Anti-Racist Psychotherapy: Addressing Race and Racism in Therapy

David Archer, MSW, MFT — EMDR therapist, EMDRIA-approved trainer, and author of "Anti-Racist Psychotherapy" breaks down how EMDR therapy can be used to treat racial trauma and complex trauma in clinical practice.

In this episode of the Self Careapist Therapist Podcast, Lorain Moorehead, LCSW, PMH-C, sits down with David to explore anti-racist psychotherapy as a science-based framework that integrates EMDR therapy, trauma-informed therapy, and an understanding of how systemic racism creates lasting neurobiological harm. David shares his Rhythm and Processing (RAP) approach,  a somatic, rhythm-based method rooted in EMDR principles and explains how therapists can apply memory reconsolidation techniques to help clients heal from racial trauma, complex trauma, and the intersection of both.

Whether you're an EMDR therapist, a trauma therapist, or a clinician working with diverse populations, this conversation offers practical clinical tools for addressing race and racism in the therapy room.

⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 — Introduction: Who is David Archer?
02:30 — What Is Anti-Racist Psychotherapy?
08:15 — The Overlap Between Racial Trauma and Complex Trauma
15:42 — How Systemic Racism Creates Neurobiological Harm
22:18 — EMDR Therapy and Racial Trauma: The Clinical Connection
29:05 — Rhythm and Processing (RAP): A Somatic Approach to Healing
36:50 — Memory Reconsolidation and Conflicting Client Beliefs
44:12 — Working with Clients' Nervous Systems and Allostatic Load
51:30 — Practical Clinical Applications for Therapists
58:20 — Accessibility and Making Healing Available to All
1:05:00 — David's Books and EMDR Training Programs
1:08:00 — Final Reflections and Takeaways for Clinicians

📌 TOPICS COVERED
• Anti-racist psychotherapy as a clinical framework
• EMDR therapy for racial trauma and complex PTSD
• Rhythm and Processing (RAP) — David Archer's somatic approach
• Racial trauma vs. complex trauma: overlaps and distinctions
• Memory reconsolidation in trauma therapy
• How allostatic load and nervous system dysregulation manifest as racial trauma
• Conflicting beliefs and cognitive dissonance in trauma processing
• Trauma-informed therapy across cultural and racial identities
• Practical EMDR therapy techniques for diverse client populations
• Accessibility in mental health care

🔗 RESOURCES & LINKS
📚 David Archer's book — "Anti-Racist Psychotherapy: Confronting Systemic Racism and Healing Racial Trauma"
Available on Amazon (US & Canada) and BIPOC-owned bookstores:
https://archertherapy.com/books/anti-racist-psychotherapy/

🌐 David Archer's website (therapy services, consultation, blog):
https://archertherapy.com/

🎓 EMDR Training & RAP Approach (EMDRIA-approved, online):
https://archertherapy.com/training/emdr-basic/

📚 David's other books:
• "Black Meditation" — https://archertherapy.com/black-meditation/
• "Racial Trauma Recovery" — https://archertherapy.com/racial-trauma-recovery/
• "Black Mountain" — https://archertherapy.com/black-mountain/
• "Transforming Complex Trauma" — https://archertherapy.com/transforming-complex-trauma/

📧 Contact David Archer:
https://archertherapy.com/contact/

📚 ABOUT  SELF CAREAPIST THERAPIST PODCAST
Hosted by Lorain Moorehead, LCSW, PMH-C, EMDR Certified Consultant, and Clinical Supervisor Self Careapist Therapist Podcast delivers conference-level clinical training between sessions. Each episode features in-depth clinician interviews and practical technique walkthroughs covering EMDR, CBT, DBT, RO-DBT, ACT, IFS, play therapy, and trauma-informed approaches.

Whether you're a practicing therapist, social worker, clinical psychologist, or counselor, you'll find assessment strategies, case conceptualization frameworks, and evidence-based interventions you can apply in your very next session.

🔔 Subscribe for weekly clinical training episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@selfcareapist
💬 Join the conversation leave a comment with your clinical questions or reflections

The Self Careapist Therapist Podcast is a biweekly conversation with Lorain Moorehead, LCSW a therapist in private practice.  With guests ranging from expert psychologists, therapists, researchers and authors, each episode offers a deep dive and keeps listeners from intern to advanced supervisor  in mind while dropping gems and aha moments for everyone who loves to learn! If you love learning and want to keep track of some future learning opportunities, grab your personal curriculum here!

If you liked this episode, feel free to subscribe and leave a review! Your support helps us be a top mental health podcast and resource.  See you next week!

The Self Careapist Therapist Podcast is a biweekly conversation with Lorain Moorehead, LCSW a therapist in private practice.  With guests ranging from expert psychologists, therapists, researchers and authors, each episode offers a deep dive and keeps listeners from intern to advanced supervisor  in mind while dropping gems and aha moments for everyone who loves to learn! If you love learning and want to keep track of some future learning opportunities, grab your personal curriculum here!

