Episode 91
Interview between Speaker 1 (Meg Ferrell) and Speaker 2 (Honey Schneider, they/them)
Episode 91
[Introductory note]
Hey, it’s Meg. If you love this podcast and you are a professional supporting Autistic people, this is your moment to check out the Learn Play Thrive education hub at learnplaythrive.com/trainings. We have three free masterclasses and a whole catalogue of neurodiversity-affirming, on-demand continuing education courses, including a brand-new course on trauma-informed practices for Autistic people. We also have an annual continuing education summit with an incredible panel of speakers. All of our courses are registered with AOTA and ASHA for CEU’s and many are registered with NASP for school psychologists and ASWB for social workers. Check it out and get your continuing education credit in a way that’s truly meaningful and aligned with your values; learnplaythrive.com/trainings.
[Introductory music]
Welcome to the Two Sides of the Spectrum Podcast. A place where we explore research, amplify Autistic voices, and change the way we think about autism in life, and in our professional therapy practices. I’m Meg Ferrell, formerly Meg Proctor, from learnplaythrive.com broadcasting to you today from unceded Tsalagi territory.
Meg:
Before we get started, a quick note on language. On this podcast, you’ll hear me and many of my guests use identity-affirming language. That means we say ‘Autistic person’ rather than ‘person with autism’ because this is the preference of most Autistic adults. Being Autistic is a part of their identity that they don’t need to be separated from. Join us in embracing the word ‘Autistic’ to help reduce the stigma.
Welcome to Episode 91 with Honey Schneider. In this episode, we tackle the systemic issues that keep us separate from each other and how we can find our way back together. I imagine that many podcast listeners by now have a sense of how capitalism is inherently bound with ableism, racism, and other forms of oppression; and how important this work is that we’re doing here together to look at it and its impact as we plan how we support our clients, and how we exist in our communities and in the world. So, in this episode, Honey Schneider helps us look at this inside of ourselves interpersonally and systemically, in ways that are meaningful, practical, and actionable. In the end, I asked Honey their own question: How do we reclaim a sense of wholeness while also doing what we need to do to survive? And I know you’ll all want to stick around to hear their answer.
Honey Schneider has an MA in Mental Health Counseling from NYU. They’re white, disabled, and transsexual. Honey currently works as a peer coach. We’ll talk about the peer coaching model in the episode and why they’ve chosen this route. They also work as a consultant educator, and they center trauma and disability-informed frameworks and practices in their work. In addition to being a counselor, Honey is a roller skate technician and a working drag and performance artist and dancer. I love the way this conversation zooms out and then zooms back in and creates real touch points for how this conversation can guide our work as professionals supporting Autistic people in this world that we live in. Here’s Episode 91 with Honey Schneider.
Hi, Honey. Welcome to the podcast.
Honey:
Hi, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Meg:
I am excited to sit down with you. I have a, I have a four-year-old who is like completely obsessed with pink and blue right now. And all I can think of how much she would love your hair. For folks who can’t see, it’s cut short and it’s half, like, hot pink and half neon blue. And it looks wonderful.
Honey:
Thank you. Oh, yeah, it’s popular with the kids for sure.
Meg:
I bet it is, yeah. I want to start with your story. Can you tell us about yourself, the work you do, and how you got into it?
Honey:
Yeah, it’s wild. I think these days I find it increasingly difficult to kind of encapsulate who I am and what I do because it’s so many things. But I guess for the sake of this podcast, a lot of the works that I’ve been doing for the last few years is like basically therapy work, peer counseling work, primarily with queer, trans, neurodivergent, disabled folks. And I also do a lot of like consulting and education work around such topics as like disability justice, sex and sexuality, especially sex and sexuality as it kind of intersects with neurodivergence and disability. Yeah. And then, like, I work in nightlife, I do some drag stuff, I dance. And then, I also do, like, some DEI stuff in nightlife, though I’m kind of, I’m always a little all over the place. I also work as a roller skate technician; I build roller skates. I’ve sort of cobbled my life together.
But yeah, I’m 32-years-old. I’m like queer, and transsexual, and neurodivergent in sort of a variety of ways. In some ways, the jury’s still out on the diagnosis side of things in a variety of manners. But my profile definitely fits autism in a lot of different ways. And so, that’s kind of the direction that we tend to lean and think about things. And I found a lot of community in the autism and Autistic communities. So, yeah, I guess how I got into the work that I do is it just starts way, way, way back when I was super young. And when I was really, really young, I was institutionalized, like hospitalized for mental health stuff, and eating disorder. And it was a pretty intense time of my life, a lot of different stuff was going on. And the institutionalization stuff lasted kind of a long time and impacted my school and my relationships. And my, really, my view of myself in a lot of ways.
And a lot of it, as I got older, it took a long time for me to understand when I got older that like a lot of that was actually connected to Autistic and like neurodivergent struggles that were being missed, because I grew up for all intents and purposes as like a young woman, right? So, it was kind of that thing that people have talked about in the community of like, oh, yeah, like, a lot of times, young women are sort of overlooked. And for me, I was like one of those students where it’s like, school was really easy. I was getting straight A’s, I was kind of bored in school, but the social stuff was kind of difficult. And the social stuff was a lot of what led to the mental health stuff. And like, anyway, all that happened, tried to like kind of get through life, but struggled very much through high school, through adulthood.
But I was always very interested in psychology, I was always kind of trying to figure out like, what’s wrong with me, basically. Not a great place to come from necessarily, but it led to like really intense, passionate interests for kind of understanding mental health, trying to understand the people around me, because I struggled with social stuff. And that all kind of eventually, very long story short, it led to me going to graduate school for mental health counseling, which is starting back in 2018. And that’s the thing that sort of led me even deeper into a trajectory of doing, specifically working with Autistic clients, families of Autistic folks, and then also getting connected with a program called the Nest Program at NYU, which supports, you know, schools around New York State more or less, and having integrated classrooms and settings and whatnot. And so, for a lot of my consulting and education work kind of blew up in terms of like this realm of things.
But prior to that, I was doing a lot of, like, educating in the world of roller derby, I was doing a lot of DEI-type trainings for leagues around like gender policy stuff, how to be more trans-affirming, trans-inclusive. So, before that I went to school for environmental education. So, being an educator has been in my life for a long time, but it’s always kind of, I feel like my life is always evolving. I’ve lived like many different lives, I’ve sort of just always wanted to try different things, and also have always had like a lot of interests. But all of it ended up really kind of leading me into this path and every sort of thing sort of, like, had a confluence that brought me to a space of really kind of being more of an expert than I think I realized in a lot of things just because of my own self-study, and then the ways I was able to apply that through graduate school and then just get hands on experience, like working with people. Yeah, I mean, there’s so much more I could say, because my life has been a wild ride. But I guess that’s all I’ll share for now.
Meg:
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. As you sort of honed in your work as a counselor, were you seeing a gap, or a place where other folks weren’t trained? Or was it mostly a place that you saw a lot of need that you could meet as you sort of came to focus on neurodivergence, sex, sexuality, gender?
