Transcript

- [Speaker] And one more thing I need to tell you about this woman, She was pregnant. Pregnant, pregnant, pregnant. She was pregnant with college degrees she had not earned. She was pregnant with businesses she had not started, she was pregnant with children that yet to be born. She was pregnant with songs yet to be written and movement she had not yet danced. This woman.

- [Aja Monet] Greetings listeners, this is The Sound Bath, and my name is Aja Monet. It's a podcast brought to you by Lush Cosmetics. I'm really looking forward to today's episode with Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis. Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis, aka Dr. Thema, is a licensed psychologist, ordained minister, and sacred artist. Using artistic expression, spirituality, psychology, and culture, Dr. Bryant-Davis lectures, performs and preaches internationally. She spent many years working with women's groups and trauma survivors, encouraging emotional wholeness. She's also the president elect of the American Psychological Association. In 2020, the international division of the APA honored her for her international contributions to the study of gender and women for her work in Africa and the African diaspora. Dr. Thema is a fellow podcast host. Her beautiful and empowering show is called The Homecoming Podcast, which provides weekly inspiration and mental health tips to her listeners. We live in confusing and challenging times, and Dr. Thema aims to guide us through them by encouraging qualities of love, healing, acceptance, compassion, and creativity. Let's get into it. All right, so excited for this conversation and I'm here with Dr. Thema. First of all, thank you for being on The Sound Bath with us. And I wanted to just ask you, how you're feeling today? What are you carrying in your body? How are you feeling overall in general today?

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Thank you so much, Aja for having me and for who you are and the work that you do, and I'm excited for this conversation. I am feeling full on today. I'm just in a place of gratitude.

- [Aja Monet] Oh, that sounds lovely. Yes, thank you. I guess the way I would love for us to begin is I think that there's always spaces and places and ways that we like to just describe our own way of being in the world, how we see ourselves and what we're doing. And so I would love if you can share with our listeners a little bit of what you do and who you are and how you identify?

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yes, so I would say the overarching theme of my work is healer and healing, and I facilitate healing in multiple ways. So one, I'm a licensed psychologist and I have a private practice in Los Angeles, primarily working with trauma survivors, victims of violence and of oppression. I also am a professor at Pepperdine University where I teach our graduate students who are studying to become therapists and psychologists. Within that role, I do research on the intersection of culture and trauma. So how do our cultural identities shape both our risk for trauma and the ways in which we heal. And then I am a minister, so I'm an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. And here in Los Angeles, I lead a mental health ministry. So really looking at things holistically, mind, body, heart, spirit, community.

- [Aja Monet] Wonderful. So my first question for you is a little bit about hearing the call. How does one learn to hear the call and be called? How does one learn to listen deeply? I think in this podcast we talk a lot about active and engaged listening. And there's a way that we can hear people but not really be listening. And so I think that it's one thing to learn how to listen to other people, but I think the first listening and some of the hardest listening is learning how to listen to oneself, right? And as you've been called to minister, as you do this work and with therapy, and healing and as a sacred artist, I guess I wonder how did you first hear your call or listen to your call or your calling, and what ways or what lessons have you learned that may be useful to those listening on how to better listen to their own calling?