If you liked this episode, feel free to subscribe and leave a review! Your support helps us be a top mental health podcast and resource.  See you next week!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Self-Cherapist Therapist. I'm Lorraine Moorhead, and this is a therapist to therapist podcast for mental health professionals who want practical, evidence-based skills they can actually use in session. Each week I'm joined by leading experts in the field as we talk interventions, modalities, client populations, clinical supervision, and sustainable self-care, the kind that helps you do meaningful work without burning out. If you're a therapist, counselor, social worker, psychologist, or graduate student looking for real continuing education, you're in the right place. Welcome back to another episode of Self-Cherapist Therapist. I'm host and fellow therapist Lorraine Moorhead, and in today's crucial episode, we're going to talk about anti-racist psychotherapy considerations and approaches of rap, rhythm, and processing with its developer, David Archer, social worker, MFT, and soon-to-be PhD. David is an award-winning anti-racist psychotherapist, a certified EMDR trainer, an author, and specializes in PTSD and complex racial trauma. Please be sure to subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts and share this with a colleague or friend who would also find it important.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Yeah, likewise. Looking forward to our discussion. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Yeah. So I think we have our timelines might be fairly similar, but you've been doing this work for pushing 20 years now. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Yeah, my first class for my bachelor's of psychology was 20 years ago. And things have been really different since then. So yeah, my clinical work officially started 17 years ago. So it's been somewhat.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Yeah. I think I'm on year 18. So we're right there with each other. But I love what you said, and it feels like an important place to start. What shifts have you noticed or have you helped to make since that first class that you took in your bachelor's?

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Yeah. Okay, great. Well, that's leaning into the reason why I developed any of this or did any of this stuff in the first place. So let me just rewind time a little bit first.

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Please, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

So before I did any of this, I had like 10 years of experience in software engineering. And because like back then, I was interested in how how to like design software. I was especially interested in how do you make video games. I didn't work in the video game industry. Instead, I worked for the small business that was specializing in things relating to like fire extinguishers. And so I was like, okay, this is good, and I'm helping this company, but how do I make a bigger difference in the world? So then I did my bachelor's in psychology, I did my master's in social work, master's in marriage and family therapy. And as you mentioned, I'm doing a PhD. Since that time, I realized that while the systems that I was working on from computer science were interesting to work with, I was also interested in trying to find out how do we solve the problems within our human systems as well. So what I learned back then was that anytime I was in my psychology classes and they'd say anything about black people, it was usually kind of like a way of saying, okay, well, white people are good, but by the way, black people have worse vision or worse health. Like anytime that black people were mentioned, it was always in comparison to white people. And me being the only black guy in my class, it was kind of like, hey, I'm feeling a little taking this personal here, like, what's going on, people? And I realized that it wasn't just in my psychology courses, I realized that it was also in society in general, is that black people, specifically black men, would usually be the target of specific stereotypes and the projection of uh many traits that white people didn't want to take on for themselves. So when we think about, for example, black men stereotypically, by our laws and all of this, we are seen as being a threat. So I started to think then well, how do we help people to heal from this? Not just the racial trauma survivor, but how do we help even white people to heal from the internalization of anti-black racism that leads to this violent struggle? And that's what led me to develop anti-racist psychotherapy. After that, people started to hear about my me from anti-racist psychotherapy, my first book. And then in Buffalo, New York, in 2022, there was a mass shooting. There was a white supremacist insecure individual. He went to a supermarket, tried to kill as many black people as he could. There were some white therapists in the New York State, black therapists in the New York State, they knew about me from my first book, and they wanted to know how do we do an anti-racist psychotherapy? How do we make it so that if you're a white therapist, you can work with black people? If you're a black therapist, you can work with white people. If you're of any race, how do you work with people who've been impacted by a mass violent attack that's based on discrimination, based on hatred, violence, and these things? That's what led to the development of the rhythm and processing strategies. And the goal of rhythm and processing is to address the mental health consequences of complex racial trauma. So currently, that is the subject of my research. After five books, currently, this is kind of like my life's goal, my purpose. And generally is to make it so that in the future, that young black men, young men, young women of any race, of any culture, that they don't know need to have that difficult time that I did growing up. That all people are able to feel included in the promise of what therapy, of what social work, of what family therapy, that we can feel as if our needs are reflected or are met. And we're gonna get into it after meeting my colleague Thomas Zimmerman, speaking about predictive processing. We're also trying to expand what psychotherapy can also become for the 21st century. So that's my short answer. I hope I think it's probably a bit longer than expected, but is because I'm just excited to share about recently.

SPEAKER_00 6:42

I think I've seen improvements too, but we've moved from a cultural competency model that feels like maybe part of what was driving those uncomfortable moments in your bachelor's degree where we were taught, or so we thought, about different cultures. And that was supposed to arm us to be culturally competent. And then we've moved into more of a cultural humility model, which is where we're actually listening to our client about their unique experiences and we're coming in with an openness and a not, you know, a stance of not being the expert in the room. We're open to being educated. Can you take it even further and just give some of the important elements of how to actually be then anti-racist in psychotherapy?

