Makungu Akinyela on Testimony and the Mattering of Black Therapy

Makungu Akinyela: Testimony Therapy is a discursive therapy, related to Solution-Focused Narrative Therapy, and any of those therapies that we think about that focus on privileging people's stories about their lives. I tell people that testimony is a narrative therapy with a small “n” because testimony and testifying come from my tradition — the Black cultural tradition, to testify. The way Black folk use it is to tell your story but also to tell the story that you want told about you, to give your testimony. It has some roots in the Black church experience. Folks who are from the South or have been to the South and maybe to a Black church, might have witnessed a testimony service or folks testifying in church where they get up and tell a story. There are parts to testifying it. Usually, a testimony starts out with what I call a doom-and-gloom story. For folks who are into Narrative Therapy, Michael White and David Epston used to call it a thin telling of the story.

So, it starts off with this real doom-and-gloom narrative that goes something like, “Well, I woke up, and the doctors told me that I had cancer and I was going to die. And I've been sick ever since and in bed and I couldn’t get up. And that’s what my life is about.” That's the doom-and-gloom telling. But then usually a testimony begins to sound like, “But if it had not been for my friend or my neighbor, who came to give me support and help...” The important thing about that testifying process — the dialogue — is in Black orality, which is that orality that we are grounded in, the oral telling of stories.

There's also call-and-response. As the “testifier” begins to tell that doom-and-gloom story, there is a response to the call. The “witnesses” let them know that they're listening. “Wow! Really? Well, okay. Amen. I get you.” And that call and response becomes a community telling of the story. It's not just the storyteller telling the story. The witness to the story, by engaging with the story, also helps to shape where the story goes. The testifying usually goes from doom-and-gloom to the call-and-response, and then all in the “community” begin to identify what I call the “victorious moments” in the story.

Narrative Therapy might say those victorious moments contradict the thin telling of the story. And as you get to those victorious moments — if it were in a church ceremony, as people begin to give that feedback, that response to the call — they begin to say things like, “Yeah, it wasn't so bad. It was good.” And then people might start seeing the blessings in their lives in the middle of the doom-and-gloom.

The story begins to become a little stronger and a little more positive. By the time the story finishes and all have experienced victorious moments, transformation has happened, and the testimony becomes, “This is the story that I want people to have of me. This is the story that I want.” It uses narrative ideas, and for folks who are familiar with Narrative Therapy, the preferred outcomes have replaced the doom-and-gloom, thin story.

The important thing about testimony therapy is that it is a discursive therapy. I consider it a narrative therapy in the sense that it's a storytelling therapy. I agree with the narrative therapist, that people use stories to constitute their lives, to describe and explain the meaning of their lives. The critique that testimony gives to narrative therapy is that all storytelling and all ways of telling stories are not grounded in the metaphor of literacy. Narrative therapy, the therapy that was developed by Michael White, David Epston, and that is contributed to so strongly by all those other great people — you know, Steve Madigan, Jill Combs, and Gene Freedman – all those ways of doing narrative therapy are particularly grounded in the metaphor of literacy.   

MA: Exactly, in very linear ways, even the metaphors that are used such as “Turning over a new page, re-authoring our lives.” So, the metaphors reflect the culture that it comes out of, which is primarily a culture whose consciousness is developed through literacy. What testimony therapy says is, “What about those people who come from cultures that are predominantly oral cultures, grounded in orality?” Like the culture of Africans from West Africa, where my folk come from, the culture of so-called African Americans who, basically, trace our lineage and heritage back to West Africa?

Our cultures are primarily oral. So, the thing that shapes our thinking, the way we talk about and think about relationships is grounded in that orality. Storytelling will look different, and the meaning that's given to the story is different. And so, within testimony therapy, rather than being grounded in the metaphor of literacy, I ground it in the metaphor of orality and musicality. Does that make sense? 