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yes, beautiful question. So I think really listening to the calling is about aliveness. So noting when you are muted, when you are bored, when you are shut down versus what are you doing when you feel free, when you feel fulfilled, when you feel alive, those moments where you feel like, this is what I'm here to do, I'm in flow, right? It's not that it will always be easy. So for example, getting my doctorate degree in psychology, I'm not a math person, so the statistics was not flowing even though it is my calling. So it's not that it's always easy, but it is aligned with your authentic self. And different experiences can confirm it or remind you or reveal it to you. So I would say as it relates to psychology, growing up I was a pastor's daughter, and so people would often call our home in distress. And even though I'm the youngest of my two siblings, if someone called and my parents weren't home and they were kind of tearful, my brother would immediately hand me the phone. So I've just always been a listener, as a child I would be called sensitive. I feel things deeply. I'm not one for argument and debate, I am more heart led. So while I learned the profession, I was born a healer. And so being tuned into the ways you showed up to the planet, not what trauma or stress took from you, not the lies that, you know, society can tell you, but what are you doing when you feel the most you, the most connected to you, and in terms of ministry, and this can be some lessons for our listeners, there were roadblocks to me accepting the call to ministry, and so there were two big ones. One was, growing up what my parents really promoted was this idea of if you're gonna do ministry and take it seriously, then that is all you do. So I really only grew up with a model of people who were like full-time ministers and I knew in my heart that I'm meant to be a psychologist. So when I started feeling this pull around ministry, I was initially saying, I'm not gonna do that because that would mean giving up this other thing, right? So I wanna pause there for people who have multiple gifts or multiple callings. Some people will try to convince you you have to choose, but you can be everything that you are. And it's no slight to any aspect of you, it's just you may have multiple, multiple gifts and callings. And then the, the second thing, which was a barrier for me was I thought that in order to do ministry, I had to say that I 100% endorse every scripture that is, which was a problem for me, right? Because there are some things in there which raise questions and so one of the liberating moments for me was my godmother, Reverend Renita Weems, Reverend Dr. Renita Weems is a womanist theologian, and she was the first person I heard preach a sermon and in the middle of the sermon she says, "And this is a suspect text." And I was like, Whoa, can you say that? Can you? And you know, she started asking the questions of who wrote this story? And you know, the women in this story were really in the margins and what might they have been feeling or thinking or dreaming and, so that really opened up for me that we can ask questions and still, and still minister, right? And so then I said yes to both.

- [Aja Monet] Hmm, yeah, that's really, really powerful to hear because many people don't know, but I think all great, great people and great things started, and at least within the Black community, started with the church.

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yeah.

- [Aja Monet] But I started in the church, that's really where I learned so much about the power of the word and the will of the people. And you know, the courage of faith and just, you know, the devotion to one's truth and goodness, and feeling like there was something larger, larger that we were here for a purpose.

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yes.

- [Aja Monet] And so it was interesting because for so long, kind of to hear you say, you know, the questioning, I remember when I was in the beginning of, believing I would be a minister someday or I would go off into the world and minister that I was gonna do something that would change, revolutionize the ministry, revolutionize the Church.

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yes.

- [Aja Monet] You had this idea that I was like, it's so outdated the way we do they, how we talk, how they approached the text etc. And then I discovered so much about other faiths and other religions, and I was so self-righteous, so convicted in like Christianity and this idea.

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yeah.

- [Aja Monet] And when I went to Sarah Lawrence College for undergrad, and it's a liberal, you know, this very liberal arts, art school. The way that they approached theology, the way that they approached faith, with this like critical care.

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Right.

- [Aja Monet] The sense of that care is rooted in a critical lens and analysis, that it's not just about feeling affirmed and in alignment all the time. That sometimes that tension or that struggle can be a big part of learning how to care, how to deeply engage with, you know, what you care about. And so I wanted to ask you, what are other faiths that perhaps, or practices that perhaps, deepened your relationship to your work? What does solidarity look like in an interfaith sort of practice in the world? What are the ways that you see that's showing up now more than ever? And how necessary do you feel that is for our healing?

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yes, so I believe strongly in our connections around interfaith communities, and it has been such an enriching part of my journey, and I'll say a necessary part of my journey as well as someone who works as a psychologist. So when we are doing the healing work, I think many times when people hear about the importance of paying attention to culture, they primarily think about race and gender, maybe sexuality, maybe economic status. But often people leave out awareness of a person's spiritual, religious, or faith walk is for many people integral to how they experience the world and how they experience mental health, mental illness, and the ways they think about their healing. And so many psychologists, it's interesting, they have research that shows mental health professionals on average endorse lower religiosity than the general public. So, then that often means you have people of faith going to people who don't endorse faith for their healing. And so then all kinds of ruptures and misunderstandings occur. And so it has been a beautiful part of my journey of learning the overlaps as well as the unique expressions of spirituality and faith. And one of the core pieces for me has been contemplative practice, and growing up I would say my mother, who's also in ministry is a mystic, and really, while a very powerful teacher and minister is also one who really loves the music of silence, right, and the sacredness of silence, and so it has been incredible across traditions to get into how people experience that stillness, that silence, that sacred awareness of this present moment. I think what often creates the difficulty in relating is communication, right? That people will call it different things. For example, mindfulness is a popular intervention or approach now but sometimes if you were to say to a Christian to be silent and open yourself up and let go, some of them would respond with open myself up to what, right? What are you trying to do to them or put inside of them? So they're like guarding their spirits is how they would talk about it but if I were to say, let us be still in the presence of God and make ourselves available to the Holy Spirit, they would be able to go right there, right? So it is the different languages of what gets us home.

