[00:00:00] Speaker A: If I broke my arm and go to the hospital and say my arm is broken, the doctor says, well, you know, I'm. I'm a Asian doctor. Is that going to be a problem?
[00:00:10] Speaker B: No.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Could you fix my arm? And I think the same holds true. It's not. It's what we say when we're in distress and we're seeking services, we'll be polite. I don't think that gets people in touch with their cultural roots and how influences their emotional expression or their view of attachment or their view of what the presenting problem is, let alone the difficult stress they might experience uniquely as a culture not of the US and we tend to think of the US as white middle class. And therein can lie some stressful challenges. To what degree do we assimilate? And people from different cultures have to wrestle with that question.
If you're white, you don't.
[00:00:56] Speaker C: Welcome to Deconstructing Therapy, Transforming Therapy, and the therapists who lead it. Let's deep dive into conversations reshaping therapy into a powerful tool for healing, liberation and systemic change. Join us as we challenge the status quo, reimagine care, and celebrate therapists breaking barriers. Let's transform therapy together.
[00:01:22] Speaker D: I'm truly honored to welcome Dr. Paul T. Guillory to the podcast today. Dr. Guillory is a licensed clinical psychologist, professor, researcher, and one of the leading trainers in emotionally focused therapy with a special focus on culturally informed care. He is the author of the groundbreaking book Emotionally Focused Therapy with African American Love Heals, where he beautifully integrates attachment science with the lived experience of African American couples and families. Dr. Guillory brings more than 25 years of clinical experience to his work, and throughout his career, he has been deeply committed to exploring how racism, grief and trauma impact attachment and relationships in African American communities. He also serves on the faculty at UC Berkeley, where he continues to teach, research and advocate for therapy that is not only effective, but also culturally attuned and equity centered.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Such an honor to meet you and to have you here. Since I started the podcast, you were like one of the first people on my mind of who to invite on this.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: In touch.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, all my work has been trying to kind of bridge that gap between the racial identity work and EST is such a beautiful model on attachment and you are such a pioneer on really bridging the gap between those two things and bringing racial identity work to attachment theory and emotionally focused therapy. And I'm just so honored by your work. I was hoping today to understand a little bit more about your personal story and what brought you to this type of work? And then maybe some of your evolution of what really got you to take emotional focus therapy and start putting this lens on it. What got you into this work in the first place?
[00:03:05] Speaker A: It was a long time ago, but, you know, as an older teenager, I had dreams of going to the Olympics as a track and field person.
And then through injury that got vanquished in terms of dreams. And I was helped during that time as long as well as my brother who had been playing five years older, but he was playing in the NFL. And then by that point his career was over. So we were both going through depression about our sports careers. So I saw what now would be a sports psychologist about that and I had to really redirect and so did my brother and I. I think people don't quite understand that when you are one of these athletes, although gifted, your whole life is devoted to that. There's no other identity.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Yeah. How old were you when you started?
[00:04:02] Speaker A: Well, I've run all my life, so I was always running and I was always. Before racing started, I had my own races that I created. I would. I would race you down the street.
I would be walking and you might not know I was racing you.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: You always knew.
Always a couple. So it was a whole. That was just the core of your identity. That was who you were.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: I had a religious identity. We were part of a religious family. So that was there, but I didn't quite think about it that way. So who I was, even though we had practices and so on, but it was this redirection, finding other identities, like being a student. I had only seen school as a vehicle for running track. So it was where could you go for track competition? Where could you go for good coaching and so on. And school was just an adjunct. Now fast forward. I became a sport psychologist for the Oakland Raiders and spent 14 years doing that and consulting in the the NFL with professional football players, but also track athletes as well and some basketball players. And so it was a way of kind of giving back because I knew what defeat felt like the way that other people didn't granularly ill it.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: My brother's experience, where it's a. It's kind of a form of death.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: Yeah, of course.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: And that occurs really no matter how successful athletes are.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: At some point you're going to have to face that identity. Dag. Yeah, that's true.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: And so now you know, there is more of this influence in sports where that even the professional teams have professional former players and have organizations that Help athletes and they start with other programs as well to help athletes transition to develop.
[00:05:57] Speaker B: Yeah, so that's all you learned, that's all of who you are, just.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: And there's a lot of maturity that you don't have as you don't have some of the other experiences that people your age have. You sacrifice those things for the love of sport. And so then you're out in the world as a 20 something, 30 something EX player and you've got to learn some things about the world that other people have learned in high school because your kids had.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: Everything revolved around that. Everything you're doing, even school was just a venue for that. Everything was that the one that's gone like. Well, you have to recreate yourself, create.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: Yourself and you become aware interpersonal rejection that you were spared.