SPEAKER_01 7:34

So I will say that what I was referring to before with not cultural competence, it was more cultural incompetence. We know that these words were developed with racial hierarchy in mind. We know that a lot of our sciences or a lot of maybe the pseudoscientific ideas that many psychology students need to know. Like we need to know about phrenology. We just need to know that these things like took place. And inherent in a lot of these early, some of these like early people. I mean, Darwin, I'm not getting to Darwin yet, but just to know Freud, I'm not getting to Freud yet, but just to know there are so many people who are like influential in our field who we could say they had the biases of their time, but it was a social idea, like there was kind of this push towards white dominance, white supremacy, patriarchy, and all of these things. So we don't see it as explicit now, but it still is more in the background and still informs a lot of what it is that we do.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

So I think you're making an important point that the people that we're leaning on with their theories and their approaches are influenced perhaps by their time, but certainly whatever is influencing them is is also showing up in the work that we're studying and and taking to our clients. I think that's really important.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

When the white enslavement of like when white people captured my ancestors, there were a lot of white people who knew this was a bad thing. So we're not trying to excuse him. There's a guy named John Brown. I don't know if you know who John Brown is, but this is a white abolitionist. And he made it his point to kind of kill as many racists as he could. And the thing is he's erased from history because it doesn't fit the script, is that we are supposed to think that all white people were this and all black people were this. But this is a person who took, like, he's a person who helped with the Underground Railroad and made connections between individuals. But a lot of white Americans don't even know that there were any white people who were part of the resistance against the fascistic tendencies of the past. So we need to, it's like racism is created and recreated. And the separations between ourselves, these are things that need to be maintained, lest we come to the conclusion that we're all one family. So to get back to what you're saying, though, is that people always knew injustice was bad. It's just people in power would use injustice to get more power. The reason why there were these different races was to justify colonialism and to justify the abduction and the kidnapping and sexual assault of all of my ancestors as well. And they needed to then say that these people were lesser than that's why we can exert dominance and destruction upon them. This is why we can take the land of the indigenous people. So there was a justification. And it's just our field was used in these ways to kind of continue these messages and to make it so that, like, for example, most of, and so if you're talking about like cultural confidence and moving towards cultural humility and all, that's all fine. But still, many of our measures and our assessments are tested on college students. Many of them are going to be white people, but we are then administering to people, we're administering them to people who aren't those people. And we are testing them on, yeah, we are saying that our tools are reliable and valid, despite the fact they may not be reliable and valid for the specific individuals we're working with. I say this as a person who has worked in indigenous communities, worked there for five years, learned the language of the Ganyangahaga people. And the fascinating thing is we were using these Western tools and these assessments of trying to assess them. And I knew at the time that, you know, something's not really working too well about this. And I didn't go to speak to my professors at the institutions about it. I didn't go to speak to any colleagues who were therapists. I went to go and speak to the medicine men that were in these communities. I went to go and speak to the people who live and breathe the work of decolonization. And it's those conversations with people who were different from me, who had a different culture than me, people who have always been in resistance to colonialism. It's those things that inform where my specific understanding of anti-racism comes from. So once again, cultural competence is still problematic. Cultural competence is saying, you know, if you read this book, you could know how to work with blacks. But the fascinating thing is there's no book for cultural competence to know how to work with women. I think that most women would be like, wait a second, if there's a therapist who's like, you know, I read the book on how to work with a woman, so I'm culturally competent in gender. I think most women would turn the other direction. And it's not a problem. I understand because it's just you can't fully know a culture. A culture is always emerging, a culture is always like changing and shifting. Cultural humility, from my understanding, is that we acknowledge that this may be the case. We acknowledge that we can project our biases onto others. But ultimately, I think that anti-oppression is even more adequate because anti-oppression and my specific intersectional anti-racism cares about the fact that not only is it that we need to acknowledge that these harms have been done, not only is it that we need to acknowledge these harms take place in our therapy offices, but our therapy also, the structure of it also needs to take into account the fact that there's a power imbalance between therapist and client. And in therapy and outside of therapy, we need to do everything we can to help people to heal from the scourge of the suffering that has gripped our sciences, gripped our society, and even threatens the future of humanity.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

What do you think you took away from those meetings with the medicine men? How did you then find your approach with your clients differing?

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Well, when I was working there, one of the most important things that I did was to learn the language. So learning the language meant that instead of me using the name, because again, my people, Jamaicans, we were colonized by English. The Ganyan Gahaga people were attacked by French, attacked by English, attacked by the federal government, and continue, and the attacks continue. And so even though many of the people that I met had English-sounding names, when I learnt their language and could use their Ganyan Gahaga name, it was a completely different therapy. Because now I'm acknowledging the importance of their culture. Now, and also the fascinating thing is speaking to the culture liaisons I met is that the person's name in the Mohawk culture is also significant for understanding the therapeutic process that's going to take place. Like you'd meet some people that they have a name, and the name informs what the problem is and also what the solution is as well. Like the names that they're going to have are given by naming ceremonies. So if we're just gonna erase a person's sacred name and then just give him a chuck or like give him a like a Tim is his name. No disrespect to any of your listeners who are Chucks or Tim.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