Honey:
Yeah, I think, actually, I really appreciate that question. Because that is really a big part of what even brought me into this field in the first place. It was actually my therapist years ago that was like — because I was always kind of like, why don’t more people know about this stuff in terms of neurodivergence and kind of trauma and how those things come together? And how like autism and, like, gender stuff are often very linked, and, like, what’s going on? You know, my therapist was like, “You know, have you ever thought about —? Like, you could, have you? I think you’d be good at it.” And I was like, oh, shit, like, I guess I never did — pardon my language. And yeah, definitely. I mean, the thing that was hardest for me about graduate school was like sitting in rooms with people who were talking about people just like me, but didn’t know that I was in the room in that capacity. And talking about people just like me in incredibly disparaging ways and incredibly pathologizing ways and having to sit in a room and end up either basically always having to make the decision of like, okay, am I going to speak up in this moment and be like, “Actually, here’s what that’s about. And here’s what you’re actually talking about,” or am I just going to kind of sit back and protect my energy.
So, a lot of school was feeling — like, school really gave me a good understanding as to why I was mistreated and went through a lot of the things that I went through during my early institutionalization, because I was like, oh, I understand now how people are trained in this field. And I understand how people are trained to pathologize people and to not really think about people as fully sort of human, right. We’re taught to diagnose and eradicate, right. It still is taught with this medical model in mental health counseling school. So, I did see like a really huge need for more education around how do we kind of break down and think differently about, quote unquote, ‘pathology’, especially as it applies to neurodivergent people. Because it’s like, you can’t cure and eradicate this thing, you have to accept that this is a thing about this person, you also have to help that person accept it about themselves. Because so many people are coming to therapy because we’re like, “What’s wrong with us?” You know, like, “There’s something wrong, I want to get rid of it,” and I actually think that oftentimes, it’s the job of the therapist to be like, “No, no, actually, you don’t have to get rid of these things. You can work on things, but like, it’s okay to be who you are.”
So, yeah, definitely a huge need. Things are limited in terms of training around the intersection of all these things specifically, but even around autism, like there just aren’t that many, there aren’t classes about disability, there aren’t classes about neurodivergence. So, it’s something that you either have to seek out additional training for, and even if you have to even think about knowing that that’s real, or you just have to kind of be in those circles or kind of have that lived experience. Yeah, there’s a lot of gaps in the training and the mental health counseling field, I think, unfortunately.
Meg:
Yeah. Yeah, there are. It’s interesting to hear you talk about watching that training as a part of your sort of journey of understanding yourself and accepting how and why things were so hard, or understanding how and why things were so hard being able to look at that and say, “Oh, of course, it went like this. Look at how folks are trained. This wasn’t my fault. It makes sense that this is how it unfolded.” But it’s alarming, one, how slow professional training is to change. And I know I’ve always heard the statistic of 17 years from research to practice for systems change, which is feeling right. It’s feeling accurate. But also, you commented on how sort of siloed we are. So, I’m trained as an OT. And we just had this Summit and a psychologist, Gillian Boudreau, was teaching on basically, like, how to keep yourself calm and not go urgent and be aware of your own triggers when you’re supporting Autistic folks. You cheered silently in the background when I said that. And a lot of the folks attending were OT’s and SLP’s. And they’re like, “Oh, how do I do that? Oh, I need to do that work. How do I do that?” I said this to a friend who’s a social worker. And she went, “Yeah, I don’t have any training on that.” And I was like, zero. I mean, they teach us the phrase ‘therapeutic use of self’, but we don’t have any training in our own regulation. Just like you’re saying, oh, you don’t have necessarily training in neurodivergence, or supporting Autistic folks, disability, and we do, but it’s not usually good. This siloed-ness isn’t helping any of us support the humans who are in front of us in our work.
Honey:
Yeah, it’s tricky. First of all, also, love Gillian. Bless Gillian for doing that work. Yeah, I think it’s really needed. And that’s the thing, like, the ways that our trainings are built, the ways that our professional training stuff is built, especially in fields like occupational therapy, mental health counseling, even social, I mean, social works a little more, I think, a little further along in how they talk about stuff. And they do focus on systems more. But even still, it’s more — I found that it’s more about like learning a set of skills to apply to other people and to apply within certain systems, but very rarely isn’t about learning skills to apply to yourself. And I’m like, especially as a mental health counselor, most of our training should just be us working on ourselves, not two years of us learning how to diagnose things that are incredibly complex, because then what happens is people will leave the training. And they think that they’re like, “Oh, now we can just go and like diagnose anything. And I know everything there is to know because I took that abnormal psychology class.” And it’s like, I’ve never found that one diagnosis is ever that straightforward for anything.
And two, it just creates a dynamic where people are able to leave and kind of have this stance of like saviorism almost, where it’s just like, “Oh, I’m here, like, I’m good because I’m trained in the thing and I’m like the helper.” But then, there’s no interrogation around, like, who am I and how am I showing up in this space? And how does that influence the space? And how does that influence the people that I’m working with? Not to say some people aren’t doing that work, but when it’s not a part of the training and it’s not even on people’s radar, I think it just creates a lot of space for harm to be done. And I hate to be so, like, pessimistic about it. But I just, like, having been harmed by the people that were supposed to help me so much when I was a young person who are literally people who have these degrees and have these licenses who were supposed to be people supporting me, that’s just the reality, that’s what happens to so many marginalized people, is that they go into spaces hoping for help, and then they end up being harmed in the same ways that they’re harmed systemically, it just looks more interpersonal now. Because there’s that lack of self-reflection and support around self-reflection.
Meg:
Yeah. You know, a lot of the folks who listen to the podcast, myself included, have had and continue to have moments of realizing the ways that we’re doing harm and never intended to. And so, those programs being set up that way aren’t serving our goals, you know, when we go in to be any sort of therapist or provider, none of us set out to do harm. And it’s interesting, you talked about the process of how we’re trained. We know now that culturally responsive care is a process, not like a checklist. And I think that our training programs need to reflect that as a process. And they don’t. They’re not, for the most part, not modeling that. So, we do have a lot of folks who are embedded in those training programs, professors, program directors who listen to the podcast and are really on the ground trying to change things at that level, so that makes me really hopeful. I want to shift while we’re talking about systems, you do a lot of really good work that’s zoomed out and helping us think deeply about the systems that we exist in. And I want to start sort of basic with this idea of neurodiversity. We talk a lot on the podcast about being neurodiversity affirming. And you talk about how there is no neurotypicality, only neuronormativity and neurosupremacy. Can you talk about that?
Honey:
Yeah. I mean, I think I’m still kind of trying to find the language for it. And I guess I think I’ve kind of started to hear some other people talking about it, too. But as I’ve sat with it, I just, I’m thinking about stuff a lot all the time, as I’m sure many of us are. But, you know, as I think about it, and I ponder, and I turn it over in my head and my hands and stuff, I just think that, like, neurotypical is like a misnomer. And I think that because, in my experience, just observing the world, first of all, and second of all, doing mental health counseling work, and also working with people that also do mental health counseling work, OT work, stuff like that, right, like, there’s this whole thing that’s happening right now where everyone’s like, “Why are like more and more people getting diagnosed with ADHD? Why are more people getting diagnosed with autism?” And I think at first people were like, “Oh, it’s just because we have more clarity on the diagnosis.” But personally, my view is that intergenerational trauma is a thing. That things are handed down. And we also know that like ‘neurodivergence’, quote unquote, is a handed down trait. And more often than not, and my understanding is also about, like, some neurodivergence comes from the environment. Like, if you were a young child, and you’re going through trauma consistently for your young developing years, you’re probably going to be neurodivergent, whether it is a profile of something that looks kind of like a BPD type thing, or bipolar type thing. And again, not much I could say about those diagnoses. And I don’t even really like to use that language. But just to make it easy for listeners, right.
