Encounter with an other: a discussion between two women in the field.
An interview with Carmen Joanne Ablack
Christine Stevens
Carmen Joanne Ablack is a senior Gestalt trainer and practitioner, President of the European Association for Body Psychotherapy and a member of the Black, African and Asian Therapy Network Leadership Group. This discussion took place via online video chat on 8 January 2021.
Carmen, you are a woman of considerable power, influence and formidable energy! Since graduating in psychology and sociology, you have amassed an impressive body of work in the field of mental health. You are particularly known in the Gestalt community through your work as a trainer and faculty member at the London Gestalt Centre, you are an Integrative and Body Psychotherapist. As well as your own therapy practice, you have been very involved over a number of years working for UKCP. You are a leadership member of BAATN (Black, African and Asian Therapy Network) and you work as a trainer and a consultant on a range of issues including diversity, inclusion, gender and conflict resolution. You have a long-established supervision practice and you are increasingly engaged in writing and publishing.
I would like to start our discussion by asking what you see as the most formative factors on the way your life has developed.
I come from a largish family – five children and an older half-sister. We had a very international upbringing and I was moved in and out of schools a lot, so by the time I was seven-and-a-half, I'd been born in England, moved to Trinidad, lived in Barbados and Canada. My father had come to study at Oxford University as a ‘scholarship boy’ from the Commonwealth and was recruited into the Special Operations Executive during World War II. He then became a BBC cricket commentator. He was a contemporary of John Arlott and they knew each other, I understand, quite well. People often comment on my voice; you can't have a father that was a cricket commentator and not learn how to speak well. He knew all about cadence and annunciation – it just went with the territory of growing up in my family. Later, he was involved in diplomatic roles for the government of Trinidad and Tobago. Sometimes I would find myself as a little girl needing to be articulate and speaking to diplomats and quite senior people in the world.
From an early age I was asked to think from more than one perspective. I remember as a six-year old being given the newspaper to read. Looking back, I think there were some things we were asked to do as children which went well beyond the scope of what was reasonable for a child. It was okay to argue in our family, in fact I think people would describe our family as quite argumentative. There was a real emphasis from both my parents on thinking for yourself. This was an important formative influence.
My mother was from Tobago, the ‘other island’, she went to work at sixteen. Her heritage was partly African and is harder to trace, although I know her father was Barbadian. My father’s side of the family includes a mix of West-Indian, East-Indian subcontinent, indigenous Carib, African and the Scottish Highlands, via slavery, to name some. I describe myself as a Black woman of multiple Black heritages. I'm deliberately using this term, heritage, rather than multicultural, it's more than culture. I believe we inherit the whole.
My family moved with my father’s work to Washington DC, a year after Martin Luther King had been killed, I was aged about nine. It was my formative time of learning about discrimination, differences and inequity. My younger sister and I attended a local elementary school, her form teacher clearly having never heard of Trinidad and Tobago and assumed she didn’t speak English. She sent her to a special teacher to learn English, we discovered this when she came home with a painting she'd done with beautiful, scripted writing on it. My mother asked who had written her name? She said 'Oh, my special teacher'. My mother was surprised, 'You have a special teacher?' and she said 'Yes, she's teaching me to speak English'. My mother just marched us back up to the school and gave them hell! It says something about the kind of insularity at the time, and huge assumptions people made.
Moving around so much when I was growing up meant I had to work hard to step over my fear and learn to fit into yet another new situation. Sometimes, especially as a preteen, I did this by making up stories, some of which were completely bizarre! Looking back now I feel such compassion for the young person I was.
It is so interesting to hear some of your early experiences. I’d like us to move on now to explore what has influenced and informed you in your work as a psychotherapist.
