What We Do

We believe in interconnectivity of all humans. We are aware of the impact of the parents and other family members on the identity formation of the children being raised in that family. However, we are not oblivious to the wider society and political realities that frame a person’s existence. It is our belief that social and moral values, and political and intellectual practices transmitted in a culture influence the way people believe they should be. We thrive to achieve social justice through our writings and teachings. We also take it upon ourselves to actively address these wider issues of injustice in our sessions with our consultees, and we feel accountable not to reproduce the harmful dominant discourses, beliefs and expectations from persons who seek consultation from us.

Our style of consultation is ‘collaborative and not imposing.’ We intend to assist people to find alternative ways of being, thinking, and living in this culture through which they can succeed in breaking from the rules set by the dominant cultural discourses; alternative ways that open up the doors to other options for how they might lead their lives consistent with what they want and like regardless of the dictates of the prescriptive cultural ‘shoulds and should nots.’

Our belief is that people suffer from the stress that is informed by the expectations about what it means to be a real person in our culture. The new alternatives provide options that will allow them to break from the self-accusations and attributions of personal inadequacy and guilt they have concluded from the cultural values imposed on them as the only right way to live by. In the work we do together, we help our consultees to identify these alternatives; alternatives that are often made visible to the consultees through tracing the histories of the consultees’ resistance to dominant culture.

Through Healing Conversations, we help the consultees to separate the problem from their personal identity, opening up possibilities for them to become who they want to be. We view problems as the result and the expression of how misuse of power, by families and by society, has hurt our consultees. Asking deconstructive questions, we help make visible the invisible pattern of ordinary humiliations and acts of aggression and micro-aggression, and routine tyrannies that comprise much of our civilized life.

We do not see ourselves as ‘the experts’ as we find the ‘one-up’ position to be ingenuine, patronizing and disqualifying so we flatten out the hierarchy between us and our consultees and do not impose the expert knowledge on them. Neither do we diagnose our consultees as we believe that the diagnostic labels undermine belief in the possibility of change. We believe that the person is never a problem; the problem is the problem and view the problem as coming from outside the person and ‘contaminating’ parts of the person.

We view the problem-saturated stories people tell about themselves as not just stories of these individuals, but stories dictated to these individuals by the society. Therefore, as their allies, we help our consultees to reclaim the other stories they have about themselves that have been overshadowed by the dominant culture’s narratives. We have strong faith in people and their possibilities and are interested in hearing people talk about themselves in ways they never have before and see ourselves as the co-authors of our consultees’ stories. Thus, we carry the responsibility to help them create more helpful and more healing stories that in turn will make it possible for them to feel ‘accountable’ for the choices they make in relation to the problem and for taking necessary steps to revise this relationship if it is not helpful to them. We truly believe that people are not their problems, and that their problems are co-constructed in the contexts of their families and the wider society they are surrounded with and that they are capable of change.