Reimagining Relationships, Decolonizing Minds.
An Anti-Oppressive Approach to Love
Reimagining Relationships, Decolonizing Minds.
An Anti-Oppressive Approach to Love
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Each relationship has its own unique micro culture..
..informed by the personalities, agency, & trauma history each person brings, but also, by larger cultural & political narratives. The latter is a dimension many relationship guides & therapists miss. In my practice, I draw on Eastern, Indigenous, & Western sciences as equally valuable lenses for understanding these complexities, & the stories about power & partnership that influence how we relate.
What lights me up about this work is seeing what's possible when we examine these stories for ourselves.
After decades of experimenting with different versions of relationship, I believe there’s no one right way to do it. Each unique combination of people gets to decide what works for them, & I love helping people figure that out.
I practice & teach non-binary thinking: the art of holding multiple incongruent truths at once. I believe this is one of the most effective ways to use conflict to deepen intimacy & embolden each person's sense of freedom.
While all humans yearn for emotional intimacy & safety, we’re still evolving our emotional literacy & relational skills, learning how to get our needs met in ways that reflect the realities of modern life, while minimizing how much we hurt each other. We’re all learning. I honour that in you & in me.
Loving is innate, but HOW we love is cultural; it is LEARNED
Which means... it can be UNLEARNED
My work guides you to explore what culture has taught you about relationships.. then question what hurts, and amplify what's helping.
Land Based Attachment Theory
When I first discovered Attachment Theory, I felt incredibly seen. I was anxiously attached, my husband (at the time) was avoidant, & suddenly I had language for what was happening between us. I also had someone to blame (hint: not me).
Years later, I began to see how that framework had actually contributed to the division between us. It encouraged me to understand our struggles through fixed roles (which included 'the avoidant as villain', & 'the anxious as victim') instead of seeing both of us as contributing participants whose capacity for connection changed with our circumstances.
So, as the nosy Anthropologist (& Projector) I am, I went looking at the theory itself.
Attachment Theory was born out of a white, Western worldview that centres the child-caregiver bond & nuclear family. But humans have always belonged within much larger relational worlds. We attach to friends & communities, ancestors & cultural lineages, animals & ecosystems, spiritual traditions, places & the land. And, all of these relationships exist within cultural & political conditions that influence whether or not we are privileged enough to get to experience a felt sense of safety, connection, & belonging.
My version of Attachment Theory is therefore, Land-Based. Because, it asks us to understand attachment within this larger ecology. Which I believe, is more honest, and therefore produces more effective & sustainable results.
Instead of fixed attachment “styles,” I think of attachment as relational 'states' that we move through as our inner capacity & external conditions change.. much like seasons.
At its heart, this work explores something I have experienced personally & witnessed repeatedly in my practice: many of us are trying to become securely attached to other people while profoundly disconnected from ourselves, the land, & the wider web of relationships we belong to.
After generations of colonial & imperial systems disrupting people's relationships with the land & each other, all around the world, rebuilding these connections is therefore an act of consciously disrupting the [mostly unconscious] colonialist agenda to divide & conquer... by helping us restore a deeper sense of belonging to the world we are a part of. From that place of deep, intimate knowing within oneself, we can then connect with one another with greater security, agency, accountability, intimacy, & the much beloved.. freedom.