So, the way that I kind of see it is I’m like, I just, I think with the harder that it gets to live in the world, the more sort of traumatic it is to live under, like, imperialism and capitalism, to watch genocide happening, like all of the things that are happening, it’s like, I just don’t see a world where people are moving more towards like, quote unquote, a ‘baseline of neurotypicality’, I just think more and more of us are just gonna be trying to move through the world with the nervous systems that we were born with, and also trying to exist with nervous systems that are kind of constantly being bombarded by difficult things and trying to survive. So, when I think about the idea of neurotypicality, I’m like, no, I mean, I think — I think that it’s more aligned with something where it’s, like, even this idea of heteronormativity, right, and queerness. Like, in my mind, I’m like, most people are queer. Let’s be real, human beings, there is no perfect end of one end of the spectrum or not. And so, even straight people, it’s like, I work in a bunch of queer clubs where straight people come who want proximity with queerness, because there are things inside of themselves that they’re repressing that actually they want access to, but they get access to it by watching other queer people do things. So, I’m like, I just don’t think that like neurotypicality is real. I think there’s this idea that our systems are set up with this idea of, like, that’s where like sort of neuronormativity is a word that I think about, or neurosupremacy, right, like cis-heteronormativity, right? We’re not saying that being cis and hetero is actually the majority, we’re just saying that that’s how the world is set up to cater to this type people, right?
So, the same idea, I feel like the world is set up to cater to like a certain type of neurotype but whether or not that neurotype is like the majority, or is like typical, I feel very skeptical about it. So, I’m also someone who finds that like language gives us a lot of power and really helps us understand better what we’re even grappling with so that we can be more strategic as marginalized groups and as communities of resistance and stuff. So, when I, you know, a lot of times I use neurodivergence basically like this, because I’m like, that’s what the language is that everyone’s going to understand. But I do think that we should start grappling with, like, are we actually divergent, like in any sense? Like, what does that even mean, you know? Like, what even is a neurotypical? Because I don’t think I know any people that are ‘neurotypical’, quote unquote, I don’t really know what that means. I don’t know what neurotype we’re talking about when we say that. So, yeah, that’s kind of where I come from with it. And I try to kind of disrupt that when and where I can. But at the same time, I have to kind of match the language of the people that I’m around and working with. So, it becomes a challenge in my own mind. But I’m always curious about what people think about that idea, and that line of thinking.
Meg:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I really like that reframe. And it’s very, very different than folks who say this is offensive, the quote unquote, ‘We’re all a little Autistic’, right?
Honey:
Yeah. I don’t necessarily feel that way at all, not really at all, you know, but more so just like having a lot of neurotypes, all of them different. Like, kind of more or less.
Meg:
I saw an interesting conversation happening in the comments of someone’s Instagram post, where they were saying, just really explaining the words ‘neurodivergent’, ‘neurodiverse’, ‘neurotypical’, and one of the slides showed, a group of people who are only neurotypical is not a neurodiverse group. And they were just making the simplistic distinction of, like, neurodiverse as people with different neurotypes and this is all people with the same neurotype. And somebody commented, this isn’t aligned with the intent of the word ‘neurodiverse’, because it, according to this person, the folks who coined the language, did have the intention of saying that, like, brains are all different, and brains — that there isn’t a single norm that we’re diverging from.
Honey:
Yeah, I kind of like that definition, too, because it at least kind of allows us to expand on the idea of what actually are we talking about? I’m glad to know that people are starting to grapple with what actually are we talking about? Because I’m always wondering that. I’m like, what actually are we talking about? But I also find, if you kind of look historically, and now if you look at like social media, with all of the little, like, infographics that people share, and the little sound bites and stuff, I think my observation is that it’s actually much more difficult to change a definition of an already established definition and word societally than it is to just be like, we need a new word for this thing. So, one, I’m like, yes, let’s grapple with what are we actually saying when we say ‘neurodivergent’? Let’s try to shift that definition and shift that understanding. But I also have, it seems historically, like, at least for marginalized communities, as we tried to shift definitions, often those definitions are co-opted by dominant culture in a way where now that definition has been diffused, and it holds less power in a lot of ways for people. And I’m thinking about that particularly in queer and trans and, like, kind of the DEI world of things and how, like, yeah, there’s a lot of language in my life. And I’m like, what are people even talking about? Does anyone actually know what we’re talking about when we use this term or use this language? So, I don’t know what the right way to kind of move forward is. But I do think that it’d be helpful for us to have more clarity as a collective on some of the language pieces of it, again, in order to be more strategic when we think about being affirming, you know, being, quote unquote, ‘inclusive’, which also is language. I mean, what do people talk about when they’re talking about being inclusive, right. But that’s a whole other conversation.
Meg:
Sometimes it takes more words, I think, to be specific, which people do not like, when you take something that they’ve tidied up into a word and make it a phrase, it’s like, oh, that’s cumbersome. But sometimes, that is what it takes. I do appreciate this focus on the systemic and nuanced nature of it. And I want to talk about this across levels based on some of your work. So, systemically, capitalism is inherently ableist, and you’ve talked about how systemic issues fragment us. Can you break that down for us?
Honey:
This is one that I’ve been thinking about for a while, and it’s been particularly present on my mind lately, I think because of my experience in the world, where it’s like, I’m trying to survive, you know. That’s like, I guess the goal of being here. It’s like, let me live. And as a disabled adult, and someone who has like a lot of kind of early trauma and specifically early trauma around like authority figures, it’s difficult to work when I’m working in just like systems that are problematic and it’s just, it’s just been difficult for me to find spaces and places where I can kind of thrive as who I am and be doing good work and have the support that I need. I think it’s true for a lot of adults in general and also specifically true for a lot of disabled adults, not just adults. And so, for me, that has meant that I need to do certain things to survive, whether that’s certain types of work or whether it is like getting into nightlife, things like that. And also it means — and this means this for a lot of people — again, that like when I’m in certain spaces, like quote unquote, ‘professional spaces’, even when I’m being hired as an Autistic person, and a transsexual, and a queer person, all those things are very clear, on my website, clear in pretty much everything that I do, I find that like, I still am not — it still is not favorable for me to fully bring those parts of myself into those spaces. But in order to get money and pay my rent and eat food, I have to go into those spaces, more or less. And then, I have to sort of figure out, well, how much of myself do I get to bring into this space? How much of myself do I need to sort of leave out of it in order to survive? How do I, how am I strategic in this space, to get what I need to be able to show up in a way that sustainable enough for me, but also to play the game of being a little bit of what this space wants me to be?
