“My Enemy Who Is So Beautiful – Resistance, Resiliency, and Countertransference in Psychotherapy With Queer Activists”

For queers who move between merely surviving in dominant cultures and flourishing in chosen communities, families, and alternative spaces, the body bears witness to that tension and movement, often manifesting in anxiety, depression, hopelessness, illness, and disconnection from one's full experience.

How do we work with clients to help them maintain connection, intimacy and vulnerability with their loved ones while actively defending against the dominant cultural or familial forces which push against the limits of autonomy and resistance? How do we maintain our own intimacies in the midst of this work?

This presentation will draw from clinical work with queer activists and queer parents, and from my own experiences with queer activisms, to explore the possibilities of generating hope and resiliency in clients, and in ourselves as clinicians and community members.

Keiko Lane earned a BA in Literature from Reed College and an MA in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in Somatic Psychology from CIIS. She is adjunct faculty in the School of Undergraduate Studies, and in the MA Somatic Psychology Department at CIIS where she advises students and teaches a course entitled “Queer Bodies in Psychotherapy.” She serves as chair of the Queer Bodies in Psychotherapy Conference. In addition to teaching, she maintains a private psychotherapy practice in Berkeley, CA, working with individuals and couples, focusing on queer parents and prospective parents, multicultural identities, and the impact of social and cultural contexts, especially political and cultural dislocation, on embodied experience. She has organized in various community justice and activist organizations and collectives for 20 years, and is a published poet and essayist.

“Queer Latino Teens Negotiating Sexuality, Culture, and Poverty”

Cultural, religious, and family values are often antigay. Expressions of sexuality are further shaped by gang involvement, sex work, substance abuse, and stereotypes of gender. Culturally shared beliefs about sin and demonic possession can dramatically color gay teens' psychosexual development and complicate psychiatric diagnosis. Yet, the large population and concentration of Latinos in Los Angeles also facilitates queer teen networks and subcultures.

Relying on case material gleaned from the treatment of adolescents in the dependency and delinquency systems, this talk examines the specific risks and coping mechanisms of these queer youth.

Vernon A. Rosario is an Associate Clinical Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and a child psychiatrist in private practice in Los Angeles. He received his PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University and his MD from the Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Program in Health Sciences and Technology. Rosario is coeditor with Paula Bennett of Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism (1995), and the editor of Science and Homosexualities (1997). He is the author of The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity (1997) and Homosexuality and Science: A Guide to the Debates (2002). His current clinical research is on sexuality and gender identity in transgender and intersex children and adults.

“Queer, Healthy and Fabulous: Toward Community Wellness, Resiliency, and Mental Health”

This lecture will present and apply the principles of Appreciative Inquiry to health and wellness promotion, assessment, and therapeutic interventions   in the LGBT communities. Much of our community organizing has been based on seeking funds assigned to specific diagnoses, and the result is a community-disease environment rather than a community health and wellness environment. The talk will present and discuss strategies to change this approach and revitalize our lives, our communities, and our professional practices.

Steven Tierney is the Program Chair of CIIS's graduate counseling psychology concentration in Community Mental Health. He has an MA in Counseling and Social Psychology from Wayne State University and an EdD. in Education, Leadership, and Supervision from Northeastern University. Steven has also done postgraduate work in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy. He has worked in community-based organizations in Boston and San Francisco for three decades, creating and providing innovative mental health and medical service models for adolescents and transition-aged youth. Steven has been the principal investigator on several Special Projects of National Significance (SPNS), examining models of adolescent HIV, mental health, and substance abuse services.

Steven is member of the Health Commission for the City and County of San Francisco. He has taught at a number of universities and has a lifelong interest in experimental education, begun in his days as a student leader at Monteith College (a university without walls program in Detroit).
 

Facilitators

Alzak Amlani, PhD

"Liberating the Queer Body: Familial and Cultural Constraints for Middle-Eastern and South Asian Americans."

This presentation will focus on unique challenges and possibilities for the LGBT population from the Middle-East and South Asia, now living in North America . These begin with a close-knit and highly interconnected family and social structure woven through multiple generations of extended family, intact religious and social traditions and fear of psychospiritual and sexual individuation. Given the intense incorporation of familial expectations by the child and the gratification of belonging to the familial-cultural matrix, defying norms and coming out with one's queerness becomes particularly challenging and meaningful.