I am an Integrative Body and Gestalt Psychotherapist. I trained in Integrative Body Psychotherapy at the Chiron Centre, which included exploring and understanding Gestalt principles particularly from one of the founders, Rainer Pervöltz. I then studied in a post-qualifying group on contemporary field theory with Carl Hodges (from the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy) when he visited the London Gestalt Centre. An understanding of field is very much part of the foundation of my work and the Gestalt teaching I do now. Also, with Carl I learnt a way to work with issues of difference, diversity and inclusion that was very different to what I was doing as a trainer at the Inner London Education Authority and the Greater London Council at the time and in my private work as a freelance consultant. He helped me towards an understanding of a Gestalt perspective on relationality. Michael Ellis invited me to be a visiting tutor on working with the body for the counselling training at the Gestalt Centre and I went on to teach psychotherapy there. It supported me to incorporate the language and deeper understanding of Gestalt into my thinking and my work. I always come back to field conditions. I heard George Wollants speak at the Gestalt Centre on this. Working with context and situation forms a big part of my thinking, working with the client in the room, supporting them to come into more awareness of context and situation, both in the moment and in the story and then how that is affecting them in the moment in the room with me.
And how do you integrate your Body Psychotherapy training into your Gestalt practice?
I think in reality I adjust depending on who the client is, so in that sense it really is an integrative practice. That includes adjusting when working with people who are specifically coming because they want to work in a Gestalt way. As far as I'm concerned, Gestalt is a body-based psychotherapy. I've always thought of Gestalt as a body-based psychotherapy but I'm also clear that Gestalt is not Body Psychotherapy; it is a very subtle difference.
I'm in a Think Tank at the European Association of Body Psychotherapy, where we have spent a very long time chewing over the idea of ‘What does it mean to be my body, a body, our bodies?’. I get very bemused looks from some gestaltists when I say that! We know what body is biologically and physiologically but then there's the whole issue of body-energetics, and I do think all these things are coming much closer together. When I trained and when I first studied Gestalt, there was much more separation between these ideas. So nowadays, I work with more than body awareness. I do invite clients into bodily-based experiments, and I did that as a Body Psychotherapist. That was part of the Body Psychotherapy training, that idea of experimentation. I think there's a particular way of thinking about, setting up and talking about experimentation in Gestalt. In fact, the idea of using experimentation, in my experience, crosses over many therapies.
I think there is a level of attention to... I guess a depth of understanding of the meaning of awareness that is shared, but from a slightly different perspective, in a lot of Body Psychotherapies – I'm deliberately putting an ‘s’ on that – and different Gestalt ways of working. It's sometimes complex, and the bottom line is whether I'm thinking from a perspective of somatic resonance – (which is very much a word that comes from my Body Psychotherapy field) – whether I'm working from my somatic resonance and also speaking from an embodied place with that, so that my somatic resonance informs not just what I'm saying but how I'm saying and hearing what I'm saying. That's something that I spent a year practising doing as part of my Body Psychotherapy training. There's an emphasis on all the different depths of non-verbal communication. All this is in my background and I bring it to the work I do.
I am thinking now of connections with the work of Ruella Frank and her Developmental Somatic approach.
Yes, I've done a couple of conference workshops with Ruella and read her books. I also did a lovely workshop with Michael Clements in Stockholm, working with the embodied relational. There are definite crossovers.
Maybe it's more how I think about my work and how I hold it in my various supervisions. I'm engaged in systemic and family supervision with someone who very much works with ideas of attachment in systemic thinking. I deliberately went to her as a supervisor because I found so much of her writing reflected something that I'd been discovering for years in my work and I wanted another language or way of holding it. I think I bring all of that into my work. There is a level of systemic understanding. It’s slightly different what I'm doing in individual work and what I do in group work actually; in group work, I'm also bringing in, from a Gestalt perspective, Yvonne Agazarian's work on systems and ideas about sub-grouping, which I was introduced to by Carl Hodges. I went on to study Agazarian and briefly did some work with her.
I don't tend to frame what I do too rigidly, which is why I come back to field theory, because that allows me to hold all the different aspects without being or becoming interpretive.