And it always kind of blows my mind because I feel like a lot of places that hire me want me to behave in these, quote unquote, sort of ‘neurotypical’, you know, the professional standards you have set up, like, you reply to the email right away, you, like, you know, I don’t know, you show up, and you have a lot of eye contact, and you do X-Y-Z. Like, whatever it is, like just, and it’s always funny, because I’m like, well, that’s not who you hired. And then, I’m like, you know, I can use that as a case example to be like, well, here’s how you’re already not being very, like, ‘affirming’, quote unquote, to neurodivergent people, but at the same time, it’s like, I’m a professional, so I am supposed to have that skill set. So, that’s just one example. But there’s a lot of ways that I think it shows up.
And in capitalism, I think, for most marginalized people, we are always asked to leave parts of ourselves out of the equation for work, you know. Unless we’re self-employed, and even when we are self-employed, sometimes we still have to play that game, depending on who our clients are, and what the industry is that we work in. Still, on a basic level, it’s like, well, just in order to make money to survive, unless you come from a wealthy family, or have a lot of assets available to you that you don’t have to be participating actively in capitalism and, like, getting hired different places for, it’s like, I can’t even fully be myself in these spaces without a great deal of either institutional power or a lot of protection and leverage, right? Where it’s like, okay, this space needs me, so I can be myself because they can’t afford to fire me like, that’s kind of rare for a lot of people. Yeah, I’ll leave it there. But there’s like a bunch of other ways that that can bring about as well.
Meg:
Yeah, there are. There’s a lot on the line. I wrote down when you said, “I’m trying to survive,” I was thinking about that when you were telling your story of being undiagnosed, and trying to find your way, and what that looked like was a mental health crisis. And you said, a very long period of time of being institutionalized. And so, so many Autistic folks who aren’t diagnosed as Autistic, so they can’t begin that process of like knowing and accepting themselves have really similar stories. We know about suicide rates being really high. And then, you’re at the intersection of this with gender identity. And I think for other folks, this ‘I’m trying to survive’, for Black and Brown folks, has an even, there’s an even bigger context to that, right, of having to hide to literally stay alive in a lot of situations. I was thinking about I have, do use the term neurotypical to describe myself, and I was thinking about how what I’m trying to convey when I say that is that I am not asked to hide any part of my neurotype to exist in the world. And I’m trying to figure out if we’re moving away from this paradigm of, like, there is one typical — I don’t know what other word would capture, like, I don’t have that lived experience.
Honey:
I think that’s where I lean towards, like, neuronormativity or like neurosupremacy, only because when I think about, like, cis-het people, I’m like, yeah, like most straight dudes and even like straight women, when they walk into the office, or when they walk into a lot of spaces, it’s like, yeah, your culture is going to be reflected to you, you know what I’m saying? Queer culture is not typically going to be reflected in a workplace necessarily, unless it’s a queer workplace. Like, Autistic culture is not going to be reflected in a professional setting necessarily, unless it’s an Autistic, professional setting. And even then, I’m like, we still kind of have to operate based off of the larger systems that are asking X-Y-Z of us on a regular basis in order to maintain a business under capitalism, you know. So, I think it’s like, for me, that’s where I think about it as a cultural thing. And that’s where the word neuronormative is what comes to mind. It’s like, what are the cultural norms, right? And that’s the other big piece I’ve been grappling with, is the cultural aspect. I think we talk about culture, at least for me in my life, it’s often been coded as like race stuff when we’re talking about culture, like multicultural stuff. But it’s like, actually, there’s queer culture, there’s Autistic culture, there’s culture behind being a marginalized person, and what that means and what that looks like, and what those communities look like and stuff. And so, yeah, I think part of what you’re talking about is that like, quote unquote, ‘culturally’ like what you experience is kind of more reflected, I guess, right.
Meg:
Yeah, I think looking at being Autistic as a culture has been really useful for having a critical lens on neurosupremacy. Because most of us can reflect on that with a little bit more practice when we think about the damage of imposing your culture on somebody. It’s a familiar lens, which I think is helpful. And it’s rich, it’s a very rich way to look at it. Another thing that you’ve said when looking at systemic issues is that they impact our ability to see the humanity and other people on an interpersonal level, which is certainly showing up in our work. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Honey:
Ah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think my understanding in this, you know, I guess, obviously, bear in mind that this is coming from a white person, but no, but this is coming from a white person. And I’m someone who’s worked pretty closely in a lot of kind of anti-racist spaces, but I still carry all the baggage of whiteness. But I guess my observation, for me as a white person is that, like, even in my own psyche, there’s something about the psyche of especially white folk who have grown up in America — again, just speaking to my personal experience and spaces I’ve observed and stuff — it’s like, we are literally ingrained to think of anyone outside of our cultural norm as like ‘the other’. And we are literally like trained to dehumanize ‘the other’.
And that’s like a colonized mindset, you know, that’s like an imperial, imperialistic kind of mindset. And that’s something that people are very resistant to hearing and grappling with. But in all of my mental health training and all of the work that I’ve had to do around my own trauma stuff, it just keeps coming up as, like, it’s just true. And so, what that often means is, we do need to kind of learn to extend compassion and empathy beyond a saviorism mindset. Like, I do see a lot of white folks that are like so — they’re like, “I’m an empath,” and they’re like, so like into that language, but actually, what they’re talking about is not having great boundaries energetically and emotionally, and also taking on the pain of someone else in a way where they feel like they have to be the savior, which is also like, very specific to white culture. So, there’s like these ways where it kind of shows up, but it still is about us, as white people. And there’s a way that we really struggle to actually make it about, like, the full humanity of the other person in front of us. And again, I can’t speak to anyone else and any other type of racial or cultural background, but that’s kind of what I’ve observed.
And it also does extend to me as a disabled person, I’ve also internalized ableism in my life. So, I’m not free of the experience of, like, looking at other disabled people and seeing them as less than throughout my life. Before I knew what I know now, like, absolutely, you know, like, I was using language that was inappropriate as a younger person in terms of how I talked about, like, physical limitations or disabilities and different, you know, like, I’m not, like — I was a young person also using the R-word as a young teenager because it was like, that’s what was being happening around me. And that’s what was supposedly cool. So, I was doing that, you know what I mean? And so, like getting older and having to grapple with these things, and not just learn that, like, oh, that word is, quote unquote, ‘bad’, but really learning like, what’s the history? Why was I saying that word? Why were the people around me saying that word? What are we trying to convey when we say that word? And then, really thinking about and unpacking, like, why was I okay with that? Again, as a young person, it’s complex. But as you get older and start to become more differentiated and form who you are as a person, really starting to unpack now, like, what actually are my implicit biases? And the truth is that because of the systems we live in, and the way that we’re brought up, we’re literally taught that, like, it’s okay to somehow shut out the humanity of other people, like even thinking about people that pass, like houseless people on the street in New York, we literally don’t even look at them. We’re literally trained to just filter it out. Like, it’s so wild to me. And I think it’s just a product of — not just, but it’s a product of centuries of colonialism, and also living in a world under capitalism that is so transactional, that is so built on exploiting people in order to hoard wealth.