MA: I'm paying attention to the rhythm and the beat of a conversation. So, it's not just the words of a conversation that are important, right? It's not just listening to the words that are coming out of your mouth. It's how the words are coming out of your mouth. I'm paying particular attention to things like the relationship between bodily space and the words, the rhythm that's created through bodily space. I'm paying attention to things like the expression on your face because those are all things that also begin to define orality.

In other words, people from oral cultures don't just use the words out of their mouth. It's the tone of the word. You know, where there might be three or four ways that I can use the same word, depending on the tone, it means something different. Also, it might be even the way I might use my body. You know, sometimes people make jokes about Black women. You know, if a Black woman is talking to you and she starts snaking her neck...what's the meaning of that? So, no matter what the words are that she's using, that body motion, the way she takes up space, begins to define the rhythm of the conversation –   

MA: I would be getting in rhythm with you, right?  

MA: I might be mirroring, or I might be thinking, “Wow, he's really agitated here. And I might even slow down my rhythm, and I might begin to speak more slowly. And I might even become a little more reserved, again, because I'm believing that the rhythm and the beat of our conversation is just as important as what you're saying. I might be taking note of and become curious about what the emotional content of your speech might be at that moment, and I’d bring that out.

I was talking to a couple just the other day. Now, this couple happened to be White, but I'm a testimony therapist whoever I'm working with, just like narrative therapists. A narrative therapist, whoever they work with, they're simply using their cultural understanding to engage the work. And that's what I talk about with this. I don't believe that “techniques” in themselves fix things or do things.

But with that couple, there was a conversation going on. In this case, it's a heterosexual couple. The husband listened to the wife say something, and it felt as if she was saying he was the problem. But he was his usual calm demeanor, almost a flat effect. But he began to describe how he was resentful that she was making him into the problem. Sometimes, not always but sometimes therapists are really afraid to engage emotion, particularly “negative” emotion, right?   

MA: First of all, I validated what he had to say. And then I said, “You know — ” Let's call him George. Not his name. “George, I get the feeling that you are real pissed off about right now. And I'm really appreciating that. I'm really glad that you got pissed off enough to say that.” In other words, rather than running away from the emotion, to name the emotion — because I also believe that all our emotions are important. You may have read one of my articles, and one of the things I point out is that oftentimes, particularly for Black people, we're encouraged to suppress our emotions.

MA: Right, especially anger! You're not supposed to do that. I believe that my work as a therapist is creating a space where all emotions are safe, and all emotions can be validated and understood and experienced. Because one of the things that I'm trying to do when I'm working with my clients is — and again, these are my philosophical understanding of this work — that, under conditions of oppression or suppression, people are alienated from their emotions.

A lot of the ideas that I work with come from the psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon. And Fanon talks about alienation, which comes with colonization. And when people are alienated from their emotions, they don't feel their emotions. They don't experience their emotions. So, the emotions control them rather than them being in control of their lives. And so, a lot of the work that I do is about helping people to feel their feelings, to experience their feelings, and to dis-alienate themselves from that.   

MA: That's a good question. And one of the emphases that I make is that this is not about trying to find something that on the front looks like a radically different practice. It's about worldview and understanding. One of the big complaints that I often get if I am referred a Black client, who maybe has previously had a White therapist, is the cultural uncomfortability that they felt in those relationships. It's like that person just didn't seem to get them. They say, “Well, they just sat there and listened. They didn't say anything.” You know, they didn't say anything.” Sometimes they'll even say, “They didn't tell me what to do.” And I'll say, “Well, you know, I'm not going to tell you what to do either.”

But again, it's just that interaction, that responding in those conversations in oral ways as opposed to this kind of a linear conversation. I ask you a question, and then I quietly wait for a response. And then I assess that response. “Okay.” And then I ask another question. And then I wait for a response. That's that linear conversation. Even when I'm doing supervision, I don't want therapists to try to be like me. In this field, that's what a lot of people do, particularly from our generation. You know, we used to go to those demonstrations, and we would be mesmerized by the experts.