Alzak will also highlight and celebrate some of the queer individuals and groups who have brought forward their gifts in these cultures. The topics will have personal, cultural and clinical relevance and will draw from the presenter's research, clinical cases and personal experiences. There will also be a short film clip to offer participants a fuller view into the topic.

Alzak Amlani is a clinical psychologist in private practice and faculty in the Integral Counseling Program at CIIS, where he teaches cross-cultural psychology. He is of East Indian descent and grew up in Uganda, East Africa, among various African, British and South Asian ethnicities. He has published on queer experiences in Trikone Magazine, White Crane Journal, Queer Dharma and India Currents Magazine. Alzak is greatly interested in the interface between queer identities and experience and familial-cultural expectations and spirituality. He recognizes that queer individuals have assumed healing roles throughout history as shamans, poets, mystics, and artists.

Matthew Bronson, PhD, and
Shoshana Simons, PhD

“When As-If Becomes As-Is: Cultural, Cross-Cultural and Lived Perspectives on the Queer Body”

Recent years have seen an explosion of “new” categories of sexual identity in the United States. Alongside “queer,” which explicitly rejected the gay/straight binary, cultural memes such as “boi,” “butch,” “lipstick lesbian,” “pony,” “plushy,” and “bear” have been added to the sociosexual lexicon to respond to the seemingly infinite range of acts and scenes now available on the cultural marketplace. Etic (cross-cultural) and intracultural or “emic” approaches may include a theoretical leveling of all such labels as "mere" social constructions; identity itself is relegated to just another meta-genre, an enculturated "performance" with associated modes of sexual behavior. Thus, a Brazilian man who has sex with men may still be considered essentially "straight" if he is not the receptive anal partner.

The liberatory possibilities of deconstruction are seductive and real; participants will have the opportunity to play with the labels that reify sexual identity and to take on a new role momentarily by way of contrast with their everyday selves. In the next segment we ask: What happens when the deconstructive attitude is itself deconstructed? What is the cost of elevating emic and etic approaches over the vibrant, breathing, naked queer body that is still left on the stage when all the props and costumes have been removed?

Appreciative scholarship of mediumship within the Candomblé and Brazilian Afro-Spiritualist traditions shows that the divine, like queerness, can not be domesticated or reduced to just another category without doing real violence to the integrity of the experience and to the validity of sacred communion as itself a source of inspiration, insight and knowledge. Is it a mere accident of social construction that so many spiritual practitioners in these traditions are queer? We close with an evocation of the queer body as a vehicle for particular relation with the divine, as a living portal through which sacred and subversive knowledge and power can come into the world, knowledge and power which are dangerous for the entrenched binaries of a patriarchical, desacralized world.

Matthew C. Bronson, an educational linguist, is associate professor in the Social and Cultural Anthropology program (where he has taught since 1983) and the Director of Academic Assessment at CIIS and a teacher educator at UC Davis. His research and writing explores the intersections of consciousness studies, linguistics and education in the service of a world in crisis. He has conducted field research on the spiritual traditions of Brazil, co-founded a psychosocial intervention program for people living with HIV, participated in dialogues between Native Americans and scientists to heal the wounds of colonialism and conducted workshops in five countries on topics ranging from accelerated learning to critical media literacy. Forthcoming publications include an extended encyclopedia entry on language socialization, a chapter on integral education, and a coedited volume entitled So What? Now What?: The Anthropology of Consciousness Responds to a World in Crisis to be published by Cambridge Scholar's Press in 2009.

Shoshana Simons, Program Chair of Expressive Arts Therapy Program at CIIS , has more than 25 years of experience in working with diverse children and adults in the fields of education, counseling psychology, organizational development, and community work. She has worked as a therapist in the U.K. and U.S. , and has taught in the fields of counseling psychology and intercultural relations at Goddard College , VT , University of Vermont , and Lesley University, MA. She is the former Director of Special Projects at The Open Circle Program , based at The Stone Center, Wellesley College, MA, where her work included promoting socioemotional learning skills in elementary school systems, integrating the arts and mindfulness practices in learning and in running creative multicultural awareness programs for teachers and school leaders.

Shoshana's interests include narrative and systemic expressive arts practices, the exploration of our own indigenous healing traditions, Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Shamanic Healing, the role of expressive arts in leadership, and arts-based research methods. She holds an MA degree in Sociology and Social Policy from London Metropolitan University, an MA in Human Development, and a PhD in Human and Organizational Systems from The Fielding Institute, CA.
 