The Chucks and Tim's among us.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Yeah, but just to understand that if a person has a naming ceremony, that's significant. We lost those things through colonization in the West. But I think that if you go back far enough for many people who think that they're white, they also had ceremonies of significance that now we've kind of diluted and we've tried kind of erased. When I speak about colonized people, remember some of the first, like, if we're gonna call them white people, uh some of the early early ones, there were earlier ones, but Irish people know what I'm talking about. I mean, like Irish people were attacked, they were attacked for and their practices, they had their language. Many of the microaggressions that were done to them about their languages and their cultures and their ways are similar attacks that were done towards my people because they test drove the stuff. They had to test it first before they exported the racism from Europe. So it's really to say that if we're able to think that a name carries an anti-racist or is a decolonial action, then we need to also just think about well, what about our therapy? Are there things that are in the structure of our interactions with people when we are helping people to heal from trauma? That could also be more culturally responsive rather than culturally competent of like knowing more than somebody. And if I just know enough, you know, even the idea of cultural competence, no disrespect to your cultural competence fans who are in the building, but it's just this makes me think about the mind-body split from like people like Descartes who are going to say, I think, therefore I am, creating the split between the mind and the body. But then you speak to most people from collectivist cultures, which is the global majority, and they don't have that same split that we as Westerners do. In fact, the mind and the body are not seen as like so separate, specifically when we talk about cultural syndromes and cultural, what we used to call cultural bound syndromes, is that not everyone experiences depression or anxiety in the same way. It's not just a mental thing. And when you're able to then have your assessment consider the different parts of the person, then after they start to speak about the somatic component that's there, and when you have a little bit of curiosity about what the body is saying as well, and also what is the function of that, and also what does that mean from your culture, then we're getting in the anti-racist, anti-oppressive, culturally responsive territory. So that's ultimately where I'd say is where the field is going in. Black people we're not going anywhere, Latin people we're not going. We're all part of a global community. So we need to like put our big boy pants on, big girl pants on, and we need to uh stand up to the occasion and continue to fight for the inherent dignity of all people, regardless of what the bullies will say, regardless of what the insecure people will say. We need to make it that we are here to to fulfill the promise of what our fields are meant to do.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

Yeah. You work with trauma and with racial trauma. Can you talk a little bit about if you consider racial trauma along the same lines as complex trauma, or if you kind of categorize them a little bit differently?

SPEAKER_01 18:42

Sure. So when we think about what PTSD is, and when we think about the almighty DSM V, what it's going to tell us is that there needs to be this criterion a stressor. It's also going to say that the person might have some intrusions, they might also have some avoidance, they might also have some hyper-vigilance, and there's a series of things that they have. But with racial trauma, oftentimes, and when I say race, remember it's a social construction, meaning there are a lot of black people, or there's a lot of Africans that only became black when they came to Canada. There's a lot of people who they only became what's it called? They only became Latino when they came to the US. Before that, in their countries, they're not looking at themselves in the same racial categories. But this is just something that white supremacy and security creates of just putting us in these things. We're much more complex than just the appearance of someone and saying that the appearance denotes culture. Like, come on.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Anyways, so even within any one culture, there's no prescriptive approach because every individual has experienced their culture. Um and in your to your point, their race, their racial construct differently as well.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

Yeah, and that's what cultural confidence that's the reason why I I'm at odds with cultural confidence, because it's trying to say, just take this course, just do this thing, and you can work with billion people. It's like, no, yeah, doesn't happen in that way. But again, but that way of operating is like that is like the idea of whiteness that's there. Like whiteness generally is going to make different levels between people of saying who is deserving of life and who is less deserving of life, or who is deserving of privilege and who is less deserving of privilege.

SPEAKER_00 20:32

And you know, right there it feels like why there's sometimes so much pushback to the idea of privilege.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

When that's what we mean about privilege. We mean that there's some things that you experience that I could not never possibly experience.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

That's actually privilege that allowed that to happen. It feels like there's so much. Oh, I didn't have privilege, I worked really hard. But going to your point of that even uh nobody is identifying as being at the top of the hierarchy, and it's really hard to hear that you've had a privilege, maybe for that reason, because it doesn't, you know. Well, I had a hard time. I had I had a struggle. I'm still having a struggle. It feels hard to say.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

But sometimes just being a white person on your CV, if your name does not have certain syllables on it, it increases the chance of you getting the job. There's been studies on this for decades.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:28

Well acknowledged. And the proof of it is just our the immigration crisis you have in the States now.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