MA: Yeah. But, again, when I talk about Testimony Therapy, I'm talking about a conceptualization of the work that we're doing, which is grounded in a philosophy. In a very similar way, when Michael and David began to develop Narrative Therapy, for the most part, they were grounding their therapeutic work in the philosophies of Michel Foucault, in other words, a conceptualization of the meaning of the word. Does that make sense, what I'm saying?

So, you know, human interaction is human interaction whatever the culture, but there are conceptualizations that define the meaning of the interaction. There's a difference between people who come from oral cultures and, again, how stories get told and the meaning of those stories, and people who come from literary cultures.   

MA: I think you're asking a philosophical question. Just off the top, I say, okay, probably that couple that you're describing in that way wouldn't even be coming to see me, right? But also, I think this is about a perception of what culture is and what culture means. I believe that when Black people say, “Hey, I know I'm Black. I'm Black,” that's not about having some deep sense of West African culture, because culture doesn't work like that. You see, the culture of African American people is African, I believe.

It's African in the context of 300 years of colonization, but it's still African. And that doesn't mean that people go around every day thinking, “I'm African. I'm African.” They just are. They're being what they're being. Using Frantz Fanon once again, he once said, “A tiger doesn't have to proclaim its tiger-tude. It just is what it is.”

I described the whole idea of a Black church testimony service, right? That's African. Those are African ways of engaging. People don't name it that, but that's what it is. You know, the way that we talk, right? When we talk about Black ways of speech that we call Ebonics. I guess the more professional way is AAVE, African American Vernacular English. I'm speaking to you right now in pretty standard English. But if it wasn't you and it was somewhere else, I would be talking in Ebonics. But the thing about the way that I speak — I call it my grandmother's language — is that it’s grounded in a mixture of African and English vocabulary, but primarily West African syntax and grammar. It comes from there. 

And this gets far beyond therapy, but we've got tons of research that shows the continuities, the continuations, the relationships between the cultures of African people in the western hemisphere, who are here because of enslavement and other things, and Africans on the west coast of Africa. So, when I'm talking about culture, I'm not talking about something that's this kind of mechanical thing that is easily identifiable. I'm talking about what we understand about the nature of culture, which is constantly moving, changing, and growing. Does that make sense?  

Double Consciousness

MA: Absolutely. And, again, I ground my ideas in, like I said, Frantz Fanon and W. E. B. Du Bois, who was probably one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century — from the whole 20th Century because he wrote his first book in 1903, and he died in 1964. But he wrote a book called The Souls of Black Folk. In there, he defines this idea that's called double consciousness. Basically, he calls us Negros, but he says every Black person has two souls in one dark body, an American soul, meaning White, and a Negro soul. And they're constantly fighting and struggling against each other.

That's something that I could never explain probably to you because you've never been through that. But to be a Black person who is constantly doubting their Blackness but also affirming their Blackness at the same time, right? If I told you, as a little boy — we're about the same age — one of my favorite shows used to be Dennis the Menace. Remember Dennis the Menace?   

MA: And wanting to be Dennis the Menace but also saying, “Wow. I wish I had hair like Dennis,” or, you know, “Wow. How come my mom doesn't stay home and bake cookies all the time? My mom is up working,” right? You know, “My dad doesn't wear a tie except on Sundays,” right? But it's also giving meaning to that. Or growing up — again, we're in the same age group – remember Tarzan on Sunday afternoon, the Tarzan movies?

MA: – and identifying with Tarzan more than the so-called natives? And, as a matter of fact, not wanting to be the native. That's the double consciousness that Du Bois talks about. Fanon calls it the zone of nonbeing.

MA: And Fanon, going from Hegel's master-slave hypothesis. I don't know if you're familiar with that.