I certainly see Gestalt as an integrative psychotherapy, and it’s been interesting to tease out with you the ideas and influences you bring to your work. We could talk about this a lot more, but I would like to change tack slightly at this point. There has been increased heart-searching in the Gestalt community, as in all sectors of society particularly following the public death in America of George Floyd at the hands of the police 25 May 2020 and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. You facilitated the GPTI conference with Sharon Beirne on race issues last year. I know that you're well placed to play a role in this in terms of where you're situated as a leader. I don’t know where you would want to get into this in our discussion, whether it's the reaction from the conference or whether you have other thoughts...
I really appreciate the sensitivity and the carefulness you're showing. I want to start with two things. That heart-searching I think is actually a more holistic searching. There is a lot of looking into our hearts, and I found Sharon's talk at the conference very moving because she was incredibly honest about her own journey and the challenges of that, and really I would describe it as heart and soul searching. What she did was speak and then I interviewed her after the speech. We followed this with a dialogue and then opened it to the wider group and people took time to consider, then came back and put questions to us and we just talked.
There was something about my facilitation role, where I really got to see how permission-giving it is if people can step over the anxiety of admitting what they don’t know and how they feel about this. I say this with a deep appreciation of what this takes. There is this lovely phrase that Isha McKenzie-Mavinga coined in her first book: ‘recognition trauma’ (2009). As a trainer, tutor and a facilitator around equity, diversity and inclusion, it’s important to remember that people can go into a polyvagal state at some level when they recognise what they've actually been doing. You could say it’s through no fault of their own, you could put in all these apologies but the reality is that I know what it's meant for me, in those moments where I catch myself doing something heteronormative and go 'What the hell are you doing?' to myself and have to do my self-talk and work it out, reflecting and thinking through with embodied awareness as I do these things. I've been doing this for decades because I've been teaching around this stuff for a long time. And I learn something new each time I fully attend to my own experiencing of my limitations.
I know, however, I sit with an advantage; I've spent many years doing this work and sometimes I'm dealing with colleagues and people in the wider Gestalt field who despite all the other types of work on awareness, somehow when it comes to these issues, they really struggle. I include LGBTQI+ issues here as well as disability, class, all the issues and identity process dynamics, and there's something about the way race is often placed in a bracket. I think of how brackets are drawn in writing, and I say to the students 'You may be bracketing, but remember it's still open at the top and the bottom for you to reach inside'. I think race has been in a bracket and sometimes it has been an almost-closed bracket and recently in some places and in some ways, we've been opening the bracket and reaching in. Really reaching in, looking at and experiencing what we have tried to avoid and/or remain in unawareness about. I'm noticing I am using a lot of images and metaphors because I think this can be so hard to talk about.
Our heart and soul searching needs to happen in discrete groups, as well as in facilitated discussion between groupings. It’s not that we should leave the discrete groupings behind, but we have to learn how to move between them and their conversations. We need to do so with recognition that as we continue being the human race in the wider context of the living and dying world, the conversation is shifting. At the same time, there are places where it feels like it isn't, and I think those places are actually reactions against the shifting that is happening. There is a kind-of movement from the central to the marginal, and often back again. Being able to stay with and inhabit that movement is important.
