Returning to Right Relationship: Training Psychologists for Healing, Liberation, and Connection
What does it mean to train a psychologist to become a healing presence in a world like this?
At the Gender Health Center, we believe the answer requires more than teaching theories, interventions, diagnostic frameworks, and clinical techniques. It requires learning how to be in right relationship—with another human being, with community, with ancestry, with the natural world, and ultimately, with ourselves.
Each year, as part of our Kindred Collective Consortium professional training program in collaboration with the University of California, Santa Barbara Gevirtz Graduate School of Education's Kindred Collective of Healing and Liberatory Traditions, psychologists-in-training gather for retreat, reflection, ceremony, and learning. This year, we returned to Blue Sky Center in New Cuyama, California, to begin another training cycle by asking a deceptively simple question: How do we begin correctly?
For us, beginning correctly means beginning with gratitude. It means becoming clear about what we are calling in, who we are accountable to, what we are responsible for carrying, and what we may need to release. It means remembering that before we can accompany another person on their healing journey, we must cultivate our own capacity to listen, notice, connect, and remain present.
Psychology Is Relational
The Gender Health Center provides professional mental health training for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows that includes narrative therapy, community-based practices, liberation psychology African-centered psychology applications, Indigenous psychologies, and community-defined evidence-based practices (CDEP). Across these traditions runs an important thread: human beings cannot be adequately understood outside of relationship, culture, history, community, and place.
Liberation psychology challenges approaches that locate causes of suffering exclusively within an individual while ignoring oppression and the social conditions shaping people's lives. Decolonial and Indigenous psychologies similarly challenge psychology to recognize that Western psychological science is not the world's only source of knowledge about healing. Indigenous approaches frequently emphasize relationality, spiritness, ancestral wisdom, community, and holistic well-being. Contemporary psychology is increasingly acknowledging the importance of bringing these knowledge systems into meaningful dialogue rather than automatically positioning one as superior to another.
African-centered psychology also asks us to consider the person as fundamentally relational: shaped through connections among self, family, community, ancestral lineage, spirit, culture, and collective life. Healing, from this perspective, is not simply reducing a person’s symptoms. It involves restoration which returns people and communities toward greater wholeness and right relationships. The Association of Black Psychologists, Inc. co-founder Baba Wade Nobles acknowledges this as “spiritness” or that which enlivens our life energy.
These frameworks deeply inform how we think about developing psychologists at the GHC. We want mental health professionals who demonstrate an exceptional knowledge of psychological theories and practice oriented research results. We also want psychologists capable of being fully human and present and attuned to other humans.
The Relationship Is Part of the Medicine
There is strong scientific support for something many healing traditions have understood for generations: relationships matter. A large meta-analysis involving more than 30,000 psychotherapy clients found a consistent association between the quality of the therapeutic alliance and treatment outcomes across different therapeutic approaches, client populations, countries, and ways of measuring treatment (Flückiger, Del Re, Wampold, & Horvath, 2018).
That matters for training.
It means becoming an effective psychologist cannot simply be about acquiring more techniques. We must cultivate the capacity to build trust, remain curious, repair disconnection, recognize another person's humanity, tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity, and communicate through our presence that another person is worthy of care.
Contemporary neuroscience gives us additional ways of thinking about these experiences. Research on oxytocin, for example, points toward relationships among social connection, bonding, and stress regulation. Although these effects depend substantially on context and whether a situation is actually experienced as safe (Olff, et al., 2013). Ideas about neural mirroring have also generated fascinating questions about how human beings perceive and respond to one another. But the science here requires humility. Mirror neurons are sometimes described popularly as if they provide a simple neurological explanation for empathy. The research is considerably more complicated: meta-analytic findings suggest associations between putative mirror systems and some dimensions of empathy, while researchers caution against reducing something as complex as human empathy to a single neural mechanism (Bekkali, et al, 2021).
Perhaps that complexity offers its own lesson.
Human connection cannot be reduced to one molecule, nerve, neuron, or counseling technique.
We are systems in relationship with other systems.
The Natural World Is Also We
Our training therefore expands the idea of relationship beyond the counseling room.
Part of development as a psychologist-in-training at the GHC means learning to be in relationship with the land—to honor and appreciate the air we breathe, the land we walk, roll, and strut across, the water we drink, the plants, birds, and trees around us, and the food that nourishes our bodies.
This is not merely poetic.
Research examining nature exposure suggests that time and therapeutic activity in natural environments can help reduce some measures of physiological and perceived stress, although findings for depression and anxiety are more mixed and nature-based interventions should not be overstated as substitutes for needed mental health care. Other research has found that greater subjective connection with nature is associated with positive affect, vitality, and life satisfaction (Paredes-Céspedes et al., 2024). Indigenous and decolonial psychologies invite an even deeper question: What changes when we stop understanding nature merely as something humans can use therapeutically and instead understand ourselves as participants in relationships with land, water, and the non-human living world? That, we are nature.
That distinction matters.
The land is not simply the backdrop for our retreat.
The land is one of our teachers and supports us.
Listening Differently in New Cuyama
At Blue Sky Center, we were generously held by the people and landscape of New Cuyama. We shared food, including wonderful hospitality at the Buckhorn, spent time together beneath an expansive sky, and created room for a different kind of learning.
Local Chumash historian, educator, and healer Carmen joined us in relationship and shared songs, history, blessings, and teachings connected to thousands of years of Chumash presence, knowledge, cosmology, and contemporary life.
We were invited to listen differently.
Listen to the birds.