[00:06:38] Speaker B: There's so many facets to it.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: Yeah, that was one career path. The other was then developing interest in just psychotherapy and wanting to be really good at psychotherapy. So I started off with children and doing play therapy. I loved it.
Child therapy is really hard, not so much with the children, but with all of the family systems and the systems you have to work with. And it can be very discouraging, painful for you as a therapist when you're trying to.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: You feel like you were kind of lost from working with the bigger system.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: Working with the bigger systems and not being able to impact those.
[00:07:19] Speaker B: Right.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: So then I went, I started doing family therapy because I thought maybe I could have more influence. And then it was, it sort of morphed into family therapy with adolescents. And I love, I love kids, I love the adolescents. But again, it was the distress around the very powerful emotional dramas related to being an adolescent. And always, not always, but a certain subpopulation where suicide was like on the menu. After a while I said, can't do that. I can't, I can't take the helplessness. And that was not the issue with the large majority, but the small majority where idea of suicide was there, that was enough over time that really bore.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: On you the helplessness with it.
[00:08:07] Speaker A: But I also thought when I took a externship from Sue Johnson, my wife and I went to Ottawa back in 06 and she was teaching with Gail Palmer and Allison Lee. I just love those three ladies. This idea of attachment was the missing ingredient from structural strategic family therapy that I was doing with families. And I thought it's not there, but they think it's there.
And so I really said, oh, this is the missing component.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: Can you expand on that a little bit? For people who are not that familiar with attachment theory or eft, just how does that impact the work when you're doing relationship work within attachment lens?
[00:08:49] Speaker A: The simplest way to describe it for me is that we did enactments in family therapy, and they were structured around roles, responsibilities, conflicts, and so on. But in eft, we're using attachment and seeding the connection all the time and then see it as a protest against disconnection. For me, it was really solid theoretical link, but it was the soft. The softening, the ability to soften the disputes that you had to validate teenagers, validate parents, and then try in enactments. It's the emotional component of pain that we enact. And that was different.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: Yeah, so before, it's like, you're still doing the communication. You're still, like, doing the enactments, but it's just looking at the surface of it. But when the attachment lens added.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: Yeah, you're looking at the stories. You're actually trying to soften with each person. But it's the language of attachment that helped me really begin to think about how to do that with the emotional component. You know, it was a new technique. I wanted to be good at that. That led to, like, a lot of experiences with patients saying that I'd seen before or during the time of the training. You're different, Dr. Gillard. And it was affirmation to me about, like, really connecting in a way, making the therapy safe. Even though I wasn't thinking of myself as a cognitive behavioral therapist, you. I was adding some of that cognitive reframing, cognitive challenging, maybe not so good ideas to the work. When I began to really validate and try to hear from the perspective of each person how they were responding to each other. So after a while, I just went full into emotionally focused therapy and largely left behind the family therapy. And it was that combination of not wanting the difficulty of working with any teenager who was suicidal that I okay, I've done my work. It's taken its toll on me as kind of a person who can be joined with. As an emotional sponge. And I still do that, but I rather do that with couples with all the distress that couples come. Now, largely, I'm working with people of color, although my practice has always been sort of balanced. I found that people of different cultural backgrounds other than black would seek me out because I really think they felt like they could be heard. So these could be people from, you know, South Asia, certainly the interracial couples, whatever combination of races there were that, you know, would. Would seek you out and I. I think they realized one, they were under cultural stress and that I think they felt like I could be empathetic.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: What do you feel like you were doing differently? That maybe they weren't getting from other therapists?
[00:11:55] Speaker A: It was like, okay, can I build? You know, as we do our work is every time we build connections, can we create a safe environment for them to talk? But I would also intersperse culture, bring it up and try to have them talk to me about the cultural influences on their positions, say, in the cycle.
[00:12:15] Speaker B: Is this something you just naturally did?
[00:12:17] Speaker A: Always, Certainly always a population of African American couples that I would see or families when I was seeing that one, that there were these cultural elements about this. For example, how that was done, about how black people talk to each other. When I would see someone, let's say an Indian couple. Oh, no. Yeah.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: You already have that awareness that influenced your.
[00:12:44] Speaker A: Tell me something about. And then you will begin to see all the cultural variations within the culture that you're talking with, right?