Bringing in a Gestalt focus, for me it's about why we pay attention to sub-groupings in Gestalt group work and why we encourage sub-groups to speak to each other in front of those not in their sub-group. We then step back into dialogue about what those in the sub-group and those outside the sub-group have got insight into and have learnt from. It’s being collectively reflective, whilst holding awareness of differentiation. We learn to sit with our understanding of how shame-provoking this work is and try to help people understand being with shame. Giving voice to shame is actually part of the process. Making a conscious choice about where and when I give voice to shame – that really has to be held quite carefully. This is such difficult territory; we very easily fall into wanting to tell each other how to do it, or that how you are doing it is not okay. I mean in both ‘directions’. I often use my heterosexuality as a metaphor for talking about race so I can cross the oppression dynamic. For me, as a heterosexual Black woman, I notice how I may unintentionally make a demand of the LGBTQI+ community to inform me in some way, or to accept my limitation. I have learnt to understand that asking for the acceptance of that limitation can only be a temporary ask. I'm asking for acceptance at this moment, but I am not making a contract with you that you have to tolerate this limitation of mine forevermore because I am who I am. It's about getting over the 'I am who I am' stuff – that comes forward as an ignorant avoidance of my response-ability for being who and how I am.
I think this takes a real staying with – of course, I fall off into my heteronormative bad habits – and I have practised for so long that I understand, most of the time, how to pull myself back from it. I think that's what people are having to learn. And if you've not been doing this for most of your career as a practitioner, it is pretty frightening stuff. It's a bit like when all the research stuff really came to the fore, Christine, and we know how much resistance there was from our fellow practitioners: 'Oh god, do we have to talk about research again?' and responding 'Look, yes we do. Are you a professional or aren't you? Are you wanting this to be taken seriously or are you not? Do you believe in what you're doing?'
It's the same thing in some ways – will you allow yourself to believe in what you are doing, to challenge yourself and others.
How do we find the support to do this necessary work?
Oh, I think I'm going to give quite a difficult answer to that: being willing to suffer and getting over thinking it's not going to be painful. It is. It always is. This work can be heartachingly difficult.
So, we need to be courageous…
It takes courage, it takes persistence, and it takes compassion. It's like understanding 'I am really hurt right now. I need to shut the hell up and go away and work on whatever it is that is hurting me’. But if I'm really hurting right now because something that's being said is challenging me, I need to notice my reaction and pay attention to it, and to my temporary frailty in that moment.
And to sit with our vulnerability…
Yes, it's absolutely about self-compassion and heart searching, including allowing our heart to be part of what supports us while we search it, in the deepest of corners, into chambers we have avoided entering. It's sitting in the heart of it, of experiencing all of one’s self. I used the word frailty deliberately because I think it's one of the things that gets missed in this work, and I sometimes have to remind people when I'm doing workshops around these issues – which is to help them understand they are going to come to not just a growing edge, but an edge of such intolerable pain of awareness, of ‘recognition trauma’ that they will literally feel frail for a little while.
I need to be able to learn how to be with my frailty, to take care of myself and do what I need to do to get support from the environment in a way that doesn't look towards the gay person or the Black person to offer that support.
I would say what Black Lives Matter did for me and many of my colleagues, and we talked about this in the BAATN leadership group, was ‘in awareness’ to step back from transgenerational habits of taking care of White people's pain, and instead of paying attention to the pain that speaking up was generating for us as communities. But also, the joy of finally giving voice to what has had to remain voiceless. I always try to talk beyond Black Lives Matter – that's a big movement that's supported multiculturally. What matters to me is staying engaged with this discussion about conferred authority. I think it brings in collective-field responsibility for how societally and globally there has been a conferring of authority to some people, but to the detriment of others.
So how do we work with this? We keep paying attention to our responses to conferred authority, to acknowledging what it means to have a conferred authority. There's a paper that Ray Johnson et al wrote recently based on research that they did with their colleagues, and they were researching microaggressions and the impact of them. It led me into looking into the polarity of micro-affirmation, which is being written about a lot in the LBGTQI+ and particularly the transgendered fields. That's where my theoretical chewing on and embodying process is right at the moment. My tendency is to find particular concepts that pull me in and I just stay chewing on them for several months and thinking about them and looking for things that inspire me to find new things, perspectives and evaluations. Looking to the wider field, I might look at art or a piece of dance work by Akram Khan, who is one of my big inspirations. I might look at the Alvin Ailey company because I often find by widening my perspective I enrich my field enough that I can make something... I can find something novel that actually allows me to then speak out like I do.