- [Aja Monet] Ooh! There's so much power in the tongue.

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yes.

- [Aja Monet] So it's something that I really have had to contend with and take seriously and learn from over and over again. But as I listen to you, there's so much power in the tongue and in the way that you carry your voice. So I wanted to ask, what role does speaking and voice play in our healing? We talk about this as, The Sound Bath, the power of conversations to cleanse, and that in therapy, oftentimes, what I learned through therapy is that in those conversations, things can be really transformed and we can come to really powerful realizations about ourselves but also what, you know, I remember being a child and in church and an elder covering my ears with her hands and praying over me on my ears and she said, this child has heard things she should not have had to hear. And I just remember I started just, I broke down and she just started speaking things over me, it still brings me chills and gets me teary when I think about it, but there was something about hearing her speak these words of life over me that changed my whole orientation towards the world. I mean, it really shifted the course of my life. And I wanted to ask you about, someone that works with just faith, but also a faith-based practice, but also works with the language, who works with words, what role does voice and language and words play in our healing?

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yes, I'd love to, first of all, I love the story of the proclaiming and truth telling and blessing as it relates to your ears and what we hear and should not have heard. And in therapy what I often hold on to, especially with trauma survivors, is shatter the silence to shatter the shame. Shatter the silence, shatter the shame because there are so many of our experiences that we keep secret that we are hesitant to share, to disclose, to speak of, because we feel embarrassed or humiliated or because of victim blaming or because of the stigma. And so in the telling there is healing, because I discover especially when I am in the presence of a compassionate listener that I told them my deepest, darkest secrets and they didn't change their mind about me. That's, you know, it's like you face your greatest fear of like, what if you knew this about me? Would I still be okay? And it's yes, yes. Like I still choose you. I still care about you. I still appreciate you. I still honor you, I still respect you, and so in therapy one of the approaches is called Narrative therapy. And so with Narrative therapy, it's not only telling my story, but how I tell my story. Because some of us center other people, like everybody else is a main character in your story, and you're in the margins of your own story, right? That you're just constantly being acted upon of what did this person say to me? What did this person do to me? But I have no voice. And so to re-author my story, to renarrate my story is healing and empowering, and also helps me to shift the distortions, the lies that I have felt about myself, the lies I've been convinced of about myself, and so to hear it and to speak it is really powerful, and one of the ways that we can speak the unspeakable is through the arts. So, trauma and difficult moments can be hard to put in words or sometimes people are saying the words, but they're emotionally numb and disconnected. But if I can speak it, quote unquote, but in my poetry, in my music, in my dance, in my collage making, in my bead making, in my cooking, in the way I do my hair, if I can speak it in the way that I dress myself, if I can speak it in my art, then it also shatters that shame.

- [Aja Monet] Hello listeners, my name is Aja Monet, and you're listening to The Sound Bath, brought to you by Lush Cosmetics. I am currently in conversation with Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis, aka Dr. Thema. She's a licensed psychologist, ordained minister, and sacred artist. The best way to get to know her is through her show The Homecoming podcast. In a minute, I want to talk more about her preaching and how she taps into her higher power. But first, I wonder what do you feel like we all could learn right now from the act and the art of listening?

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] So it really is important for us to have spaces to hear and to listen. And what I would say to those of us who are listening on today is to start asking deeper questions and to actually slow down to communicate to people that we are looking for a real answer. Because here we're so scripted of, how are you? Fine, right? Or church people say, how are you? Blessed, right? So that's the script that people have like, are halfway down the hall or down the block before they really even hear you're fine, right? So if I slow down and start to ask, how are you holding up? What has this season been like for you? What are you missing these days? So that to ask questions, to communicate that you actually want to know and to also be willing to share ourselves. So transparency is contagious, right? That often if you have someone in your friendship circle who's willing to be more honest, to share like, I'm tired, I'm disappointed, I'm exhausted, I'm frustrated, I'm confused, then it can give other people permission for more truth telling as well.

