Psychology can be oppressive as a field. It is western, individualist and pathologizing. It doesn’t take into account culture, spirituality, and collectivism and it lacks an understanding of individual and collective trauma. Indian Health Board of Minneapolis re-trained grad students like me. If you come to work in the Native community without that re-training, bringing what you learned from grad school, you will not retain caseloads.

— Hye-Kyong Kim

I don’t have many memories of childhood. I was born in Seoul, South Korea, and adopted at five months to a white family in South Minneapolis. I’ve been here ever since. I am 44 now.

 

Navigating K-12 in Minneapolis as a Korean Adoptee

I grew up on the Minnehaha Parkway, close enough to Hale school that I was able to walk. I experienced a lot of teasing. I was made fun of, told I was ugly. I had very thick glasses by the time I was five.

Starting in kindergarten, there was a boy at Hale School who would call me “Chinese” and push me down. I would come home bloody, with holes in my clothes. I have a scar on my knee from him. One day, when he wasn’t going to be there, he gave my friend a rock so she could push me down for him. She told me this when we were adults. She said she took the rock, but didn’t push me.

Because I was exposed to Asian adoptees with white parents, I thought when I grew up I would become white. When my mom realized this, she became intentional about pointing out Asian families; Asian adults. She connected me with Hmong students.  I played Hmong jump rope.

Knowing now about the experience of adoptees who grew up in the suburbs, I realize it helped to live in the city where there were other Asians and people of color.  My mom worked near Little Earth. She talked about diversity and bought me books about Korea. She did well at that. Still, there were not many Asian kids at Hale. An ESL teacher thought I was Hmong.

I was very interested in connecting with other Asian kids and other people of color. My mom was a feminist. I grew up with the idea of female power. I thought it should be the same with Korean adoptees. I would try to make friends, but that was not always easy. There was lateral oppression. When I started at Field School there was a girl in my class who told me, “Just because we are both Korean doesn’t mean we have to be friends.” That was a new idea to me.

When I was young I was chatty. I wanted to connect with everyone. I was told I talked too much. The teacher would seat me up front so they could watch me. But around 4th grade, I started to clam up. My mom said it looked like a light switch went off. I became scared of death. That childhood depression, grief around my adoption, set in. Our brains change, get more complex at that age.

I was not good at school–did not fit that model minority stereotype. It was not until I went to Clara Barton for junior high that I was seen as having intellectual promise. I was an only child, so I entertained myself creating stories. Fantasies. Barton encouraged my writing. As a result, I got into the writing-as-performance magnet program at North High.

To get to North High I would take the #5 on Chicago Ave; a long bus ride. There were a lot of Asian students at North: Hmong, Vietnamese, Chinese, some adopted Korean and Vietnamese. It was lovely. I did well for a while, but then I started having trouble with my Asian identity.  I wanted to be only with Asian people. I began skipping school.

I ended up at Loring Nicollet Alternative on the corner of Franklin and Nicollet because of truancy. It was a good place for me, helped me get back on my feet. The program was run by hippies and social justice people who believed in teaching kids the truth. There were only 45 students. The program is still there and has expanded. When I was there we had three rooms. It did the job for me. I managed to graduate on time.

 

Visiting Korea

The summer before high school, we went to Korea as a family. I did not want to go back. I was terrified. But the moment we landed, all my fears melted. I felt this curiosity and excitement about being in a landscape where the people looked like me. The language made me feel like I was at home, even though I didn’t understand much. Grandmothers were warm and nurturing to me, serving me food at restaurants or sitting next to me in buses. I felt connected to my country of origin for the first time.

 

My Hmong Family

I had my first child when I was eighteen, got married at nineteen. That marriage lasted sixteen years. He was Hmong. We had six kids together. I went from being in a white family to a Hmong one. Joining this family while I was still a teenager meant I also grew up in Hmong culture. It also formed me.

My ex-husband was a mentor in how to be Asian. I didn’t know–having no experience–how to evaluate that education. I don’t think my extended Hmong family ever really knew me. I was very quiet, being the good daughter-in law. It was such a different identity for me. It was great when I experienced racism, because I could come back to my Hmong family and it would be held up. In my white family, they would try to deny it because it hurt them, or fix it, or feel it so painfully that you would think it happened to them. You learn as a transracial adoptee to be very internal and self-regulate. So in my Hmong family it was validating.

But it was hard on our marriage. If I tried to assert myself, strayed from his thinking, he would call my thinking white. I would accept that sometimes because I didn’t know. And sometimes the message about racism was not validating. It was, “That’s how it is. Don’t complain. Survive. This is what we do.”

 

Navigating College

I went to Augsburg College as an English major. I had a great writing teacher at Augsburg who encouraged me. At eighteen was going to the adult weekend school because I had children. The focus of those older students was on getting the work done, not socializing.

I loved to write, but when I finished my English degree, I realized I didn’t want to be a professor and I was scared of teaching. My then-husband said, “We have all these kids, what are you going to do?”

I ended up going to St. Mary’s University in a masters program for counseling psychology. St. Mary’s also had an adult weekend school. By the time I did my practicum there I was hooked. I loved it. When I was done I enrolled in the doctoral program at the Minnesota School of Psychology. That was 2005, just after I had my fifth child.

I have always found education systems to be very white and institutionalized. In graduate school, there were some professors who told me I was going to fail the class if I didn’t speak up. I was not good at group discussions. I was very present, even though I was not sharing verbally. It felt like racially, there was a message that I was too quiet.