I am thinking about the importance of meeting and being met. It can be very hard to stay in the dialogue when it is painful. Like many people, I can find it easier to withdraw than stay in the difficult place to have the tricky conversation. I think of Philip Lichtenberg’s work here – how do you have a dialogue with people who hold opposing views? He has a model for deconstructing how to have difficult dialogues which I find inspiring.
I would add an element in there, in relation to what you were saying about staying in the painful place and your experience of yourself of wanting to move away from that painful place. I really make a difference between talking about difference and talking about diversity. I see difference as a noun, difference is a description for me, diversity is a process that happens between. It's like both people in the dialogue need to be holding something of their awareness of themselves and the difference that exists, in order for the diversity between them to be addressed. That's basically my ongoing theoretical position since I first wrote about it in about 2002. I think this is part of what gets missed and what we as therapists need to understand in these dialogues about our diversity. It’s a process event, not a noun.
To come back to what you were just saying in terms of Lichtenberg's work, that staying in the painful place is also a part of conferred power and authority, because actually being in the painful place is the experience, and I don't have a choice of being in it in some ways. If you like, it's an ‘enduring relational theme’ (Jacobs 2017). There is ‘both/and’ about it, because I need to learn how to stay in the difficult conversation and both sides of the dialogue need to learn to give space for the stepping away, which isn't an out-of-awareness withdrawal, but is a conscious withdrawal because actually I'm at my point of fragility and I need that to be respected, and somehow fostered and held.
If I bring this into the therapy room, I would say for at least three weeks – and it's still ongoing because this remains a part of the field now – I was having to stay in those difficult conversations. And they were less difficult for me – I mean, that was part of it, as therapist, not just to my White, heterosexual clients, but also to my clients who were consciously bringing in how this was oscillating against their other identity processes, and their feelings of 'how do I handle the fact that something is being triggered in me and I'm wanting actively to stay with my responsibility (as part of the majority) in the dialogue about race and culture and heritage?’.
Supporting people to stay with the painfulness, the shame and the uncomfortableness of the both/and-ness of that – and we are all in this in some way – is about bringing it more into awareness.
A Gestalt approach can support awareness in a compassionate way, which allows me to get to a point of noticing I have choice, because it doesn't feel like that when I'm shame bound. It doesn't feel like that when I've deflected by paying attention to my guilt and wanting to talk about my guilt rather than talk about what it means to you to bring your guilt here with me as a Black woman therapist. That's moving away from the deflection and bringing the focus back to the relational dialogic. It takes courage, practice and skills. We have to keep practising at doing this, and we will get it wrong. That's where the compassion comes in.
I don't think there's any way of avoiding that this is complex, and I think much of the work we do is complex. I'm thinking of Leanne O’Shea’s work on avoidance of talking about erotic, enduring relational themes emerging between therapist and client, and the therapist going into 'I mustn’t talk about this here in that way', 'I can't disclose to the client that I find them attractive' or whatever that might be (O’Shea 2004). I think there are parallels in talking about race; all that learning I did around staying with the erotic transference really does help me to think about to how to support someone to be able to say to me ‘I get that all this is happening in the world and there's a part of me that really resents that I'm having to talk about race yet again’, and for it to be okay for them to say that; I can choose not to take it personally, but support them to stay with all the feelings and all the awarenesses that this has potential for. That, to me, is my work as a therapist.