- [Aja Monet] Yeah. That's really, really powerful because I think about the idea of permission, giving permission for truth telling. It's also hard when people are closed off and they're used to being closed off to even know what's the right question. Or is it okay to even ask a question because someone might not be ready for that, for those questions or know how to answer those questions. And some of us have built up such good defenses around us that even the deeper questions, we find a way to like just quickly get around it. This leads me to my next question. At times it feels like we are all being forced to be on a hamster wheel of productivity that society doesn't allow for much living or rather that there are those of us who do not have access to basic material needs and goods. Our basic living is not covered, housing and quality food, education, healthcare, etc. I wanted to ask, what role do you feel therapy plays in liberating us from that hamster wheel rather than pacifying our needs or our feelings so that we can just continue to function better on the hamster wheel, right? I think society often positions the people as if their issues and their ailments that they're facing is just emotional and psychological and spiritual and their's alone, that they're in it alone, to resolve it alone, that they need to heal it alone. That if I just go to therapy and I just get my head right and I just take these pills and I just do this thing that, you know, I'll be fine. I do this retreat, I do this meditation that I'll be fine, without real accountability to a larger system and politics at play.

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yeah.

- [Aja Monet] So I wanted to know what have you observed or what thoughts you have about the role that therapy can play, or does it play, in liberating us from that hamster wheel? This system of thought.

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yes, yes. I love the question. And it is right in line, in alignment with the work that I do, and so there are particular approaches to therapy that require us to look beyond the individual. And so feminist therapy, womanist therapy, which is from the psychology of Black women, mujerista psychology, Black psychology, liberation psychology, which comes out of Latin America, and all of those we can think about as decolonizing psychologies or some people call them Indigenizing psychologies, social justice oriented psychotherapy. And so what each of those have in common is consciousness raising, right? Not just my awareness of myself, but do I understand the systems in which I have been socialized, right, that have taught me and treated me in a particular way, and so it is very important to not assume that my life is solely the manifestation of my thoughts. I know that's very seductive, right, for people to think, oh, The Secret, The Secret if I can just think positively, right, that everything will flow for me, and so then if things aren't flowing, it's just like, oh, you're not being affirming enough, right, or you don't have enough faith. But it is a matter of our survival and our thriving to recognize the impact of systemic oppression, not only past but present, and then to be empowered for what are the different ways that we respond to that. So traditional psychology or western psychology often stops at the place of coping, right? What are coping strategies? You know, taking breath, learning to calm yourself, these kinds of things. But the social justice oriented psychotherapies go to the next level, which is, yes, in the immediate aftermath, I wanna soothe myself, I want to cope, but then this keyword is resistance. What are the ways that you resist these systems that are trying to invalidate you, that are blocking you, your family, your community? So empowerment and self-definition are important aspects of the therapeutic process. And so we can resist through organizing, we can resist through our art. We may resist by running for office, we may resist by advocating for policy and then we know from the lovely Nat Bishop, we can also resist it with our rest, our joy and our love are part of our resistance and so that is an important part of the therapeutic process for marginalized peoples and to reclaim or to claim for the first time the truth of who we are.

- [Aja Monet] That's just juicy. I could talk to you forever. Yeah, I think a bit of my next question is a bit around, the role that social media plays is a big question that we have on this podcast and the limitations of social media, but also its impact on our mental health. The way that I was introduced to your work was following you for years online and the impact of how you use and demonstrate your ideas on social media. I think I wonder what are, what is our responsibility to each other in presence and in time, in real time in our healing? What is the power of social media in our healing practices, but also what are the real limitations and some practices that maybe you have found to be useful in how you even interact with social media?

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yes. So social media is a tool, and so it depends how we're using the tool and who's using the tool and so the benefit can be a large scale education, right? So if you put out messages about like what is depression or coping or recognizing unhealthy relationships? I could set them in a self-help book and there are a certain number of people who do buy self-help books and I'm glad about that, I have one, then there are people who are not going to access it that way but if you are kind of daily or weekly putting those messages out there, people are reading, receiving them. And you know, I will often have clients come and ask me questions about something they saw in social media. One of the concepts which has become more popular now is people understanding attachment theory, which is basically your attachment style with your caregivers, the people that raised you can affect how you show up in romantic relationships. So there's lots of science about this, it's been sitting in journals where only people who are academics can access it. But now it is much more common for people to have an awareness of that. So that is on the positive end. On the negative is the constant comparison, right? Of you're comparing your real life to someone's curated life. So people put up the images of the couples or family, the matching pajamas, everyone's smiling, all these lovey-dovey things. And it can really put people in a place of despair and having unrealistic expectations, right, that everyone else is joyful except for me. So that compare despair. So I often say to clients, when you're on social media, when you come off to check in with yourself about how do you feel, right? Do you feel empowered, nourished, thoughtful? Do you feel insecure? Body shaming, all of these things, then you may want to not only look at how much time you're spending on there, but who are you following because that is then shaping your day and your mindset.