When I began at Augsburg I had a documented learning disability. The CLASS program there helped me adopt alternative learning strategies. Believe it or not, I am more non-verbal. One test showed a 40 point spread between my verbal and non-verbal abilities — which is why I like writing so much. (To be fair, I took that test during a period of great turmoil).

Articulation and socializing is hard for me. I spend a lot of time feeling awkward. I can only spend so much time in social settings with small talk. That makes therapy easy for me. I have a high level of empathy. Psychology feels natural—like a calling—that is the best way to describe it.

 

Parenting

Practicing psychology has helped me in my parenting, though I am by no means a perfect mom. The divorce was traumatizing and we are still working through that. My upbringing was good, and it was also difficult. My mom had diagnosable mental health issues. I strive not to replicate those.

My kids are 25, 22, 20, 18, 16, 13 and 4. I am now married to a Vietnamese adoptee. I am a better parent now than when I was eighteen. I tell my oldest, “I’m sorry you were my guinea pig.”

We are very close knit. My children support each other, help each other figure out what it means to be Hmong, to be Vietnamese, to be Korean, to be Asian, to be American. I am so proud of them. They know who they are.

 

Unlearning Western Psychology at Indian Health Board of Minneapolis

Psychology can be oppressive as a field. It is western, individualist and pathologizing. It doesn’t take into account culture, spirituality, and collectivism. It lacks an understanding of individual and collective trauma.

I went to the Indian Health Board for my practicum and just stayed there. They were good at re-training grad students. If you come to work in the Native community, bringing what you learned from grad school, without retraining, you will not retain caseloads.

You have to be relational, you have to give more of yourself. You can’t be a blank slate. People want to know who they are talking to. They will feel you out. It was a powerful place to learn how to work collectively, to focus on the resiliency of culture, to use medicines outside of psychotics, to practice as though relationships were everything. The cognitive behavioral stuff I learned in grad school could be used as tools, but only in the context of relationships. The humbleness I had as a non-Native person, was essential. I loved being there. It fed my soul.

Eventually I worked my way up at Indian Health, and became the chief psychologist. I have never been comfortable being a big fish, but I had six children and I was getting a divorce. I was very low income. In a community clinic you don’t get paid a lot. I needed to feed my children so I tried management. It wasn’t where my heart was. I always wanted to be with the people.

This spring I left, after fourteen years. Now I am an independent contractor in private practice, at Lyn Lake in Minneapolis and in St. Paul. I love it. Most of my clients are people of color. Over half are adoptees.  It is very fulfilling.

 

Collective Mental Health Prescription for a Racist, Classist, Dysfunctional Society

Making mental health education accessible.

I am hopeful about the field of psychotherapy because more people of color are entering graduate school. At the same time, there are added barriers right now. All grad school is unhealthy. For low-income people and people of color, there is the elitism around grad school connected to class.

Just think if college was free! There wouldn’t be this lack of diversity. I think of the student loans  I have incurred. I won’t be able to retire. It affects your ability to buy a house—things like that.

In addition, people of color experience microaggressions from other students and professors who are not responsive, especially during discussions about diversity. It makes people stop their program.

The rise of Trump has been especially hard. We are overriding our intuition, overriding responses such as fight and flight. We have gotten into a frozen state in terms of our nervous systems. This survival of the fittest mentality is triggering.  If you are in graduate school, and are exhibiting deregulation as a natural response to what is happening to you and the world, you may be called out as someone who is not stable enough for the field.

Gatekeeping is a real problem. For transracial adoptees who worked so hard to adapt to one family structure in which they didn’t quite fit, to have to do that again in the dysfunctional family system that is grad school is very triggering.

De-stigmatizing mental health.

This would be a different world if we were all assigned a therapist, if insurance didn’t only pay if there is a diagnosis, if we could overcome the idea that therapy is for White people, if we could move away from the idea that doctors know best. It is the humbleness, the normalizing, the humanity, the de-pathologizing you bring to therapy that makes the difference, especially for people of color.

Word of mouth helps too; letting people know therapy is a good thing.

I would like to see a switch from seeing mental health as sickness and disease to seeing it as something that is not set in stone. I would like to see people seek services to regulate their nervous systems.  Life is really hard. Just surviving is wearing many of us down, I would like people to see mental health as just as essential as physical health. Getting regular mental health care will increase your quality of life and increase your lifespan.

We need universal health care,

including mental health, so it is accessible to everyone. More people would get help if they could afford it. I hate insurance companies. Certain companies will be good on the consumer side, but will not pay me enough to be sustainable. I would love a more socialist health care system.

When I went into private practice some people told me I should just take clients who pay out of pocket. I said no, that is not my clientele. I need to be as accessible as possible. Accepting insurance, being accessible, means working a lot more hours. I work six days a week.

I have seen a boom in people of color who are Licensed Counseling Practitioners, (LPCs) which is great, but they don’t get reimbursed as much from insurance companies as people with doctorates.  It is harder to sustain with those wages.  It’s a hierarchical system.

I am happy the masses are understanding trauma.

People are starting to get training in culture, race and holistic perspectives, though we still need many more people of color and Indigenous people in the practice.They  are starting to understand that trauma and PTSD are often misdiagnosed as personality disorders, when it is complex or developmental trauma. Even personality disorders are trauma-based. The structures that set in to deal with trauma, are no longer functioning.

The more we talk about trauma the better. I talk with clients about the survivalist voice talking. People believe, when they get a hard diagnosis and medicine isn’t working, “Something must be wrong with me.” Understanding the collective aspects of trauma is essential.