It's just that like even having an accent leads to experiences of discrimination. So I say all of this just to know that yes, you may have some viewers that are like, what? This guy's talking about privilege. This guy doesn't know. Yeah. It's just it's this is science. Like, I'm just coming from the perspective of white people's scientific journals. So, you know, hate to break it to you. And that's a lot of what anti Russian. Racism is. A lot of anti-racism is really just uh fact checks of like being able to say, well, this is what the science actually says about the thing. Whereas before, the pseudoscientific perspectives were really based on just emotional responses. So to get back to your question, because I think this is what you're saying, you're talking about the difference between racial trauma and its interlap with complex trauma. If I was able to show a diagram, I would show the binary complex trauma cycle, which I explain in anti-racist psychotherapy. So yeah, the basic idea is that, and you might notice I'm using the term white supremacy insecurity. It's because I noticed that like the people who are white supremacists, they actually don't have good self-esteem. They never do. They always feel the world is against them. They don't, you know, they think the black men are taking all their white women and they like they don't really feel as if life is going so good for them. And I realize that a lot of it is tied to this insecurity that there's never enough. That, you know, that their population is being replaced. Like they're not at peace. So when we use the term white supremacy, it makes it sound as if they're actually supreme, but no, the fear is that they are not supreme. So the insecurity needs to be added to it. So the way how it works is that white supremacy insecurity is on one end, and then through a process called soul murder, which involves being able to reject all of the negative traits within white people, of making it so then we think about enslaved ancestors and we think that these are people who were worked to death on concentration camps. And what took place is that we would then say black people are lazy, which again, they're working for the white people who aren't working. So the laziness gets projected into the black body. The violence to continue the work gets projected into the black body. On the other end is black suffering. Black suffering is the black person who becomes associated with trauma, who becomes associated with adversity, becomes associated with all of the stereotypes rejected from the white idea of whiteness. When the black person accepts this, or even if they don't accept it, when the society accepts it, then this validates the oppression. What that means is it adds to the delegitimization. And by delegitimizing the black body or whoever this is projected into, it allows whiteness to then maintain its state of being dissociated from trauma. So the cycle is that white supremacy insecurities on one end through soul murder, it allows for black suffering to take place, and black suffering allows for the validation of this issue. So I'm saying all of that because I noticed then that dissociation is like a key part of racism. So dissociation for trauma survivors, generally speaking, for trauma survivors, trauma takes place, dissociation takes place to cope with difficult experiences in the present moment. So dissociation means this is hard for me to deal with in the present. I'm gonna compartmentalize it, I'm gonna put it over here, I'll put it into this part, I'll put it into this, okay? So what tends to take place is when a person is going through a lot of complex trauma or chronic traumas throughout their day, because we've seen that when a person is going through racial microaggressions and they are LGBTQ, it increases PTSD severity. We've seen as well that when a person goes through cultural betrayals based on race and identity, when a person goes through institutional betrayals based on the society or the military or college or the university or the power structure having more power than them, when these things take place, which is often what takes place, being a black person who's undergoing microaggressions in a society that's violating the social contract 24-7, then we start to see increased spectrum of PTSD severity. That's what leads us to seeing complex racial trauma. It may not come about the same way as complex PTSD comes out, where we're talking about key developmental periods and we're talking about suffering, chronic, prolonged trauma that takes place and is inescapable. But the inescapable nature is this binary complex trauma cycle that black people of multiple racial categories and multiple identities feel that they are or find themselves stuck in. So when you get these types of microaggressions, when you get the social acceptance of suffering, of knowing the society is okay if people like you are killed, like you know, if you come from the Middle East and bombs are being dropped on you, the society is generally okay with that. When this takes place, we start to see certain types of symptoms that are above and beyond what we would see in just standard PTSD. And then we can see some of the dissociative symptoms that relate to depersonalization, derealization. We will see some of the persecutory intrusions, we'll see some of the the, as I said, the somatization. And that's what I was discovering. I if we can use that term. I don't like that. It's associated with colonization for Columbuses and all of that stuff. But this is something that I uncovered, if I can use that word. But this is something that I noticed as I was working in Montreal, working in Toronto, working in the indigenous communities, is that these are people, not all of them had the difficult childhoods that I would see with my DID clients and the people who had what we would term as complex PTSD. But it seemed as if what was happening on a regular basis, being exposed to vicarious trauma of what they're seeing on their social media, specifically around 2020, when George Floyd was murdered. And then after you keep seeing the videos of this constantly, people talking about it constantly, like vicarious trauma carries a cost to it. And I was just starting to notice that some of these people ended up having scores that were a little elevated, just as my complex trauma clients did as well. And so that's what complex racial trauma is about. There's a researcher named Jude Mary Sanat, and he talks about complex racial trauma. Monica Williams, she's one of the experts on microaggressions in the world. She's a world-renowned expert on it. Jude Mary Sanat, world-renowned expert in research on the topic. I don't know them personally, but I just got to give a shout-out because they're doing good work. But it's really just to say that complex racial trauma is understudied. Okay. We don't usually the people who are assessing harms done to people who are victims of homophobia, transphobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racial trauma, we're not always talking with the dissociation folks. So that's the reason why I was a plenary speaker at the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation in 2023, because I'm trying to make it that we're all friends. I'm trying to make it that the people who care about identity also care about complex trauma. And that's what rhythm and processing is meant to address.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

What is rap? What is rhythm and processing? How do you tell us about it?

SPEAKER_01 29:17

Sure. So rhythm. So I'll explain both parts. So I noticed again, I'm an EMDR therapy trainer. I'm doing some consultant.

SPEAKER_00 29:28

So we're an EMDR friendly place.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. Okay, so we're all one family. And some of your listeners might be interested in the EMDR therapy ideas and all of that. Hit me up, check out archertherapy.com. I got the trainings that are all available. Doing some co-trainings with Thomas Zimmerman. Thomas Zimmerman is a legend. Man's a living legend in the field, training hundreds of therapists of the week. This guy is wild with it.