Listen to the winds.
Listen to the stories carried through generations.
Even notice the biting red ants and consider what lessons might become available when we approach the living world with curiosity rather than assuming humans are the only beings with something to communicate.
These experiences invited our psychologists-in-training to practice something essential to clinical work: cultivated attention and presence. Our contemporary world is so loud. There are countless forces competing for our attention, accelerating our bodies, fragmenting our relationships, and distancing us from what is has always been known. That supports are all around us and within us. Learning to perceive them requires patience and practice.
On the Walk
Ari led us in conversation about being “on the walk.” To be on the walk is different from simply knowing about healing.
It asks:
How are you living?
How are you relating?
What happens to people in your presence?
Can you listen without immediately needing to speak?
Can you remain open when someone's experience challenges what you have been taught?
Can you recognize oppression without reducing people to what has harmed them?
Can you recognize the medicine, knowledge, resistance, creativity, ancestry, and possibility that people already carry?
And can you understand yourself not as the person who possesses healing, but as someone who can help create conditions in which healing becomes more possible?
This orientation sits comfortably beside liberation psychology, which challenges psychology to address oppression rather than merely helping people accommodate themselves to oppressive conditions. It also reflects contemporary movements toward decolonial psychology, which ask our profession to reclaim and honor knowledge and healing practices that have been historically marginalized.
At the Gender Health Center, we call some of these approaches community-defined evidence practices: ways of healing whose evidence also lives in communities, cultural memory, practice, relationship, story, survival, and generations of accumulated knowledge.
Plática, Presence, and Aliveness
Sometimes healing begins with conversation.
Not assessment.
Not diagnosis.
Not intervention.
Conversation.
Plática is a conversation that warms, connects, opens, and transforms which reminds us that speaking and listening can themselves become relational practices. Sometimes another person's nervous system needs our steadiness. Sometimes their spirit and testimony needs witnessing. Sometimes someone needs food, affirming hormones, housing support, overdose prevention & survival supplies, a letter of support for medically necessary treatments, advocacy, laughter, ceremony, movement, or community before anything resembling conventional psychotherapy makes sense.
And sometimes people need someone willing to sit beside them long enough for their aliveness to be re-awakened.
Beginning Amid Difficult Times
This year's retreat did not occur outside the realities facing our communities. We traveled while people we love and serve back in Sacramento were navigating fear, uncertainty, and violence in our beloved Lavender Heights.
So our retreat could not simply be about individual restoration. We returned to the question of the circle.
How do we strengthen it?
How do we protect one another?
How do we nurture one another?
How do we remain clear enough to determine what comes next?
Many ancestral and Indigenous traditions recognize that care is not synonymous with passivity. Life contains forces that nurture and forces that fiercely protect. Both can be expressions of love. We all know that we protect us. Part of our work in these times is discerning what is required of us and the roles that each of us plays in this cycle of protection and nurturance. Our role at the GHC is about cultivating and deepening healing spaces and participating in advocacy efforts to support our communities.
Returning Home - Community Defined Evidence Based Practices
Eventually, we returned north.
We carried gratitude for the place, people, plants, animals, food, stories, elements, and teachings that held us in New Cuyama. We returned to Sacramento and the lands stewarded since time immemorial by Miwok, Nisenan, and other Indigenous peoples with a renewed responsibility to practice what we have been exploring. Because retreat is meaningful only if something returns with us.
At the GHC, we offer many forms of healing spaces: individual counseling, support groups, healing circles, community gatherings, narrative practices, cultural programs, overdose prevention and response, health services, and simple opportunities to be together. Their forms may differ, but underneath them is a shared conviction:
Healing happens through relationship.
Relationship with self.
Relationship with another.
Relationship with community.
Relationship with ancestry.
Relationship with culture.
Relationship with land.
Relationship with the more-than-human world.
And relationship with whatever gives us the courage to remain fully alive.
Our psychologists-in-training are learning clinical skills, certainly. And we are asking something more of them. We are asking them to become what Dr. shola shodiya describes as the conduits of care.
To learn deeply and remain humble.
To recognize knowledge that includes and moves beyond the academy.
To cultivate attention, presence, and attunement.
To stay open.
To know when to nurture and when to protect.
To understand that healing after trauma is not simply about returning someone to who they were before something happened. Sometimes healing is about helping people encounter capacities, relationships, possibilities, and forms of aliveness that have been there all along.
Psychology has spent generations studying what happens inside human beings.
Our training asks another question:
What becomes possible when we also learn to study and honor what happens between us?
Between people. Between generations. Between communities. Between ourselves and the earth beneath us.
Perhaps some of the oldest knowledge about healing has been waiting there all along. Known deep within our bones. We simply have to become quiet enough, connected enough, and humble enough to listen.
Citations
Bekkali, S., Youssef, G. J., Donaldson, P. H., Albein-Urios, N., Hyde, C., & Enticott, P. G. (2021). Is the Putative Mirror Neuron System Associated with Empathy? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Neuropsychology review, 31(1), 14–57. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11065-020-09452-6
Flückiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., & Horvath, A. O. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychotherapy (Chicago, Ill.), 55(4), 316–340. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000172
Olff, M., Frijling, J. L., Kubzansky, L. D., Bradley, B., Ellenbogen, M. A., Cardoso, C., Bartz, J. A., Yee, J. R., & van Zuiden, M. (2013). The role of oxytocin in social bonding, stress regulation and mental health: an update on the moderating effects of context and interindividual differences. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 38(9), 1883–1894. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2013.06.019
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