And like, that’s the goal, like people are like, I need to go to college to get this nice job to have this money to buy this house to hoard, hoard, hoard, right? And we’re not taught about collective living, we’re not taught about rooting for everyone around us. We’re taught about getting what we need, which is typically at the expense of other people, which all of these things, I think, are inherently quite dehumanizing. So, I don’t know if I’m thinking about the right way, but that’s the way I’ve kind of been able to make sense of it. Until when I’m doing DEI work, that’s the first place I always go. Because I’m like, I can give you this checklist of things to do. But if you’re not able to look inside of yourself and understand how you’re actually viewing people and how you’re treating people on just like a day-to-day level, and even how you’re treating yourself, because we dehumanize ourselves, too, right? Like, when I’m ableist, or if I felt like I am, and I’m like, you have to get all this work done. And if you don’t, you’re terrible, and you’re not doing good job and whatever, it’s like, that’s also me just like not allowing myself to be fully human and accepting myself. So, it’s kind of like bad for everybody. Yeah, I ramble a lot. But I guess I’ll leave it there for now. But I just think that these systems literally encourage us every single day, and we grow up in them. So, how do we not internalize this thing, even if we think we’re so good at being compassionate and not dehumanizing people, like, we do it. We all do it. Yeah, we all do it.
Meg:
Yeah. And I think that’s really uncomfortable to reflect on, especially if there’s areas where folks aren’t ready to look at systems of oppression because it’s too uncomfortable, because we feel too disempowered, because it calls into question too much in our own lives. But it really is a process. Actually, as you were talking, I was thinking about unhoused folks, that the other day, my six-year-old asked me to stop and roll down the window and give money to somebody who’s asking for money. And I did. And then, they started chatting. And this person was so kind and so friendly to my child, and my child was so open-hearted and connective. And I noticed inside of myself that, like, we gotta go out the window, drive off. And I was like, what is that that my child hasn’t yet learned, but I somehow have inside of me? And, you know, he was like, “Can we have a playdate with that person?” Like, there was so much shared humanity between them that I have — have, to some extent, and it’s painful, right, lost. That something in me was like, [shooing sounds] and I hate that. But we do have to be able to, one, tolerate the distress of it inside of ourselves; and then, two, look at it with curiosity; and then, three, learn from people with diverse intersections and different experiences of the world than us, right. Why? Why is this so hard? Like, why is it so hard for people to make change and take accountability?
Honey:
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it is hard. I think my understanding of it kind of through the psychology lens, and kind of just through like observing a lot of humans throughout my life, and humans who particularly are told that what they’re doing is maybe not helpful, and just digging their heels in. And I just think, you know, as human beings, we are not really keen on threat to our livelihood, and threats to our psyche, threats to how we understand ourselves. We, as human beings, we don’t like those things, we really don’t. We’re like, I just want to feel safe and secure. Human beings feel safe and secure when how they see themselves is reflected in their world outside of them. Human beings feel safe and secure when there’s a level of predictability. Human beings feel safe and secure when they feel like they know a lot of stuff, whether about themselves or about their world, you know what I mean? And so, I think, like, anytime you’re asking someone to look deeper at these things, you are kind of challenging their view of themselves.
And unfortunately, sorry that I have to say this, but I do feel that I have to say this, I find that like white liberal folks are the most stubborn about it. And it’s because I think so many white liberal folks have already decided, in order to protect their egos, well, I’m one of the good ones. So, when you’re like, babe, it’s more complicated. Maybe there are some things that you need to look at, maybe there’s some things that we need to collectively look at, maybe there are some things that are going on beyond what you think that you’ve already sort of achieved and accomplished in order to, quote unquote, ‘be good’. And also, three, maybe we need to look at what it means to be good, because that’s a dehumanizing problem. People just really struggle with it, because you’re challenging their idea of themselves. You’re challenging what they think they know about who they are in the world. And I just find that, like, the human psyche is very resistant to that, you know. People need a lot of gentleness to kind of get there.
And I find that people, typically, in my experience, tend to be able to get there a little easier when you allow them to get them there themselves, get there themselves, right? Like, it doesn’t — I’m the person that always wants to hold up a mirror to someone and be like, “Have you seen, did you know? Did you —?” All these things, you know? And it’s just has never gone well for me, people just kind of don’t like me when I do that, or when I name those things. And it’s taken me time, I think that is part of how my autism shows up is I just, I like to name the thing that I see. And unfortunately, my radar always goes towards human behavior and consistency and things like that, I think because of my history. So, I’ve had to learn to be more strategic and more practiced. And especially as a therapist, it’s like, it’s not my job to tell somebody about themselves. It’s my job to hold space for someone to explore for themselves. And maybe I put up some bumpers, right, on the proverbial bowling lane to make sure they kind of are going in the right direction. But it’s like I it’s not my job to sit there and be like, “Well, you know, have you thought X-Y-Z about yourself?”
And I find that people are much more willing to transform when they’re the one that that’s able to say, “Oh, I’m noticing that this thing is really affecting my relationships, and I want my relationships to look different,” “I’m noticing that this thing is really affecting how I feel in my workplace. And I want to feel more comfortable in my workplace, or I want to feel more supported.” And then, we can start. I can start to be like, oh, okay, let me help give you some frameworks for this. But yeah, people, I think, it’s just — also we’re all kind of trying to survive. So, adding, adding things to people’s plates in terms of dig deeper and do this really hard, difficult emotional work, it’s going to ask you to really look at yourself in ways it can be kind of painful, I think people sometimes they’re just like, “I would like the shortcut to that, please. I would like the easier route to that,” which is the checkbox, usually.
Meg:
It’s also part of our healing, though, right? Like, we can’t accept our own need for rest and accommodation and all of the whatever it is that we need that we’re denying ourselves, if we can’t see that in others. Or I think it probably starts internally, and then we can turn it out for most folks. And I do want to say, I was thinking, as you were talking about the limitations of this podcast as a means for change and growth, but we can speak directly to the point, but can’t coach people through their internal process of unlearning ableism, white supremacy, colonialism. I’m going to ask you in a second about some of the possibilities for where we go with this. The thing that’s at the front of my mind that I want to mention to folks is the courses at the CREDIT Institute. I’m not an affiliate, I just believe in it AC Goldberg’s business on DEI. I think they have like a 22-hour course on unlearning anti-Black racism that has CEU credit for like OT’s, SLP’s, mental health providers, and really does walk people through the work. There’s like a whole panel of instructors. And not as many people take those courses as they should. So, that’s one resource there. But I want to ask you, like, we talked about capitalism, ableism, white supremacy, all these things, the way they fragment us. What can bring us closer together on every level; systemic, interpersonal, internal?