MA: Fanon says that's about the idea of recognition and consciousness, that we become conscious of ourselves by being recognized by others. Now, that's fine, but Fanon says, in a colonial situation, the colonizer never recognizes the colonized as human, right?

MA: Sometimes. Exactly. But also, what he says, in the zone of nonbeing, the colonized is never able to have a “normal” relationship.” Because a normal relationship is this, Larry: I and thou. I see you. You see me. We recognize each other. We are conscious of each other. In the colonized relationship, the third person is always in the middle of the relationship. 

So, in describing another person, and this is using me hypothetically, I might say, “You know that guy over there? He's dark-skinned, but he's handsome.” So, in other words, there's another measuring stick to that person to help me describe that person. “You know that guy? He is really dumb for light-skinned dude.” So, there's always these relationships that are in the middle of our relationships. These are the things that affect relationships.

I'm a family therapist, right? These are the things that begin to affect relationships even when they're unspoken. And if you're not aware of the nature of those things, that's what testimony therapy brings to the forefront, that these are also things that are important to think about in these situations. When I've got a husband and wife come in, it's not just the problems they have. It's the problems they have that have been exasperated (sic) in the everyday lived experience of just being a Black person growing up in America.   

MA: Absolutely. Can you be Black in America and not always have this small voice in the back of your head? For Black women, the decisions about how they fix their hair is a political decision and not just a daily decision. The choice. How they do that. Decisions about how we speak and how we are heard, right? If we speak and our speech sounds too Black, or if we speak and our speech sounds too White, right?

MA: The clothes that we might choose to wear. All of those are decisions which are grounded in, “How will I be perceived?” And it's not just how I will be perceived. Also, I'm concerned about how other Black people are perceived because I'm afraid that how they're perceived also may have some effect on how I'm perceived.

MA: Even if it is not named that. There's always this question of... For instance, I was at a conference last week. And my wife and I were about to open our hotel door. I was kind of casually dressed, had a nice little jacket on. You know, my wife is super colorful and flamboyant. So, she had some colorful clothes on. There was a White family about three doors down, and I think they were locked out of their space. And we went to our door, and we opened it up, and one of the women said, “Oh, it's down here." She's telling us, “It's down here.” And we kind of looked confused. And she says, “Oh, never mind.” [laughs]

MA: They thought we were the help. [laughs] You know, I wasn't dressed in any kind of uniform or anything like that. And so, now, the part of that is, you know, my wife kind of got a little... She's like, "Argh.” I said, “Look.” As I thought about it, I was like, “Wow. Why?” What was that about? Why would they assume that I was the help? What is there about me that looked like the help? I wasn't dressed like the help or anything else. But there was that quick assumption. That's what the young people call everyday microaggressions. It's like those things that make you wonder. Now, you're not quite sure, but it's, again, to always have those thoughts. It is not an unusual thing for me to have conversations with my clients, and in some way experiences like that come up in the conversation. Or ideas like that come up. And, again, this is not about people being hyper-politicized or understanding. This is the everydayness of life.

MA: What testimony therapy is about is about having a framework to understand that and to understand the meanings of that and a framework that allows us to engage those conversations in ways that feel safe and also are not committed to having you just basically fit in. You know, our traditional training as therapists is to help people fit in. Do we really want people to fit in to that experience of life, or do we want to give them ways of challenging that and seeing themselves in more powerful ways? 

Therapy Embraces Culture

MA: No. The reason I'm not going to say that is because I don't think just taking a testimony approach, even though I think that the things that I talk about are valid and should be dealt with, is critical because I don't get into the wars about what approach to therapy is best. But I do think that the dominant Eurocentric approaches to therapy are oppressive in that they try to force people to fit into a cultural context that is not their home. That is the subject of the book that I'm working on which is about decolonizing therapy, and that idea of decolonizing and dis-alienating the work that we do away from that kind of therapy which basically assumes Western ideas and cultural values. Eurocentric ideas are the norm and, in that context, the best way to help people's mental health is to help them better be able to fit into those norms. And so, we use those Eurocentric approaches to fit people in.