At the same time, I can also be clear when I don’t have the capacity to do this, and I can be honest about it. There was a day where I said to one of my longest-term clients: 'I heard about the death of another Black friend who works in the NHS today. I can't go there today, I just can't do it.' And he was absolutely brilliant. He's a therapist and he said, 'Yeah I remember those days when yet another friend died from HIV and I was just like “I can't talk about this anymore.”' He said, ‘Let's just talk about something else.’ And then we were able to talk about this at the next session. Transparency is an important part of the work. Of course, what I did straight after the session was call one of my peer supervisors who is another member of BAATN and say, 'This is what happened, this is what I did, this is how I handled it,' and hear him respond, 'That sounds great, well done, how are you?' and that's all he did. It is great support, and that peer supervision group, which is a group that I deliberately created, includes two other people, also people of colour, Black people, and it has been essential. I was clear it was essential to my mental health. I have to have a space where I don't need to explain when I say, 'This happened.'
So, I think that's also part of it. I hope heart-searching people do so from a place of, ’What I have been unaware of doing or how I have been unaware’, and that they actually also learn. That's the reason White people need to do this work together with each other. You can only make it work if you get to that transparency and you keep challenging each other and you keep challenging the habit to move away from the pain. And it's hard – I'm really clear, it's very hard.
I'll just finish with a couple of thoughts. One of my sources of inspiration is bell hooks, and there's a book she wrote, Black Looks, about race and representation, and in it she talks about something Shirley Chisholm said about radical Black female subjectivity. The key thing for me was this phrase: 'The critical consciousness to help eradicate internalised racism.' For me, what she's saying is we need to keep fostering that critical consciousness to help ourselves as Black women to keep eradicating the internalised racism. You could change that into anyone from any oppression needing to continue to do that. That ability to continually critique oneself consciously – with full awareness, one’s whole self – and to pick up on words you used in the deconstruction, and proactively engage in the reconstruction. It's about proactive engagement.
I think for me that is a life-long process.
Absolutely. I completely agree. When I hear people talk about eradicating racism – no, what you eradicate are the structures, what you eradicate are the steel poles, that's what you deconstruct. You have to accept you are going to be deconstructing it, because it will get reconstructed in different ways, over and over again. The difference is, if there are more people engaged in deconstructing their own processes of microaggression and perpetuating the oppression, or becoming conscious of their conferred authority and power, the more that work is being done, the less there is a disproportionate effect on the other to have to continually deal with it. But you know, I am quite a pragmatic therapist, I don't actually think issues of oppression are going to go away. I think they are part of the human experience. It's what we do with it that matters. Toni Gilligan at The Gestalt Centre often reminds students that what matters is what they do next. And maybe that's a good place to leave it for the moment.
Christine, this has been a joy. And I'm genuinely moved by the quality of the attention you've given this.
I feel very touched and a lot has been happening for me. Thank you for this meeting Carmen, which has felt rich and profound.
References
hooks, b. (1992). Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press.
Jacobs, L. (2017). Hopes, fears and enduring relational themes. British Gestalt Journal, 26(1), pp. 7-16.
Johnson, R., Leighton, L., Caldwell, C. (2018). The Embodied Experience of Microaggressions: Implications for Clinical Practice. Journal of Multicultural Counselling & Development, 46, pp. 156-170
http://doi.org/10.1002/jmcd.12099
McIntosh, P. (1989). White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Available at <https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf>
Mckenzie-Mavinga, I. (2009). Black Issues in the Therapeutic Process. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
O’Shea, L. (2004). Fears, intimacy & vulnerability in the face of eros: A response to Quilter & Cornell. British Gestalt Journal, 13(2), pp. 124-125.
Christine Stevens PhD is Editor of British Gestalt Journal. She is a Gestalt therapist, supervisor, trainer, writer and member of faculty for the DPsych psychotherapy programmes at Metanoia Institute. She is Director of Clay Studio, Nottingham, where she is involved in arts-based social engagement work.
Address for correspondence: editor@britishgestaltjournal.com
This interview originally featured in British Gestalt Journal Volume 30.1
Carmen Joanne Ablack leads the British Gestalt Journal Seminar Day 2021 on Saturday 30 October, 11am - 4.30pm. Tickets are £25 (£20 for students) plus booking fee and are available at Eventbrite here. The event will take place over Zoom.