Honey:
Well, first, I’d also like to plug something, because so one of the spaces that I went that was most impactful for me was actually through the Center for the Study of White American Culture. And it sounds funny, but they’re the folks that do the really big undoing racism trainings that are like three days long. They do in-person and they do virtual. And that was actually something one of my mentors had suggested to me, who was a mentor to me when I was doing my mental health counseling stuff, and struggling with some of my own issues at workplaces where, like, yeah, the workplace is just being like extremely exploitative. And I want to do the thing where I want to just like talk to somebody about it, like, “Did you know you’re doing X-Y-Z thing?” and my mentor was like, “That’s not gonna be effective, don’t do that. They’re just gonna fire you.” And I was like, oh, shoot, okay. And they were sort of like, based on everything you’re trying to learn, like, you know, go to this space and see what you can get out of it and everything. And they do great work around holding white folks accountable and uplifting voices of Black and Brown folks. So, I would recommend looking into them as well.
To answer your question, though, one of the things that I actually thought about when you were saying that, right, that we can’t kind of do that work through a podcast, it’s because that work is relational work. And so, when I think about, you know, potential solutions, to me, I always come back to relationship and relational work. But the other big thing that I think shows up in our culture is individuality, right? This idea that, like, again, in the white psyche, there’s just something around, like, it’s not that we don’t think that we need friends or family or that we don’t value those things, but it’s just like I find that white folks are so much more easily able to dispose of people, and so much more easily able to be like, I’m gonna move on to this other relationship because this relationship isn’t serving me anymore, because there’s more of an underlying tone of like transactional-ness. Okay, I don’t know what word that is, but of things being more transactional and things having to benefit us in order for it to be worth our time and our energy, which is like pretty fucked up if you think about it, you know what I’m saying? Like, that’s not really how we build resilient communities. We build resilient communities by being dedicated to one another’s survival and well-being.
And I just have found that, like, especially like middle upper class white folks that I’ve been around, there’s such a level of privilege that people don’t really have to do that because they have enough resources to kind of be in more disposable relationship, whereas in my like disabled in queer and trans communities and as someone who typically makes, you know, very little money most years and has kind of just struggled to survive financially and otherwise and whatnot in my life, the communities that I’m a part of, we hold very tight to each other, even if someone is doing something that’s like totally unhinged and kind of problematic. It’s kind of like, okay, well, they’re really going through it, and, one, we kind of all understand and to say like, “Okay, we’re gonna have conversations with that person,” you know, not to say that we’re excusing every little thing that happens. But it just, I just find that there’s a different quality to the connection and a different way that, like, we have to hold on to each other. Because if we don’t have each other, we really don’t have much, including shared resources, because we have to share our resources, because there are so few amongst all of us.
So, it’s like, to me, the work is very relational. If you want to start figuring out how to shift how you’re relating to other people, you have to practice relating to other people differently, and that you have to practice relating to yourself differently. And that’s also where, for me, it comes down to, like, centering our humanity, and then being able to kind of center the humanity of other people, being willing to think differently and look differently at things and being willing to have a hard conversation rather than being, like, “I’m gonna, like, avoid it. And just like, I feel uncomfortable if there’s conflict. I have this person that I don’t know how to talk about, so I’m just not going to talk to them anymore.” It’s kind of like no, like, just talk to them. Not to say it’s that easy. Again, it takes also a practice of, yeah, how do you regulate yourself? How do you support yourself when you are feeling dysregulated? And I think a lot of us are not taught how to do that. We’re not really given the skills that we need to keep relating to people in healthy ways, or healthy enough ways, I guess. Kind of a broad answer. But that’s typically where I go with this type of thing.
Meg:
No, that’s really helpful. And I’ll link to both of those resources in the show notes for sure. I’m curious what this looks like in your work. One thing that you say on your website is that you prefer peer counseling to more formal therapy work. Why and what does that mean?
Honey:
It’s funny, I was actually having a conversation last night with a friend of mine, because he’s also a therapist. And we were — I’m still waiting on my license, because the licensure process is sort of a heinous process. And I’ve been waiting for, like, almost eight months at this point. And I still don’t have a license in hand, which is like, kind of wild to me. But we were kind of talking because I’m always kind of, oh, like, the license, some of that stresses me out, mandated reporting stresses me out, different aspects of having to play the professional role of a like a therapist kind of stresses me out because of the ways we’re trained, and the ways that we’re asked to pathologize, medicalize, and dehumanize people. And then, to think that we can sit there in the room and basically, fix them cure them, right. Like, we’re encouraged to call people our ‘patients’. And I’m like, never have I ever called anyone I work with my ‘patient’. I’m not a doctor. I’m not curing some sort of disease in this person. I’m helping them understand themself; I’m helping them get resources that they want to shift certain things in their lives, even if that does include taking medication or seeking out a diagnosis. But at the same time, it’s like, I don’t know.
So, there’s also, you know, the way you’re trained in therapy work is you’re asked to sort of — there’s obviously different ways you’re trained. If you’re going more the psychoanalytical route, we’re basically trained to be a blank slate, to really bring none of ourselves into the session, because the client is supposed to project onto us. And that’s kind of how psychoanalysis is thought of, you know. In different types of therapy, there’s different ways in which you can bring yourself in and there are clinically indicated ways of using self-disclosure, right. So, that would be me sharing about myself in a way that is appropriate for a client. But I guess it’s just, I don’t know, like, I find that in marginalized communities, what hurting people really need who are seeking out support is not someone sitting across from them who has a really different lived experience who’s trying to, like, support them. What they actually need is someone across from them who’s, “I do that, too. And here’s how I got through that,” or, “I know what you mean, and I don’t have an answer for it, but I’m here with you through it.” Like, I know what it feels like to have to go through this type of oppression, to have to go through this type of experience. There might not be a good answer. And that might be a really sad reality of life. But you’re not alone, and I understand. That’s way more healing the people that are being like, “Let’s put a name on that,” you know, like, “Let’s try to like categorize that and make you feel better about it,” you know. So, I just have felt like peer coaching allows me to do more of that, and allows me to kind of talk a little bit more about my experiences in a way that’s like a little bit more impactful to people.
That being said, I think there are ways to use a license and work as a therapist where I’m doing a lot of the same things I’m doing now. It’s just kind of a limitation of like waiting on the license and then kind of figuring out how do I want to fit in that world and what’s going to feel comfortable for me. And the benefits of the license is that at some point, hopefully, I can accept insurance, which makes my services that much more accessible. The benefits of the license is I can give someone a diagnosis, and we can put it on paper, and that might help them get resources that they need. Whereas if I’m a peer coach, I unfortunately am not legitimized as much in within capitalism and within some of these systems, so I can’t offer the same types of more heavy hitting resources, right. As a peer coach, I couldn’t necessarily write a letter for someone’s top surgery, but with a license I can. So, there’s a trade-off, right. And trying to figure that out is still something I’m in the process of, in many ways.
Meg:
Thinking about the peer model, you know, one barrier that we have, a big barrier, is in a lot of our fields, folks who are Autistic folks who are mostly marginalized, folks who are disabled, Black, Brown, aren’t represented in our fields. We’re not representing the populations that we serve often. And I have some licensed professionals use a peer coaching model to help connect folks with people who do maybe share more of their lived experiences. When you were talking about the peer model, one thing that was on my mind is the barriers to entry for folks who are Autistic, who are multiply-marginalized, who are BIPOC; those folks aren’t represented in our fields in a way that represents the populations who we’re serving. So, we often don’t share our lived experiences with folks. Is this peer counseling model, is that possibly something that allows more access to folks with shared identities, given the barriers that folks experience getting into these medically socially sanctioned professions?
