What I did on my vacation:

white spaces, power and therapy

View of the San Juan Islands from Anacortes, WA, taken by the author

Hey there everyone —

To get to San Juan Island from Portland, Oregon, you take I5, the freeway that runs up the West coast. Drive past Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle. Then the land flattens out and there’s an odd mix of industrial buildings, cow pasture, and houses. Finally you arrive in Anacortes, Washington, the port town. You spend the night, because traffic is always unpredictable. The next day you line up an hour early for the ferry.

That’s when the vacation begins. You stand on the back of the ferry as it glides by island after island. Some are uninhabited by humans; some are accessible only by water taxi because there’s barely any services and the houses are privately owned; some get ferry stops. The islands block the wind off the water, so there’s just a slight breeze. The water is so deep it’s black if there’s fog, greenish if there’s sunlight.

The ferry docks at San Juan Island and you drive off, up the street with the small shops and restaurants. Five blocks up and the road hooks left and you’re in farmland: sheep, cows, lamas. There are fenced farms with seasonal vegetable stands at their gates. If you take another left and head across the island you’ll hit the edge. You’re more likely to see big rock formations that drop off into the water than beaches. You can take a blanket, sit on the rocks and look out over the straight. If you come at sunset, you can see Victoria’s lights in the distance. If you’re lucky, you’ll see otters, or harbor porpoises, or bald eagles. If you’re exceptionally lucky, you might see an Orca pod.

When I’m on an island I start thinking about ecosystem health, drinking water, land management, trash, power, money, and access. What came before me? Who was here and how did they steward the place? What species did they introduce and why? What did they eat? What trees did they cut down, and why? What fish were thriving here? There’s a great, newly redesigned visitor’s center on the island that answers a lot of these questions. On its back wall is a reproduction of a mural that was created in collaboration with artists from the Coast Salish Tribes that lived in the region before it was colonized.

The mural depicts pre-contact life on the island. Larry Eifert, the artist who painted the final image, describes it this way: “I set the scene of a summer tribal salmon camp, where for centuries families would come to fish and dry salmon–and pick and process camas bulbs that were the two main staples of their diet. It’s a pre-contact scene without iron or steel tools, so it might be any moment in time between 8,000 years ago to about 1700 A.D.”

Tribal Wall Mural by Larry Eifert 

When I drove around the island, I noticed that its interior looks a lot like England. Here’s a picture from Young Hill, where you can see the stretch of trees by the shore, and the ways the trees have been cut to provide pasture and farm land. The English eliminated the species (elk, bear, and wolves) that threatened sheep, because they wanted to produce wool. This island has a very complicated history of colonization, boundary disputes, and ecological transformation, and you can witness it in the geography of the place and the kinds of trees and animals that are here now. 

Image by the author

It was discordant to have the mural in my head as a vision of this place, and then to experience it now. Walking the streets, I saw mostly white adults. When the school bus stopped, I saw some children who were Black and brown, but when I was driving, all the drivers were white. Most of the houses I saw are very expensive and surrounded by acres of land. Some are right on the edge of the island, looking out over the water.

The people I met were very friendly—they talked to me in the grocery store and smiled at me on the street. I waved thank you, when I had to pull a U-turn, and people waved happily back at me. I experienced a kind of belonging, even though there’s no way I could afford a house here, and I would struggle to make money here, if I could only earn my income from the people who live here. I wondered if I looked like I might be rich enough to be here full time, or if people just assumed I was a tourist, and were being kind to me because the weather is getting better and they’re used to tourists.

I had already planned to write a post about white therapists talking to white clients about white identity and power, so the whole time I was there, enjoying, napping, and nature steeping, I was imagining what it would be like to practice there. Would I ask my clients how their mental health was influenced by their whiteness and affluence? Would the people here be relieved that I raised the subject? 

I had conversations with artists, photographers, healing practitioners, caterers, grandmothers, grandfathers. Many people said their children and grandchildren still lived on the island. Several had grown up on the island and were now raising their own children there. There were signs along the road, protesting a bike lane. When I asked about that conflict, people demurred: they said it was critical to keep people together, to not introduce conflict in such a small place.

I noticed the ease with which others spoke to me; how many thought I was a permanent resident. I didn’t see other visibly gay people on the island but I didn’t experience overt homophobia, here with my female partner. I think my whiteness made my sexuality less of a problem, made my lack of affluence something that could be elided in conversation.

Just before I left, I was waiting for the ferry to arrive, killing time by reading the real estate listings on the office window. A realtor came out of the office and asked if he could answer any questions. We got into a really honest conversation about race and class and community. He wasn’t uncomfortable. 