MA: This is what I do in my therapy room.

MA: If we are not aware of that reality, yes! I believe that the reality of double consciousness, the zone of nonbeing, as Fanon calls it. But there has to be a consciousness of the lived experience of Blackness in the West.

MA: – and how, as a family therapist and systemic therapist, that impacts relationships. That's always the undercurrent of relationships. Even when it's not spoken, even when it's not something that people are consciously aware of in sophisticated ways, it's impacting the way they think. 

There's always this comparison. When we talk about Black male and female gender relationships, there's always that under thing. You know, it's always racialized. When you have Black men who don't like Black women, they say specifically, “Black women ain't shit.” Black women may be thinking, “You know what? I can't stand Black men. I'm thinking about dating out of my race because these men...”

It's all of them, right? And the thing that defines them is their Blackness. That's what makes them Black. So, it defines those relationships. When people are afraid of how their kids look. “I don't want you braiding your hair like that. People are going to think you're a gangbanger or something.” 

MA: So, this lived experience shapes relationships. And, again, so the idea is: A therapy that does not prepare a therapist to be aware of that lived reality in those families that they're engaging with, and then how those families talk about those realities is always going to be a disservice.

And it's not always in high, super political ways. You know, issues of misogyny and patriarchy and racism come up in my therapeutic conversations all the time, but that doesn't mean that I have to be driven to have some high-level political conversation with my clients. It's understanding that. And then, how do I ask questions that help people reflect on the meaning of how they're engaging in this situation, right? Not to convince them of the politics of the situation, but if I'm not aware of it and aware of the significance of this and the experience, I've lost a lot.  

MA: Yes.

MA: All therapy comes from a cultural context. It doesn't just fall from the sky. The people who developed these different approaches to therapy have been impacted and influenced by their own cultures, their own histories, their own knowledges. And, again, I think, because of colonialism particularly for Black folk, we have been discouraged from seeing our cultural ways as being significant to healing. And so, we only rely on something that we learned in a book in class, what I call from old dead White men, right? As I said, my grandmother used to spend the last part of the day doing what she called moaning. You know, basically, she liked to sit in a rocking chair. And she would rock, and she would hum these old spirituals in a very slow meter. It's actually a form of deep meditation.

Combining the rocking of the body, the rhythm, the humming, which then sends a vibration through the body. It's a way of self-soothing. What if we, as therapists, understood the power of that moaning, that my grandmamma called it, and taught those ways of meditation to our clients for self-soothing, for calming themselves down because we saw that as culturally valid but something that we could codify and use clinically?

What if we see, and codify the ways Black people talk orally and to each other as a means of healing in therapy? And we could say, “okay, this is the clinical reason that I'm using this,” because it is clinically and culturally valid as opposed to assuming that this is just folk stuff, it doesn't matter. And we begin to then validate those things. When people come into therapeutic context or therapy rooms and they experience something that feels familiar, that's not foreign to them, it also sets them up for a better chance of change.  

MA: It's not just her. Probably any person that's familiar with Southern culture and Black Southern culture, has thought about their grandmamma’s moaning. It's also probably a corruption of “mourning.” But there's also the mourner's bench where, basically, it's also tarrying, right? So, there's these different terms, but the important thing there is that, okay, what was that actually doing? What was going on when that was going on? How was it affecting the body? 

MA: Yes, from Sweet Honey in the Rock. 

MA: And now that I see those two folks sitting on their porch when they're about to lose their land to the Big Machine, it's soothing. They're not talking about, “This is our death,” but it's a conversation with the spirits. It's a conversation with their ancestors. And so, the question is: How do you use those things that are familiar culturally by introducing them into our practices? You know, not just raw, but it's what all those folks who created all those therapies did. What did Freud do? He went back to his learning about Greek mythology and whatnot. And he began to name and identify the stuff he did: the id, the ego, the superego. 