“Shadowplay: S/M Journeys to Our Selves”

This workshop will present a comprehensive psychodynamic theory of S/M that can be used to inform and guide therapy with clients, individuals, and couples, whose lifestyle involves sadomasochism, dominance and submission, sexual fetishes, eroticized role-playing, and the like. We will start by addressing the question of why many healthy people are drawn to the practice of BDSM, and go on to look at how our theoretical understanding might inform our therapeutic practice.

Dossie Easton is a licensed psychotherapist working with individuals, couples and more, in her private practice, with a particular interest in how SM journeys into Shadow can bring old wounds into the healing light of consciousness.  She is a CAMFT certified supervisor and a BBS approved CEU provider, and trains interns to work in depth with clients in unfamiliar sexual lifestyles. She is coauthor with Janet Hardy of The Ethical Slut , a guide to infinite sexual possibilities, as well as The New Bottoming Book and The New Topping Book,  When Someone You Love Is Kinky , a book designed to give to outsiders to inform them about our lifestyle; and most recently, Radical Ecstasy:  SM Journeys to Transcendence .  Dossie currently teaches at conferences worldwide, including AASECT, Bryn Mawr College and the University of Hamburg, Germany.

“Gay Male Bodies, Shame and Addiction: Working Somatically at the Edge of Unbearable Experience”

In this workshop, we will deepen our understanding of addictive processes and shame, as they relate to gay male experience. Together, we will develop somatic perspectives relevant to psychotherapeutic intervention with gay men who struggle with addictions. Often, this population presents with difficulties in affect regulation, histories of trauma, and, at least, the near-universal gay male experience of shame connected to sexual pleasure. We will attempt to articulate the interrelationship between these experiences, and the addictive solutions to unbearable pain which these experiences have elicited in our patients.

Our approach will be collaborative and reflective, and will include experiential work as well as group discussion, with an emphasis on somatic management and constructive use of countertransference.

"Embedded and Emerging Identity Issues in the Trans Community: An FTM Perspective"

Therapeutic intervention promotes the translation between behavior and social function and the existing gender terminology can be constraining, judge metal, and even potentially harmful. This workshop will explore the experience and issues of FTM transgender and transsexual people. The format of the workshop will be an interactive dialogue. Topics to be explored will include: notions of queerness and heterosexuality, deconstructing privilege, multiple identity issues (legal, medical), assumptions of normatively, selective inclusively, disclosure (family, employment and relationships), and gender expression/sexual identity.

Sage Foster has been a queer activist/organizer and / LGBT community member in the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly 40 years. Sage came out as a lesbian in San Francisco in 1969, and as a transman in 1995. He was active in the AIDS crisis in the 1980s-'90s providing support groups for lesbians living with HIV/AIDS and creating permanent supportive housing for people with HIV/AIDS and other disabilities (mental health, substance use). Sage has worked with the homeless populations of the San Francisco Bay Area for the past 20 years. He has developed and implemented partnerships between community-based organizations and government agencies providing permanent supportive housing to homeless, disabled populations.

He has worked successfully with individuals and families living with mental illness, substance use and HIV/AIDS by utilizing a harm reduction modality and an integrated systems and services approach. Sage has successfully housed over 600 individuals and families in subsidized housing applying both master leasing and the cultivated market approach with property managers/owners. Presently he works as Housing Coordinator with Bonita House, as part Alameda County’s Mental Health Service Act (MHSA), Proposition 63. Additionally, Sage is a member of the Alameda County Behavioral Health Care Services MHSA Housing Review Committee. He has presented locally, statewide, and nationally on successful "housing first" strategies for chronically homeless individuals in scattered-site settings. Sage resides in the East Bay with his wife, Ellen, their Mediterranean garden, and their six miniature dachshunds.

“What is ‘Queer Sex’ Anyway? The Myth of the Normal and Psychotherapy”

The question "am I normal?" is often present in therapy sessions, whether it's voiced or not. When it comes to sex, our society has a hegemonic definition of "normal" that excludes far more people than we generally recognize, while being so close to the surface that we rarely investigate its effects with clarity and precision. At the same time, "queer"is often positioned as not-normal without examining how few of us actually qualify as "normal."

In this interactive and experiential workshop, we will explore some of the ways that the Myth of the Normal influences both sexuality and psychotherapy, examine how shame is used to reinforce the Myth, and discuss steps that mental health professionals can help clients transform their relationship to their sexual selves. Particular attention will b e given to the role of sexual shame in creating and reinforcing the Myth of the Normal.