SPEAKER_00 29:52

And I talk about him all the time too because I just because sometimes for free, he just wants people to have access.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

Yeah. And that's what I'm saying is that he's really representing what the field should be. I mean, there's no reason why any of the more famous individual, like there's no reason why the people who have the most power and the privilege should not be doing these kinds of things, except the reason is capitalism. I mean, let's just be honest. It's the system. The system is designed in this specific way. So the thing is with rhythm and processing, as I said, in 2020, there were a group of therapists. They wanted to know how do we actually do an anti-racist psychotherapy? I felt that I wanted to create something that was not going to do the same problems that other approaches that I had learned had done. So I needed to address the knowledge gaps that were there. Although I love EMDR therapy, as you spoke about, Tom is a big proponent of this as well. Is that the way like people are trained, but they often need extra support for complex trauma? So we needed to then find okay, how do we create something where it's built in, where the complex trauma support is there? And again, I told you I gave the talks about the racial trauma thing. We also need it built in where we can talk about race, where we can talk about internalized oppression, talk about the intersectional identities that we're all a part of, and that it's not an aside, it's not a second training you need to do, that it's built into what rhythm and processing actually is. But the key word for rhythm comes from the fact that it's based on Afrocentric principles instead of Eurocentric principles. And so when we're talking about the Afrocentric principles, we're talking about that spirituality is something that can be spoken about. We're talking about the fact that time is not just based on what happened in the past. Even the future is important, even the present is important. We're talking about the importance of having harmony between all the different parts of yourself so you could be at harmony with the parts of others. We're talking about the significance of being in harmony with nature instead of contributing to the climate crises and catastrophes we're seeing. We're talking about affect and emotion, we're talking about rhythm and verve, and we're talking about the fact that there's more than one way of knowing, doing, and being and living in this world. So I wanted to make sure that the thrust of it was coming from that place, that the idea of it comes from the place where the client is actually an expert. We're turning the tables on the thing. So the idea is that the client brings about the solution, not the therapist coming from their almighty throne of being able to say, Well, this is your specific cognitive distortion. You're thinking about it in this way. I'm gonna explain to you. No, we want to find a way to make it so the client actually is the person who brings in the problem and the person who's also the solution. So that brings us to processing. So with processing, I wrote about memory reconsolidation when I wrote the book in 2022. But as I said, as I've been speaking in discussion with Tom and me and him, we're actually going to be having a book club reading of The Experience Machine by Andy Clark, where he talks about predictive processing. And we are trying to get more therapists to think about predictive processing as a framework to help them to understand how to make how to help them to understand how to make their clients heal a little bit better. And to to know that we are trying to undo some of the myths that are within our field that catharsis is entirely necessary, that there always needs to be big tears, or there always needs to be a lot of anger in all of these things in order to heal from something. Well, actually, if many people have been learning traumas uneventfully or with single pass events, then maybe they should also be able to heal in a way that's relatively uneventful, and also with single pass or relatively in like short burst events as well. And that's where predictive processing comes in. So the basic idea is this is that your brain is constantly guessing what's going to happen. And also your brain prioritizes its internal model rather than its senses. This is different from 20 years ago when they were telling me that stuff in sensation and perception, okay? Is that we're trying to use the ideas from modern neuroscience instead of things from a hundred years ago. Like, come on, guys, okay, leave that stuff alone. Okay. So the basic idea is that let's say, and this is what Andy Clark talks about in his book, but phantom phone vibration syndrome, okay? Phantom vibration syndrome. Let's say, for example, we have the cell phone, and then after what takes place is, you know, someone calls me, I feel it in my pocket, I answer it, and then after I choose to answer it or not, okay. But there's some times where your phone feels like it vibrates and it's not even in your pocket. And then you check in the other room, you're like, wait a second, yo, it wasn't even in my pocket. What's going on? And you realize that maybe it was the interaction of the cotton of the pants with the movement of the body that the brain interpreted as what resembles a vibration. In some cases, you can even hear a bird outside and think, is that my ringtone? It's not your ringtone. It's just your brain made an error at that specific point. But there's a model in the brain of what is expected, and sometimes it can misfire, sometimes it can get surprised. What we are trying to do with predictive processing is to intentionally surprise the brain. We are intentionally bringing up prediction errors. What does that do? It makes it so the brain kicks into gear and is like, okay, let me get my act together. The present moment is actually more important than whatever it is that I'm focusing on. And then it updates memories. For example, I had a client of mine. This is a woman who was in her 80s. This is a white woman. I say this so that people who are listening know that yes, anti-racism is for white people too. So what happens is she has this phobia of driving. 