MA: Right? That's familiar. Greek mythology was familiar in his cultural context. And he basically codified it and makes it a clinical thing. So, it's familiar, right? So, people are familiar with it because it's in their cultural context. A part of the work that we should be doing in decolonization is: What are the familiar things to our culture that have been useful for healing, that have been helpful for people can we take with also our understanding of mental health and all those things? And how can we codify those things so that we create familiar spaces that help people find value in their own selves, their own culture, their own ways of knowing and doing things? 

MA: That's it. And that's the way culture works. People don't “think” about their culture. They just do it. They live it. But, you know, I happen to be somebody who thinks about this stuff, right? You know, I research and I study this stuff. I've become curious about it. But everyday people just live it. There's a saying: A fish doesn't know it's wet. 

Black Family Genograms

MA: I was doing a Meet the Author conversation for the Dulles Center last week with some of their master's students, and that question came up. I think it can be really useful for helping people get a sense of relationships. It's understanding what family might mean for, in this instance, an African American household. Because oftentimes when you ask about — If I just want to know about a household, I specifically say, “Tell me about the household you grew up in.” Because if I say “family,” oftentimes, for African Americans, they'll start talking about their cousins, their aunts, their uncles.

We have things that are professionally called faux relationships. The faux kin network can include play brothers, play sisters, play cousins. I teach a class called African American Family, and we talk about the importance of those. How did those develop? First of all, in the West African sense of family, family is primarily grounded in what we call sanguinal relationship: who your bloods are. In the Western sense, particularly American, the idea of family is grounded in conjugality: which two people had sex and what babies came out. That's the family. So, for instance, during the Great Migration, when African Americans were moving from the south towards the North, the most important question that could be asked and answered was, "Who are your people?"   

MA: Who's your kin?” Because if I could show you that you and I shared the same kin two or three steps over, some third or fourth cousins, even then, it becomes, “Yeah, sure. Come on in. You can stay with us. You’re kinfolk.” That's how people were able to survive and utilize family for that transition of over six million people from the South to the North over a 50-year period or so. And so, that kin network is important.

At the same time, during the days of slavery, what was going on? Sometimes, if your child is getting sold off, you know that they're going to be sold off somewhere far away. And you tell them, “Look. When you get wherever you're going, you look for an uncle or an auntie, and they'll take care of you.” So, even kin-naming becomes important even if there's no blood relationship. Every adult becomes an uncle and auntie. Every age-mate becomes a brother or a sister.

And so, the meaning of family and relationship looks different in the context of Black people's culture. So, one of the things that should be considered in building a genogram is also being able to include that extended kin network, even people who are not related by blood but who have familial relationship to you.   

MA: In an ancestry, in a lineage. So, for instance, when I do my genogram, one of the people that's included as one of my siblings is Eric, who I brought home in the 11th grade because his dad kicked him out of the house. And he and I were hanging out together, he snuck into the house and slept in my bedroom. My mom discovered him, and she says, “Who is it?” “This is Eric. He needed someplace to stay.” Eric stayed with us for the next two years to the point of ending up going to college because my parents helped him get there.

MA: He would be a part of it. He's my brother even though we have no blood relationship. Eric was this genius. He introduced me to reading Rousseau on Revolution in the 12th grade. He and I got arrested together, and my parents bailed him out before they bailed me out. 

MA: Well, I appreciate the chance to have a conversation with you. Look forward to talking to you again sometime.

MA: In an ancestry, in a lineage. So, for instance, when I do my genogram, one of the people that's included as one of my siblings is Eric, who I brought home in the 11th grade because his dad kicked him out of the house. And he and I were hanging out together, he snuck into the house and slept in my bedroom. My mom discovered him, and she says, “Who is it?” “This is Eric. He needed someplace to stay.” Eric stayed with us for the next two years to the point of ending up going to college because my parents helped him get there.