Charlie Glickman is the Education Program Manager at Good Vibrations and has been a sexuality educator for more than half of his life. He received his doctorate in Adult Sexuality Education from the Union Institute and University and is a certified as an educator and CE provider by the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists. In addition to his presentations and classes on sexuality topics, he offers workshops on effective teaching skills, consults with researchers and graduate students, and has recently joined the Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities.

Brian Joseph

“Loving Outside the Lines:
Perspectives on Non-Traditional Couples”

Addressing the challenge of countertransference stemming from the therapists' own race, culture, and sexuality, this workshop will look at potential biases or constraints to effective treatment of couples living in non-traditional partnerships and families.

SJ Kahn is a lesbian psychotherapist in the SF/Bay Area who has practiced extensively in the LGBTI community for the past 20 years. She works with couples and individuals and provides consultation. Her work is relational, empathic, and grounded in the larger social/cultural context. She is on the faculty of the Women's Therapy Center where she supervises interns and provides professional development groups.

Kristin Kali, LM, CPM

“Conception and the Queer Body”

Most queer women, when deciding to conceive, forge a new relationship with the physical body. Making the psychological shift to becoming aware of every detail of bodily sensations and secretions is a time of personal growth and expanded self-awareness. Common barriers that arise during the preconception period will be discussed, along with approaches to assisting clients in coming to resolution about these issues, including the myriad ways queer women relate to the presence of sperm in their lives during the conception process.

This presentation will also address issues such as what it's like to be a sperm donor, sexual fluidity in the conception process, how gender affects family-planning decisions, care of the conceiving partner; and roles and expectations within the family during pregnancy and new parenthood.

Kristin Kali is a graduate of Seattle Midwifery School and a member of the California Association of Midwives, the Midwives Association of North America, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, and RESOLVE of Northern California .

Kristin provides fertility consultations in person and to distance clients at Maia Midwifery and Preconception Services. Her individualized approach to fertility care focuses on building an optimal state of health utilizing natural methods alone or in tandem with fertility medicine. Kristin also facilitates support groups for a wide range of prospective and expectant parents, teaches childbirth education classes for LGBTQI families, and conducts workshops on fertility, lesbian pregnancy, and related subjects throughout the greater community.
 

“Who's Topping Whom: Queer and Relational Theories”

In my presentation, I will address the intersection of queer theory and relational psychodynamic theory in the clinical relationship. I argue that queer theory and relational theory have influenced each other in significant ways. These include the designation of queer superceding the essential identity categories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender; multiple implications for gender and sexual orientation developmental narratives; the necessity for the therapist to foreground countertransference issues in relation to gender; and a less-defended relationship to erotic transferences and countertransferences as illuminating aspects of gendered experience.

I will present a number of case illustrations to provide examples of how queer and relational theories can help us in exploring our clients' subjective realities of their gendered experiences.

Betsy Kassoff is a licensed clinical psychologist who has worked in the queer community in San Francisco for more than 20 years. She was the former Clinical Director of Operation Concern, a GLBT counseling center, now called New Leaf, and the Chair of the Feminist Psychology MA Program at New College from 1992 to1997.  Betsy has published several articles on issues relating to feminism, queer theory, and psychotherapy.
 

“Butch Lesbians: A Vanishing Breed”

Postmodern theory suggests that gender is fluid, emergent, and capable of multiple permutations, and challenges the heterosexual-homosexual and masculine-feminine binaries that divide people into two polar-opposite categories. Categories of gender and sexuality may in fact be social constructs, but these categories do often constitute psychic reality. Defining oneself by one’s sexual orientation has been crucial to counteracting the negative, the marginal, and the invisibility that so many people in the sexual minority have experienced, particularly for those with unconventional expressions of gender. We are interested in exploring the spaces between the postmodern/social constructivist and the biological-determinism/essentialism.

In this presentation we will explore nonconventional expressions of gender in lesbian women. We will focus on women who perceive themselves -- and who are perceived by others -- as embodying what has been culturally constructed as masculine. We will draw on clinical vignettes and a focus group held with self-identified butch women to focus on their lived experience. We also hope to have a discussion about the similarities, overlaps, and differences between being a butch lesbian and being transgender.

Janet Linder is a clinical social worker in private practice for 25 years, seeing individuals, couples, families, and groups. She has taught at the California Institute of Integral Studies, the Women’s Therapy Center in El Cerrito, and UC Berkeley Extension, and is on the faculty of The Psychotherapy Institute in Berkeley and the Women’s Therapy Center. Janet is a doctoral student in social work at the Sanville Institute in Berkeley, where she is studying the impact of a first child on a lesbian couple, and the quality of marital satisfaction in parenting couples. Janet has a long-standing interest in stigmatized identities and unconventional expressions of gender.