80-year-old woman. For two years, she hasn't driven. The reason why is because she saw she got into a car accident. Now her brain made a prediction that if I get into a car, I gotta close my eyes, I gotta have a panic attack. This is incompatible with driving a car in 2026. I don't know what it's gonna be like in the future, but you cannot close your eyes. It's not recommended. Not a Tesla. Yeah. Well, the Teslas I I've seen some terrible things about their safety records. So is it's just to say that the basic idea, though, is that for this woman, then she needed to find a way of being able to do this. She wants to have her mobility, she wants to be able to go out on the drives with her and her husband. So she comes to my office. On the way to my office, she was stressed because again, the cop car passed by her, went too fast, and all this stuff. And so when she freaks out, her husband freaks out. So then I had to be like, okay, let me help out the both of you. Okay. What we needed to do is using an approach that's designed that comes from resource development installation, which I think you might be familiar, developed by Leeds and Corn, which is very important when we're using EMDR therapy for complex trauma individuals. But most, some trainers are not talking about it. I don't know why. But, anyways, I developed my own derivative of RDI that is called resource integration. So, what we needed to do with the specific individual is we needed to help them to have a resource to address the fear that she would have. So this is even before dealing with the actual fear. First, we tried different resources. She tried transcendental meditation that related too much to dissociation. So she got scared. We changed that. Then after she's like, Okay, well, I was like, No, I use something that brings you joy. Then she's like, you know what? I had an at named Joy. And then she's thinking about Joy. Then she's like, Oh no, Joy died. I'm like, no, no, no, change this person. And so then after we I said, like, no, no, no, think about something that really gives you joy, like the archetype of joy. So, what did she think about? She thought about in 19 whenever, the first time on the transistor radio, when she heard the Beatles playing and she's jumping up and down as a teenager and all this stuff, and you could see that she started to light up, she started to feel great. That's the resource. We needed to use that feeling of joy as a disconfirmation. So when she would think about the fear of even talking about the trauma, she's got the beatles going on, she's feeling good in her body, she's feeling good in her mind, and that allows for a disconfirmation that allows for a type of prediction error, where typically the brain's model is thinking if I even talk about this fear to this therapist, I'm gonna freak out. Well, actually, in the moment, you're feeling this great somatic experience. You haven't thought about this memory in so long, girl. Like, yeah, enjoy yourself. So that allows for us to reduce the initial stress. Then we bring in the rap technique. The rhythm and processing technique is a derivative of predictive processing flash by Tom Zimmerman. What we are trying to do with rap is we are trying to help the individual to then think of the stressor, immediately gather and place it out of awareness, and then you're going to bring up a focus of your choosing. All of this is determined by the client. I don't know nothing about Beatles. All of this is determined by the client, okay? They wanted to look at a video of the beach because who doesn't like the beach? I'm in cold Canada. I don't know what it looks like in your state, but outside, I would want a vacation too. So she's thinking of this beach. She's looking at the image of the beach on her cell phone, okay? And then we give a set of instructions that when she's looking at it at a certain interval, I'm going to give her a cue and she's going to take an action. That action could be blinking, the action could be tapping your fingers, the action could be dancing, the action could be searching for numbers. But what's taking place is that you the brain is constantly sampling its environment to check to see does this match up with the internal model? Is this matching up? When we are telling the person to take an action, now the brain is going to increase precision weighting on the present moment, noticing this thing that they like, this beach. And now we are tapping it in almost as if you're taking a screenshot of it multiple times, and the brain is then uh after a set of rounds, the brain then has to update the fact and be like, wait a second, this is 2026, this isn't 1926 or whenever it is that that she's listening to the Beatles. And so then the brain needs to update accordingly. That's where we're talking about memory reconsolidation. When we are able to provide a prediction error, we are able to destabilize the target, the emotional learning that underlies the stress. So we don't need the whole narrative, we don't need the whole story. When we are able to pair recalling the stressor, moving out of moving it out of awareness, and the disconformation, the destabilization of the joy that she gets from the beach, the good feeling she gets from the beetles, that trauma doesn't stand a chance. And so though these good somatic experiences can cause a somatic disconfirmation of what is typically experienced. And that will help us to then re-encode the way how the memory is stored forever. So when we're talking about memory reconsolidation, we're talking about the way how humans learn. This is what we inherited from our ancestors as well. We might have inherited many stories about, you know, white supremacy and security, about Freud and the seduction hypothesis and these things or the things that he hid from us and all of these things. Okay, we can inherit these things. But we've also inherited the ability to heal. This is not something that needs to be reserved for the billionaires or for the rich people amongst us. You're seeing Thomas doing these trainings for free. I also do free trainings as well. Low cost and no cost options are available. But the basic idea is that if this is the way how healing takes place, we have to do everything we can in this current day and age to make it so as many people as possible know that they are no longer helpless in the face of suffering. This is an anti-racist action. It's one that is meant to help all people of all races, all people of all classes, all backgrounds, excuse me. We want all people to know that they are all deserving of fuel. We want all people to know that they are beautiful the way how they are. And that's why I do this work.