Honey:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, it’s definitely one of those things where even in my program, the quote unquote, ‘diversity’ was kind of limited. Though it seems like the program tried to bring in like lots of folks with marginalized identities and stuff, like something I heard from peers when I was leaving the program, like I had two different students in two different classes say something along the lines to me as like, “I feel like I learned more from you than I did from like some of our professors.” And I was kind of like, well, why did I pay for school then? Why am I not getting paid to be here? You know, like, this is very frustrating to me. And I feel like it should have been flattering. But instead, I was like, yeah, it’s just because I have lived experience that no one here seems to want to talk about or seems to have, you know. And unfortunately, then I’m being brought in as someone who’s already without a lot of institutional power, because I’m the student. And so, now, like, my experience is not really being reflected or really uplifted, unless I’m willing to assert myself in class, which takes a lot of energy, frankly.
And like, also being someone who’s coming in who has to engage with student loans, I don’t have a family that can pay for my school. And I’m also trying to pay my rent, I’m working a part-time, sometimes a full-time job, I’m taking on extra gigs, I also, for this program, had to work an unpaid internship for a certain amount of hours in order to even graduate and get my degree. And then, typically, in this field, you’re pretty exploited when you have a limited permit, you’re not often paid super well to be doing labor that you’re also not typically getting a lot of support around. So, for me, there were multiple periods, because of all of the confluence of all those things, and because of my neurotype, and the way that I show up in the world, and some of my like emotional and social disability stuff, like mental health disability stuff, I almost didn’t make it through the program in a lot of different ways. And even like, now, I’m waiting on my license, but I was so burnt out just getting my hours to get my license, that I had to leave the practice I was working on, take a break from therapy work, and wait for my license, because I just got to a point where I was like, I cannot sustain seeing clients in this way, especially online, because then there’s a whole ADHD thing where it’s like, I’m sitting in my home, and I’m trying to concentrate on the screen.
Like, there’s just so many things that can get in the way of making it an accessible process. So, someone who’s marginalized, even getting through the process, one, is like, damn near impossible. So, two, it’s like, sometimes the barrier to entry is lower when it’s like, I can just kind of start like a little bit of a small business, if you, you know, depending on how you want to do it, you can just do like a single member LLC, you can just be fully — you don’t even have to do an LLC. And you can just, depending on how you want to do it, be like I’m offering peer coaching, I’m offering a peer support group, and you don’t have to go through that process. You don’t have to be $200,000 in debt from an expensive grad school, you know, you don’t have to be waiting for a license, you don’t have to wait on some state board that doesn’t really care about you signing off on whether or not they think you’re good enough at what you’re doing.
You can just be like, I have this lived experience, and I can support people around it, and then you can just go do it. So, again, it’s like, with the legitimacy of licensure, you get to kick down more doors for people, which is of benefit, but it’s also kind of like at what cost to me as an individual because of the systemic problems, you know, does it come at. I want to be able to kick those down those doors, but if I’m not getting enough support through the program, or through getting my license, and I can’t even make it through, then how am I going to be able to kick down those doors? So, it’s like this weird catch-22. And I think that’s where the peer model can sometimes be really helpful is it’s just, it just removes some of those barriers and it just makes, it can make certain things more accessible both from the provider side of things and from the like, quote unquote, ‘consumer’ side of things.
Meg:
Yeah, that both/and makes a lot of sense to me. I love a mutual aid model and we live in this world where there’s so many access barriers that we have the potential to help break down with our licensure and whatever it is. So, I love that idea of sort of doing both to meet the incredible amount of need out there. I want to end on something thing that sort of ties together everything we’ve discussed, and I’m going to quote you. This is a question that you asked. You said, “How do we reclaim a sense of wholeness while also doing what we need to do to survive?” Perhaps, Honey, you asked this question rhetorically, but I’m curious if you have any thoughts on it?
Honey:
Yeah, I think about it a lot, because I think I just often feel pulled in so many different directions, trying to just kind of like make ends meet and like, trying to be able to engage in work that feels both meaningful but also somewhat affirming to me, which was also a privilege to be able to say that I can do that. So, I want to acknowledge that. But I think, like, it still is something that, again, I think, often, just asks us to disconnect from our humanity, disconnect from our communities. I think about people that work nine to five, where it’s like, you’re at work all day, giving all your energy to the space, by the time you come home, do you have the energy to go to a dance class? Do you have the energy to connect with a friend? Do you have the energy to just make yourself nourishing food? The answer for so many people, and especially disabled people, is ‘No’.
So, it’s like, we always have — it feels like some people have to always be giving something up in order to engage in capitalism. Or it’s like, yeah, I really can’t hold down that nine to five. And then, what I’m giving up as possibly secure housing, I’m possibly giving up the option to choose what types of foods I’m eating, because I don’t have the income that I need. So, I don’t know. But I just I think for me, the things I’ve learned in the last decade of life is primarily, again, just like the relational piece, it’s like holding on to the relationships, holding on to my community. Because when I’m in the grind, when I’m in the hustle, when I’m doing the thing where I’m working all day in a day job, and then I’m working all night at a nightlife job. And then, I got to wake up and work all day at the day job the next day, and I’m kind of like, I really don’t want to be here, I really don’t want to be doing this, I really don’t want this to be my life. It’s the fact that I can lean on my community members who understand what that’s like, who are like, “I’m gonna bring you lunch at work,” or who are like, “Yeah, I’ll hop on a phone call with you between jobs just to keep your company and remind you that, like, you’re doing what you can, and that’s good enough,” you know, like, for me, it often has become the relational piece that is so important for me.
It’s not a self-practice. I mean, there are those, right, like trying to take care of my body in the ways that I can, taking time for myself when I need, asking for the things that I need, having boundaries, like those practices are important, but I can have a million of those practices in place. But if I don’t have strong relationships, I found that I feel very isolated. And it feels very hard to want to continue in the world. And it hasn’t been until I started to build strong relationships and community that even some of my own suicidality stuff has started to decrease a bit. And that’s come with the relational work for me. So, yeah, I don’t know if that’s right for everybody. But I think that it is, for the most part, like community, people that can reflect our experiences back to us and appreciate the experiences that we have. And people that are down to fight alongside us for the things that we need, and the resources that we need.
Meg:
I love that your answer was relationships. So often, when I asked folks about systems change, we get a lot of folks who are like listening, getting fired up, and then they’re like, “How do we do the systems change piece?” And the first answer is almost always been, no matter who I ask, find the other people who are doing that work too so that you can do it together. Because you’re right, we do need each other and we do need those relationships. And we need relationships that can withstand a lot of hard things and a lot of differences. And that takes practice. When I asked a similar question, I just did a question-and-answer session with Gillian Boudreau, because her talk at the Summit that I mentioned earlier which was about cultivating safety, some of the folks reflecting said, “Okay, I’m a neurodivergent practitioner, and I don’t have bandwidth, like, how do I still do this work?” And other folks said, “I feel so burned out, how can I do this work?” And she tied it back in really nicely of is it burnout, or is it exploitation, right? Because working under late-stage capitalism is by nature exploitative to almost everyone. And then, she said, look at all you have to do and make a choice about who you’re going to disappoint. And don’t disappoint the vulnerable person who needs you the most, just because you’re scared to disappoint the person who has the most power. Like, look at it and make a choice and I loved that answer as well. So, I, yeah, I think there I think there are things we can do, but our default isn’t necessarily going to be the most sort of wholehearted answer. It takes practice.