Elena Moser is the Clinical Director at the Women’s Therapy Center in El Cerrito, and has a private practice in Berkeley. Elena identifies as a Relational therapist and has been supervising and teaching about the clinical relationship for more than 20 years. She is deeply committed to understanding people’s psychology within the sociocultural and political context of their world. In Elena’s psychotherapy practice she is particularly interested in working with people who have had difficulties forming attachments in previous therapies, childhood loss and trauma, dissociation, and all issues related to unconventional expressions of gender and sexuality. She has been interested in butch women since high school.

Connors McConville, MDiv, MA, MFTI

“Charon: A Queer Body? Traveling the Emotional and Spiritual Landscape with the Dying and Their Families”

A presentation of stories about counseling hospice patients with thoughts and reflections about how a gay spiritual guide may or may not do this differently.

Connors McConville grew up in the Midwest, one of 10 siblings in an Irish Catholic family. After high school, Connors entered the Jesuits and was eventually sent to Thailand as a missionary where he studied the Thai language, culture (especially dance), and Buddhism. Connors returned to the U.S. to complete an MDiv degree, left the Jesuit order, and pursued a dancing career. He returned to Thailand to perform and teach dance, while further pursuing studies in Theravaddha Buddhism, Vipassana meditation, and Thai Massage. Connors received an MA in Counseling Psychology from CIIS, and currently works as a Hospice Spiritual Care Counselor, which includes a lot of dancing for his patients.
 

“The Asian/Pacific Lesbian Experience: Decentering the ‘White Gay Male' from the LGBT Universe, or How to be Gay and Asian, too!"

In recent years, the taboo of homosexuality and the existence of Asian male and female homosexuals – in both the East and West – has finally been broken. Particularly with the positive portrayals of Asian lesbian lives in recent American and Asian movies, including “Saving Face” (USA, 2004), “Spider Lilies” (Taiwan 2007) and “Love My Life” (Japan 2008), it can no longer be maintained that homosexuality is a “Western disease.” Significantly more gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Asian people have come out of the closet in the U.S. and Asia. Recent events demonstrate an increased and public acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people among families and in the Asian community.

As a microcosmic example of this trend, the Asian/Pacific American lesbian experience over the past 20 years will trace highlights of this change, present the Asian cultural constructs that were challenged in the process and explore a theoretical framework underlying the basis for this cultural paradigm shift. This talk is based on findings of a survey of Asian American lesbians as well as historical research and direct experience of the presenter as an Asian American lesbian community activist.

Rev. Trinity A. Ordona was Associate Director of the UCSF Lesbian Health and Research Center from 2002 to 2004 and now works with survivors of sexual violence, teaching and facilitating access to nondiscursive healing modalities from Western and Eastern traditions to underserved populations. Trinity teaches classes on lesbian relationships and queer communities of color at City College of San Francisco. She has a 40-year history of civil rights activism in people of color and queer communities in national and international arenas, and has received several awards for her organizing efforts. Recently, Trinity was named among “The 20 Most Influential Lesbian Professors” by Curve magazine, and along with her life partner of 20 years, Desiree Thompson, was given the “Phoenix Award” by the Asian/Pacific Islander Queer Women and Transgender Community (APIQWTC) of San Francisco.
 

“Working with the Gender Galaxy”

Transgender women who want nothing more in life than to be feminine women, transgender women who are proud butch dykes, transgender men who cannot wait to become hairy and wear pink nail polish, transgender people who want surgeries, transgender people who want nothing to do with the medical system, genderqueer people, third gender people, bois, grrrls, boi-grrrls: This is just the beginning. How to navigate this ever-expanding galaxy of identities and bodies?

This workshop will begin with an interactive presentation on the many different ways in which people are transgender, including gender identities, sexual orientations, and choices about body modification. I will suggest a simple, nonlinear model of gender that gives everyone, transgender or not, space to be themselves.

This workshop will include practical advice on working with transgender and gender-nonconforming clients.

Dylan Vade is a transgender educator and attorney. He has a PhD in Philosophy and Gender Studies and a law degree from Stanford University. Dylan cofounded the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco. He currently teaches medical students at Stanford and Touro Universities how to provide culturally competent care to transgender patients. He has spoken widely on transgender issues, including to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.