SPEAKER_00 43:05

Yeah. Great, great description and great example on how it came about and how you've been integrating it. If you as the therapist had a client come in that was endorsing some racist beliefs or just some beliefs that were in contrast to you as a person.

SPEAKER_01 43:27

But if a person is going to be a threat to you or a stress to you, anti-racism isn't about like just turning over and letting this stuff happen. Anti-racism is about the sword and the shield. Is that the shield is there to protect yourself from the vicarious trauma that takes place. And the sword is to draw a line in the sand or in the concrete, however strong your sword is, but to make it so that we no longer tolerate this type of bad behavior. Because we have to protect ourselves. It's also just to know that this question, the reason why I asked about the race, is because I Talking about racial trauma, you know, you said you were doing this for 18 years, I've been doing this for 17 years. I'm surprised that there haven't been more discussions about this. Like, there's no reason why I should have been the person to write anti-racist psychotherapy. I'm sure a lot of white therapists probably hear racist things all the time in their sessions. I think then we need to find ways of being able to make it that we can make the distinction between something that is clinical and non-clinical. But I really do think that that white people need to stop the racism thing. I just think it's that simple. I just I really think it's that simple. We need to stop the war thing. Like we need to just say, okay, we're not gonna shoot the bombs, we're not gonna shoot the play. Like, this is what we need to do. We need it that the people with the power and the privilege speak to the other people with the power and the privilege and have a conversation and say, we're enough of this. Okay, let's not look at racism or anti-racism as just one specific race, even though I did, I wrote it because really there was nothing about anti-racism when I wrote that book. Okay, there was nothing about the experience of anti-black racial trauma. But what we need now is we need the next person to write the book on uh anti-Asian violence and anti-Asian racism. We need to support the people who are most impacted by the immigration enforcement on the communities in the U.S. I have some colleagues, I have some colleagues of mine who have been in fear because they're at risk of being like illegally deported. Okay. We need white people who have platforms like yours to be able to advocate for people who aren't white, to be able to speak to people who are white and say enough is enough. But we need to understand we are one community, we are one family. I'm talking about anti-racist psychotherapy, but this is not just only in the realms of the therapy office. Therapy itself is not going to change the world, but you can. Like now, when you see World War III can pop off at any time, now when you see the climate crisis, we're not even talking about the climate anymore. But the world, we're seeing that like coral reefs are being devastated and all of those things. What are we gonna eat if we're uh cannibalizing ourselves like this? If we're doing these terrible things to one another. So injustice only thrives because we're not speaking up about it. But there's a lot of people who can save a lot of lives, but we just have to use the courage that is within each and every one of us and the power that each and every one of us has.

SPEAKER_00 46:49

Yeah, I think that's a great that takes us to my final question. You mentioned vicarious trauma and burnout, and something I like to ask everyone how do you approach self-care, or how do you encourage your clients to approach self-care?

SPEAKER_01 47:06

They need to defeat oppression. People need to cultivate purpose, they need to cultivate a sense of what do we do in this time? And you know, like one of the best forms of self-care is to care for someone else. And yeah, we need to stop, we need to be intersectional with our anti-oppression. We need to think, okay, how do I care for someone else? That's not me. Like, how do I provide for myself as well? Like, you know, when I teach the rap technique, it's not just meant to address complex racial trauma, it's not just meant to address complex PTSD or depression. It's also meant for the therapist to know that you have a choice with healing, you can actually switch it on. When you use resource integration, the person is going to be using either a cultural concept, they could use a characteristic of the self that's underdeveloped, they can use an ancestor, they could use a force of nature. And so, even if it is that you're not of my specific culture, all of you have an unknown ancestor who had a harder time than you did and didn't have AI and didn't have internet. All of us have it within our genealogy, that will to continue, the will to survive, the we're the will to flourish. As a parent of two young children, in fact, some of my daddy brain could have been acting up throughout this whole presentation because it just turns out my son just wanted to get a fever because my daughter just had to get this cold and she's just blowing snot bubbles like there's no tomorrow. So the thing is, I know it's cute, but cute doesn't give you sleep. So the thing is what happened is when I was having difficulty caring for my son when he was much younger and wondering how am I gonna stay up? This is insane. How did my mother do this? How do you the baby doesn't know it's time to sleep? No, doesn't have the diurnal night cycle yet. So, anyways, I needed to then practice what I preached. I needed to then use resource integration. I needed to use the idea that my ancestors have done this before, that there is someone like me. They might not have looked like me, they might not have had the same skin complexion, the same height, and all of that, but there is somewhere, somewhere, somewhere in my past, someone cared for another child, and that's why I'm here. When we are able to think about it in that way, when we're able, as I said, from the Afrocentric principles, caring about the past, it's the concept of Sankofa, which is the con principle that sometimes we need to go back in the past in order to move forward. When we're able to think about the fact that we are all like when we think about things very differently from how we are being presented it in the present, that's when the breakthroughs take place. So me being able to understand my ancestors are always with me, me being able to understand if I can transmit this love in my son, he will be able one day to transmit this love into others. It's these ideas of knowing that we are always interconnected. That is one of the most important things I can say for the self-care plan. It's to take good care of yourself, to love yourself, and know that there is someone who already loved you. Even if today is a little bit tough, remember that your ancestors, they also went through that. And then some. And so we have to honor the ancestors by learning to love ourselves as much as they loved us.

SPEAKER_00 50:42

Great, great closing thoughts. David, thank you so much for taking the time to be here, even with all that's going on in your personal bubble today.

SPEAKER_01 50:52

Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_00 50:54

Yeah, it was a great conversation. Thank you for listening to the Self-Therapist Therapist. I hope today's conversation gave you insight, clarity, or a tool you can take straight into your clinical work. If you found this episode helpful, be sure to subscribe to the show on YouTube and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps other therapists find the show and keeps these conversations going. Until next time, keep learning, stay curious, take care of yourself. Thank you for listening to the Self-Cherapist Therapist. I hope today's conversation gave you insight, clarity, or a tool you can take straight into your clinical work. If you found this episode helpful, be sure to subscribe to the show on YouTube and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps other therapists find the show and keeps these conversations going. Until next time, keep learning, stay curious, and take care of yourself too.