Honey:
Yeah. And in order to be able to, for a lot of us, I think in order to be able to withstand disappointing, again, like especially for like white folks and also like people that were brought up as people pleasers and stuff, right, like it does — you can’t always do that work by yourself. You have to have people around you where it’s like, okay, yeah, I just said that I can’t come in tomorrow, because I’m choosing the center of my humanity. And I’m going to call off work, even though it’s hard for me, even though it makes me afraid. Let me call that person that I know that’s going to affirm the choice that I made. Let me not be sitting in my own head with it. Okay, I have to write this email to a boss or I have to do X-Y-Z thing, like, I’m finding it really hard. Again, where are the relationships around me that can support me in making this change and doing this thing differently? And yeah, I really appreciate that take on it. I think it’s nuanced. And it’s tricky, because it’s also like, yeah, risk is something I think a lot about. And it’s always the question for me is always who has the privilege to take the risk, to push back against the person in power, and who’s willing to? And I often find that like the people that are most reluctant to are, again, a lot of times like white folks, and it’s like, but we’re the ones that I think have the most delusional idea of how much power we actually hold. That’s been something I’ve had to work through in my life. I’ve often made myself so small that I haven’t been able to be accountable to the power that I probably do have in this situation, because one, now I’m read as masculine in my life, because I’m transitioning. And two, I’m white. So, it’s like, actually, even though it’s really terrifying to me to take up space and to say what I need or to stand up for something or for someone at times, like, the truth of the matter is that the consequence I’m going to face may not actually be as big as I think that it’s going to be based on my previous trauma and previous experiences, because of the positionality, the social position that I hold.
And so, slowly, helping my nervous system understand that we, meaning me and my entire system, can tolerate that has actually also been huge in my relationships and in my communities, because it’s allowed me to reclaim a sense of power that I have more or less lost because of my trauma experiences that also were making it so that I couldn’t even be a good ally to the people that really needed me or to myself. You know, I’ve consistently in my life been overworking and demanding an inhuman amount of things from myself, and then berating myself when I fall short, which is just an internalized ableism piece, right? And it’s like, that’s not going to help me and it’s not gonna help my communities. So, there’s also kind of that element to it thinking about risk and being really thoughtful and strategic about that, too. But yeah, I think it’s great, right, think about who you’re going to — and also, you’re going to want to be yourself, or someone who doesn’t care about you, and whether or not you’re taken care of, you know? And oftentimes in workplaces, we can get away with doing a lot less than we think we need to, just saying, for the people that might need to hear that.
Meg:
Yeah, and doing things a lot more differently than we think we can. I get questions like, “But what about insurance billing?” I’m like, I’ve billed insurance. And I never got a rejection. And I did things dramatically different from the way folks are trained they have to do it. Like, sometimes the barriers aren’t real.
Honey:
Well, yeah. And capitalism really teaches us to not be imaginative. Capitalism really teaches us to not tap into our creativity. And I think like colonialism and imperialism too, right? Like the ideas, we want you to think there’s only a limited number and way of doing things. But if we really are willing to do the work and dig deep, there are so many ways you can be creative and strategic about stuff to do it differently. There are so many ways available to us. And sometimes all that takes is looking back, looking at how other people who have been in resistance towards systems of oppression have done it in the past. We very rarely need to reinvent the wheel. A lot of people are like, I gotta figure out, I gotta reinvent the wheel. It’s like, literally just read about people in the past and how they’ve navigated these systems. And like, there are already people who have already been doing that work. So, we’re also not alone in that. Not only are we not alone right now in the timeline that we’re in currently, but we have people from the past with documentation, books, podcasts, whatever it might be, there’s also our ancestors and people that came before us that have been trying to do change work, who we can also lean on, and learn from, and be in relationship with in our own ways. So, there’s a lot of possibility, which is something that makes me feel — makes me feel that I will continue to be on this planet for longer, to be quite frank, frank about it. Like, okay, we can move forward, I guess.
Meg:
I love this conversation. Thank you so much. Is there anything that you want to bring us back to or anything you want to add before we wrap up?
Honey:
I guess the only thing I’ll say is just that, like, you know, I’m someone who’s certainly, and I think it’s a product of like some of the rigidity type things that I experienced that are probably aligned with like, autism type profiles and stuff. But like, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that things can’t really change. And it’s also easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you have to have an answer. And you have to have the right answer. And I guess I just want to say that the more we can also allow ourselves to be imperfect and the more we can allow ourselves to understand that the whole process, kind of like you said about how training and learning these things are the process, right, the whole process of moving forward, trying to shift, trying to change, is one that is inherently imperfect and one where none of us really have the answers. So, even people sitting here listening to me, like, I don’t know, don’t take anything I say at face value, do your own research, think about it yourself. We have to be in dialogue and conversation about these things. Because none of us really necessarily know. The most I think that we can do is keep trying to grapple with things and trying to do better by ourselves and by each other. Yeah.
Meg:
Honey, thank you so much for all of your insight and for sharing your story today. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you’re up to, and where we can find you online?
Honey:
Yeah, totally. Thanks for having me. Yeah, some things I have coming up, I have a couple of different workshops and like seminars coming up. We’re gonna be working with actually a group of OT’s pretty soon, gonna be doing some disability justice type training, and again, sort of how do we apply some of these things, how do we think a little more relationally, how do we think about who we’re standing up for in these systems and who we’re letting down, some of these very things we’ll be talking about. And then, I actually have something else going on in the spring that’s going to be kind of like geared around family of Autistic folks, and we’re going to be talking — it’s kind of gonna be like sex education, kind of like puberty education, kind of like how do we, kind of how do we support families in talking about these things with folks, which also is really just a lot of how do the parents regulate themselves in order to just have like a normal conversation with their kid, you know what I mean? But gonna do some of that, which is exciting. Yeah, I have some travel coming up to actually just take a little break, which I haven’t had in a long time. So, that’s exciting. And then, in terms of finding me online, if you’d like to see more about my peer coaching stuff, or inquire about consulting me, or speaking, or anything like that, you can find me at divergenthealing.com, www.divergenthealing.com. I kind of want to change that name, too. But names are elusive. So, someday, I might, maybe not. Lower on my list of to-do items, to be honest, given everything I have going on. But you can also find me at @Healingwithhoneyy. It’s a private Instagram account, but I talk about some of the stuff there and everything, and we can link to it in the show notes or whatever. Two Y’s at the end. Yeah, that’s me. I appreciate you having me and listening to what I have to share. Happy to be here.
Meg:
I love the name Healing with Honey. That’s lovely. Yes, we will link to everything in the show notes. Thank you so much.
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