to keep
taking it. If you are already on board,
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That's athletic greens.com/therapist uncensored.
Therapist.
Uncensored is Ann Kelly and Sue Marriott.
This podcast is edited by Jack Anderson.