- [Speaker] And one more thing I need to tell you about this woman. She was pregnant, pregnant with possibility, pregnant with vision, pregnant with purpose, pregnant with tomorrow's, tomorrow. She was pregnant, pregnant with college degrees she had not earned. She was pregnant with businesses she had not started, she was pregnant with children that yet to be born. She was pregnant with songs yet to be written and movement she had not yet danced. This woman was pregnant. Last year, there may have been some stillbirths and some abortions and some miscarriages, but today is a new day. I said yesterday might have been some abortions and some miscarriages and some but today she is pregnant.

- [Aja Monet] So really powerful to hear you preach, and I look forward to one day seeing you preach live. This specific excerpt was really striking and powerful to me because we are in a time of just shifting ideas around gender, gender identity, our bodies becoming more aware of our bodies, their abilities, and their limitations. And I wanted to ask you about, especially from an internationalist lens, what are you envision around the urgency of our international solidarity, among women, but how do you see the solidarity around our bodies and our visions for our bodies, our visions for what's possible? What are the things that excite you or what is the urgent work that you're seeing internationally that might be exciting to be privy to that's maybe shifting and challenging how we see each other, how we show up for one another, how we show up as women in the world? I think it's a define time of norms. So yeah, I wanted to ask a little bit about what are the urgent things you see being done?

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yes, so I am really moved by women's voices globally showing up in an interdisciplinary way, right? So in all of our different disciplines, so the growth of women in politics, in community action, in artistry, in film and in science. So it is being all the way out of the box. There is no box, there is no spoon to operating boldly and what I also appreciate that I'm seeing on the global scale is the intergenerational rise of women's voices. And so from elders to middle age, young women to children and those who are non-binary of being activated in that sense of we have nothing left to lose, right? We have nothing left to lose. When you have lost so much and so that urgency and pure fire and commitment of recognizing this moment of awakening is very hopeful. And it also brings the spirit, right, that we bring the spirit into the space, which ultimately is undeniable.

- [Aja Monet] Yeah, that's, thank you. Cause that reminds me of that line that we chant in our movements around from Assata Shakur, it is our duty to fight for freedom and it's our duty to win.

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Duty to win.

- [Aja Monet] We must love each other and support one another. We have nothing to lose but our change.

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Nothing to lose, yes.

- [Aja Monet] And yeah, so thank you for that. That really, really resonates and I'm so grateful for that little segment that we shared because it's inspiring to hear a Black woman preach, you know? It's just really is, it gave me chills. It makes my, the hair on my arms stand. And I look forward to, I really do look forward to seeing you preach one day live. The last question I have for you is a question that we ask all of our guests, and I just wanted to see what sounds make you feel whole? What sounds come to mind when you think about wellness, when you think about healing, and when you think about freedom, being free, feeling your most free, what sounds come to mind or come to your ear?

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yeah, in my prior days, earlier days of doing spoken word, my name was the lioness and so in keeping with that, I will say roaring, roaring because it is, as you kind heard in the preaching, not holding back. And so many times, especially as women, we are told to soften our voice, to reduce our voice, to talk in a baby voice, to do all kinds of things with our voice. And so to roar, there's no polite way to roar. It is to be fully present, alive and unafraid.

- [Aja Monet] I really do love you and I'm so grateful for you. It affirms me in so many ways to hear you speak and yeah, as a woman who has a very deep roaring voice--

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Yes, I love it.

- [Aja Monet] Hearing you say that just brings so much joy to my heart. And I just wanna thank you for your time today. I look forward to connecting with you more deeply in real life and I hope we get to meet in person one day soon.

- [Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis] Definitely, thank you for this healing space. I love The Sound Bath.

- [Aja Monet] Thank you. I wanna thank all the listeners for listening and I encourage you to tune in next time to The Sound Bath. Please enjoy this beautiful sonic meditation.