[00:12:51] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:12:52] Speaker A: Wealthy families as opposed to poor families. And I had this notion that we just group people together. And then you start realizing, no. And that's true. It seemed to be true in other cultures as well.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: And you just had this natural curiosity.
[00:13:07] Speaker A: I'm curious.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: And then the more you did the work, you would realize more and more.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: Nuance and the more people talked about. And that would be true for, you know, Mexican clients or Asian woman, white man, or vice versa.
And you start to then deal with the multicultural reality families reject. That's. That's real. And you have to. It impacts the couple and you have to talk to them about it. Now, none of our theoretical perspectives ever prepares us for that. So they teach it as if it's a monoculture.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: Attachment is just universal and everything.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: Attachment is universal.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: And there's no need to add culture to it. Or if it is, you just broach it in the beginning. But it's for the self of the therapist. Oh, you and I are from a different culture.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: Okay. That's it.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: And that's it. Yeah.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: And, you know, and people come in. If I broke my arm and go to the hospital and say, you know, my.
My arm is broken. The doctor says, well, you know, I'm. I'm a Asian doctor. Is that going to be a problem?
No. Could you fix my arm? And I think the same holds true.
It's what we say when we're in distress and we're seeking services, we'll be polite. But I don't think that gets people in touch with their cultural roots and how influences their emotional expression or their view of attachment or their view of what the presenting problem is. Right. Let alone the difficult stress they might experience uniquely as a culture not of the US and we tend to think of the US as white middle class.
And therein can lie some stressful challenges. To what degree do we assimilate? And people from different cultures have to wrestle with that question.
If you're white, you don't, you don't.
[00:15:08] Speaker B: It's a whole thing that's missing.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a unique technology and a unique stressor. Now when it comes up in EFT in traditional training, it's not attachment, it's not significant.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: Content.
[00:15:23] Speaker A: They would be referred to content or something other than what we need to focus on.
But I don't think we spent enough time knowing psychology other than the psychology of Western, the dominant culture.
[00:15:38] Speaker B: Right. So.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: So this other stuff is not well researched. It's certainly not taught in graduate school. It's not taught in. So it's invisible. So when you walk in, they're saying, oh, you or I or whoever of a different culture. But we're all the same. Yes, we're all human. Part is true. Yes. But that part has been denied.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: That's valid too. Yeah.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: But secondly, some medications don't work for all people. Pain medications, for example. They don't. There's just a tiny sampling, which again.
[00:16:10] Speaker B: Is based on the dominant culture.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: Right, Right. So it's a great unknown.
And largely people don't care. They speak about caring, but not enough funded nor enough to get enough participants in a multicultural environment is EFT works for all. You know, I, I'm not doubting it.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: It's just that's not what you observed. And there's a reason why everybody was like, oh, I feel seen here. This is different. You are different.
There was a reason why people kept coming to you and you just always naturally did that. You'd go to the trainings and you heed kind of this universal language and yeah, we'll, we'll name it. We'll see that we're different and we'll name what's happening between you and me and then we'll leave it at that and put it in context. And then you thought differently, you kind of practice differently.
[00:16:57] Speaker A: So see, I think I. It's not me alone. I think what happens is that people from a multicultural are thinking multicultural all the time, particularly if they start to see clients. Now it's true many black therapists or Asian therapists or Mexican therapists can see all white couples. They are. They don't have to make adjustments or think otherwise in terms of the model. But as soon as you start seeing people of other cultures and you listen to them, then you realize, okay, I guess I have to adapt. So if there are a , let's say, EFT therapists from a multicultural, they are all adapting individually, figuring out what works.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: And we do this in all aspects, right? We kind of go in, get the training, understand that this is just dominant culture. And we know when we go home, we kind of do have to do it differently. And that's just a natural thing that I think people who are not in the dominant culture do. So I guess what was it that sifted you of like, no, actually, we need to talk about this in trainings too, or we need to have a system for this.
[00:18:02] Speaker A: Well, you know, there was Nancy Boyd Franklin's book, Black Families in Therapy, who, you know, she highlighted some ways culture can be uplifting. In some ways, cultures has to be addressed. And she also highlighted in some ways how social class has to be addressed in terms of how you deliver therapy. Back in the day, I think I might have been a supervisor, an EFT at the time. And there was a listserv that we had back then that's different than what's provided today.
But on that listserv, I asked, are there any black trainers in the US Now? My goal was to get supervision and have discussion with people about these kinds of things. And how were they adapting? Well, it turned out there were. There were none.