He told me that current development ordinances mandate 5 acre minimums for new homes. He said there’s a debate happening between people who don’t want any more building here, and those who want affordable housing and a more representative community. He said there’s plenty of water to support more people, but for now, it looks like not much is happening in terms of creating housing opportunities for people who aren’t incredibly wealthy.

At first it was easy for me to think of San Juan Island as a place that’s exceptional, in terms of its politics, because of its geography. I caught myself trying to escape the discomfort of loving a place so deeply for its beauty, and for the opportunity to sit in total silence and see wildlife that I could never see in a city. The longer I sit still on San Juan Island, or any of the other islands, the quieter I become. I don’t want to talk to anybody. I find people a disruption. I crave the quiet and then I see the people and I face the truth of who is allowed to have access to this place.

After I got home it occurred to me that perhaps I was off base, thinking there was something exceptional about raising the subject of whiteness on San Juan Island. After all, is what I am describing so different from dynamics that might occur in a small rural town that is largely white? Or in an affluent white neighborhood in a city, cordoned off from its working-class neighbors by its price? An island has particular needs for its community to function, so everyone can survive. But there are conceptual islands everywhere.

At the end of the day, no matter where we live, don’t we all depend on a small group of people for our survival? What happens if that small group is largely white and we identify as white? Don’t many of us feel a curl of fear rise up when we prepare to raise the subject of white power to other white people; wonder if we’ll be socially shunned for making people uncomfortable?

One thing I’ve noticed is that I feel comfortable talking about whiteness in my therapy practice, because I bring it up in my initial consult session with a new client. My white clients often bring up whiteness and class and power and work through their resistance to hard conversations. There are people in my friend groups who will talk about white supremacy and white power. I get nervous at parties, or in business settings, or with strangers—I feel like I have to hide myself. I’m practicing saying what I think out loud, making it normal for white people to talk about the network of structures that keep whiteness in place, makes it look normal and inevitable when it’s not.

What is insidious, I think, is the idea that having conversations about white identity and whiteness in a therapy session will inexorably lead a client and a therapist to engage in public resistance to those structures that maintain self-segregating environments, especially among white people.

Therapy is designed to help a person remove, or at least contest, the emotional blocks that impede change. It is a space in which avoidance, denial, anger, terror, repression, and anxiety are welcomed and made visible. It’s a place to practice allowing the energy and the heat and the sweat of fear show up and crest and then drop back. It’s a place to figure out what risks need to happen to support growth.

Because therapists are experts at welcoming these emotions, and because these are the very emotions that keep white people from raising the subject of white identity and whiteness with their friends, their bosses, their neighbors, it would seem that therapists are uniquely positioned to be able to help our clients, and ourselves, name the forbidden so that we can move into action to collectively resist structural violence and oppression.

But here’s the thing: I’ve been thinking about the fact that therapy, itself, is part of white culture. We all know that the majority of therapists are white women; the majority of counseling and social work professors are white women; the psych research subjects are mostly white university students; the majority of therapy clients are white women; the licensing exam is written so that white candidates will pass it at far greater rates than Black candidates.

In white culture, therapy can perform the role of mitigation: it can save a community from facing discomfort, the very discomfort that it is essential it face, in order to repudiate power and privilege. When white people’s friends get too obsessed with their ex, or come to parties and get wasted, week after week, or can’t get out of bed in the morning, someone will likely ask them if they’ve gone to therapy yet. Though many people still see therapy as the place you go to deal with your personal problems, and don’t yet see white supremacy as a “personal problem,” I wonder if, as white supremacy does start to be recognized as a problem for white people as well as everyone else, if that, too, will be something that therapists deal with in private.

This is one of those both-and situations. I believe white people should absolutely talk about white identity and whiteness in therapy. I think therapy can be a great place to push past the anxiety and the internal “Stop!” that shows up when we get ready to break a social taboo. 

I also wonder if there’s something particular to middle and upper-class white culture, and the way it relies on therapy to salve and cordon off pain from the “neutral” space of the social, that makes talking about whiteness in therapy something that lets white people off the hook, in terms of action. Or, more precisely, that might teach white people that talking about whiteness is the action. 

I know we need multiple strategies to support white people who are undermining white supremacy culture and the systems of oppression from which we benefit. The trauma and secondary trauma of activism for social change often can be anticipated and prevented if the person is engaging in therapy and activism at the same time. They can stay in the struggle longer, if they’re regularly taking stock of their mental health. Therapy also can be a space in which the efforts of the dominant culture to lure white people into complacency can be named as strategies of ideological containment. There are many ways therapy can be an integral part of action and change work. I’ve seen the persistence and true commitment of white people who are doing this work, and it gives me hope. I want the role of therapy in the battle to combat white supremacy to be like war photography—the talking, the naming, a snapshot of carnage meant not to stop just one war, but war itself.