And it started kind of a brouhaha on the listserv. And some of that was about, oh, you know, there's some structural racism in eft. And the reason why. True, not true. I was focused on consultation. I. That's where I wanted to go. And so sue wrote me an email and asked, what? Well, what do you think we can do? And I listed five things, one of which was a book on black couples in therapy, kind of like what Nancy Boy Franklin had done. So she said, well, you write it. And I said, okay. And so that started that. And I took it from the point of view of here are the EFT interventions and here are some unique stressors that occur to African American. Now, I think here are some unique stressors that are true, if we call them like cultures within the US immigrant populations and, you know, now being targeted and projected on by politics and throughout the social sphere, immigrants in general experience rejection. So there's this idea of civilization and accommodation and to what extent you Leave your culture. And a lot of people have left their culture behind to come to this country and experience the alienation with not being in the culture that they're from, in the small community that might maintain that culture and the dominant American.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a rough process, but so.
[00:20:31] Speaker A: Are LBGTQ plus people as they, you know, are young and they begin to experience their genuine self, they're faced with rejection. So part of me is saying there's some similarities. Social rejection and being genuine to oneself.
[00:20:48] Speaker B: Do you feel like these are the themes that you are able to touch on more? And really because of your experience of losing your own identity as a runner? Like, you know, the feeling of, hey, I lost the core of myself, or that rough transition of losing.
[00:21:03] Speaker A: It may. It may sound strange, but I became black once. I wasn't a runner.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: Yeah, that. That makes so much sense to me. But can you expand on that?
[00:21:10] Speaker A: When you are an athlete, a successful athlete, and then suddenly you're not, you realize, oh, now I see social clips. Now I see how they think they're special.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: Right, because you were saved from that. You had the privilege of not when you were the runner. That's right.
[00:21:29] Speaker A: Because I wasn't concerned about social matters.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: That makes so much sense.
[00:21:34] Speaker A: Time and winning. All of a sudden, I became aware of that. Otherwise, I felt like I was thriving in my community and in my cocoon. Suddenly I. It was different.
[00:21:46] Speaker B: And there's so much of us, even as immigrants or different experiences where we. There are things we can do that give us proximity to whiteness and we don't realize it. And then if that is stripped from us. When I'm hearing you speak, it kind of reminds me of 9 11. And I'm like, oh, 911 is when I became musl.
Because before that I had so much proximity. I'm, you know, born and raised here. No accent? No, no. Like cultural clothing. And then it's suddenly like, oh, you realize that identity, and it's. It's. It's a process. So I guess for you, you had that image of ripping away who you are and then having to recreate and.
[00:22:20] Speaker A: Really get in touch, but also know that things like cultural identity are a lifelong development.
And so it wasn't like all of a sudden overnight, I became something different. It was like I was always becoming.
So as I got in touch with being an African American man, there was different phases of it. So when I became a father, yeah, it was like I was a father as an identity, but in particular, these. The. The amount of responsibility I felt to children, to girls, it was like, well, this is an obligation. So my father, because he was a product of the segregated south, really did not do much schooling as an adjunct to that, did not do much reading and of course didn't read to us. But I realized, oh, other kids get read to. We're reading to my.
And so it was like, okay. I've always had this saying to never read enough to a child, never too early to start. And it's a byproduct of that intergenerational experience of education being important. Suddenly I realized all this focus on sports, no attention.
Now I have to go back. I have to learn a new stuff that other people focused on. So even as a student, I had to recreate myself and develop that over time and do all of that while I was still, like, progressing. And so it's something that when I hear immigrants come to this country and I'm amazed that they don't speak English, and then whatever age they start, at a certain point, you know, those people are working hard to learn English, to learn how to read, to do the work that they have to do in school. I know what that's like.
[00:24:03] Speaker B: So pretty amazing how you weren't read to and now you're an author.
[00:24:07] Speaker A: My daughter is the real author in the family. She's published, I think nine and has had four New York Times bestseller. So I take from my father to this drive we had to educate, to read and write. She was always a reader.
[00:24:23] Speaker B: I love how you cultivated that.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: No.
[00:24:25] Speaker B: Oh, that's so beautiful. Okay, look at that. Intergenerational, like, how it's growing. Yeah. And how you became your blackness. You were like, there's different evolutions to it. So where are you with that now? And then, how is it for you as being one of the only. I guess one of the only, like, black men in, like, the EFT training, there are two or there's two.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: But for me, presenting now in a way that says this is something that we have to include, I call it extra steps. You know, we have. There's a CARE model, and I call it extra because each step is an extra element for multiculturalism for each stage. It's not just broaching and making it okay for us to work with. It's developing the safety for stage two work or the intrapsychic work where we have to deal with our. The deficit model, how we don't compare. We're not white, and we shouldn't be necessarily assimilating to be white. And if that's not the case, what should we be driving? This is, I think step two kind of work. As well as the harsh criticism that we can apply to ourselves because the world sees us in negative ways, we begin to see ourselves that way. Talk or inner voice can say these things to us. And we can be overly unnecessarily positive to white people. Concerned about their safety. Concerned about their.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Yeah, because it gives us safety.
[00:25:56] Speaker D: Right.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: When we.
[00:25:57] Speaker A: Right. We give them safety so that we. Yeah, right. But I think we can over to the extent that that's too much of our psychic makeup. There's this kind of dynamic between overly negative towards self and overly positive toward others that may or may not relate to us. But we have to choose if they do.
So I don't think that is being done in our ET world. Thinking about it as, oh, no, it's part of the steps and the stages. The deeper intrapsychic work that has to be done as well as. As well as it influences the psych.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: There's so many nuances to it.
[00:26:33] Speaker A: Otherwise people just talk about brochi. If you just ask them about their culture, you check them.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: That's it. Yeah. We're naming it. We're not pretending it's not there. But there's so much. It impacts everything.
[00:26:45] Speaker A: Everything, everything. So we don't teach it like that. That's part of my mission.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: That's such important work. I'm really. I'm honored to meet with you and honored to hear more of your story today. Yeah. Because it does impact everything and we feel it. There's so many people of color that have come to me afterwards, like, oh, yeah, I. I didn't feel seen or heard or understood or there was these little microaggressions that happen because being seen is just so important. And we're already internalizing these messages.
We don't. When we get in the therapy room.
[00:27:15] Speaker A: It'S because most of our training mates. If we had a hundred people, we're teaching EFT externship. If you bring up this stuff, people are so reactive one that people of color are saying, yes, oh, tell me more. And our white colleagues are saying, oh, I'm scared of this. I'm not going to say anything. I'll just wait till they get on to the next part or vft. This is something that I don't really need to know.
[00:27:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: And I'm saying, no, this is a failure of how we teach in graduate school and a failure how the model is taught. Because then we can process.
There's race based events, culturally based Events that people go through and we can process those because it's just as important as the attachment, because it's about survival. So when somebody says they look at your name and they look at you. Are you Muslim or something? I don't think. I'm not saying. I'm just saying people can project these things.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: Of course, happens all the time. Yes.
[00:28:16] Speaker A: And it could be worse.
That might be something minor. And we stay on the minor and not this sort of scary stuff.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: So your push has really been to say, no, we need to keep going. This is survival.
[00:28:29] Speaker A: This survival activates bodies. And even if that situation goes away, it creates things like irritability and patience. Yeah, bodies. And that's what we take out on our children. And I'm saying, hey, this is real.
[00:28:49] Speaker B: Ask people of color. Yes, it's real. It's already there.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: That means they get it. It can be processed with our EFT interventions. But we have to know that race based events are more prep. They're not one off.
There's a.
[00:29:04] Speaker B: Everyone who's doing. Yeah, like you said earlier, everyone who is not in the dominant culture is experiencing this. They're all doing it already.
[00:29:11] Speaker A: There we. I say we pause. Sometimes people have good coping. They've been doing this all their life. They feel like they're in charge of those moments. Other times it's like, no, these are really impactful moments. And then we linger. We help process that.
[00:29:28] Speaker B: No, that's wonderful. There's probably a million other questions I could ask you at a time. I appreciate your time today. Can you tell me, if you were to give one takeaway from your discussion? If there's people new to this work that are listening today, what would that be?
[00:29:44] Speaker A: Be curious about culture. And I'm not just talking about the idea of appreciating people from different cultures, but how people experience their culture in this culture, because it's there. There are two different phenomena. People can be joyful in their own.
[00:30:02] Speaker B: Culture, feel dreadful, and be true at the same time. How do you experience your culture within the culture? Such an important question. Wonderful.
Where can people find you?
[00:30:14] Speaker A: Well, I'm on.
I have a website and it's, you know. Paul Guillory. Paul T. Guillory, PhD.
[00:30:23] Speaker B: All right, thank you so much. I appreciate you.
[00:30:26] Speaker C: Join the movement and keep the conversation
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