“When We Goin Do Something That Is We” The Myth of Universality in Clinical Work Part 3

In part one, we explored whose knowledge is considered important. In part two, we spoke about how the Caribbean child develops an understanding of self through the people and institutions around them. In this final part of our story, we turn the focus on ourselves as local clinicians and briefly explore what happens when the frameworks we were trained to use meet the cultural realities of the Caribbean people we serve.

Only later in our educational journey in psychology and social work did we become more aware that the textbooks that taught us about our work promoted human development, wellness, and family functioning through a universal lens. The universal lens means these topics are understood and treated the same way, no matter where someone is in the world.

In Western textbooks, for example, Bronfenbrenner's ecological model explains how a child's development is shaped by the family, the school, the neighborhood, relationships between parents and others, and even government policies. Clinicians worldwide, including here in the Caribbean, often use this model. However, while useful in some instances, the model is often taught in ways that privilege the nuclear family. Yet here we are as local clinicians in a Caribbean space where many of the children we work with develop within extended family systems that include grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents, cousins, and godparents.

Another example is that within Bronfenbrenner's model, there is no explicit mention of how enslavement, colonialism, and white supremacy shape policies, identities, and laws, which indirectly influence the ways Caribbean families operate. As local clinicians, we encounter clients who hate the color of their skin, the texture of their hair, or local food and fruits. This example touches on historical and cultural realities that shape the Caribbean individual but are not addressed within Bronfenbrenner's model.

Based on our clinical experience, the psychology and social work we were taught in Western universities are not always fully applicable to our clients in the Caribbean, who come to us with their own family, communal, and intergenerational values and solutions. Yet we often stick to textbook frameworks of what a well-functioning child, family, or community should look like and push these models onto the clients we serve, believing the theories and solutions promoted in textbooks are objective or even universally sound.

We have been doing this work long enough to know that there is no such thing as culturally neutral textbooks or assessments that measure intelligence, personality, or family functioning. As the well-respected psychologist Dr. Linda James Myers says, “We need to acknowledge the myth of objectivity when working with clients. It is humanly impossible to be completely objective because we always bring our own experiences to our subject area. Getting people to acknowledge this and develop cultural humility toward cultural epistemes that may be very different from their own is a significant challenge.”

Cultural episteme refers to how a community understands what counts as knowledge, who is considered knowledgeable, how healing is understood, and what a healthy or well-functioning family looks like.

For example, a Caribbean grandmother shelling pigeon peas with her granddaughter, as she shares family stories and proverbs with her because she is having difficulties at school, is the grandmother’s traditional strategy to support and calm her distressed granddaughter. This may not be printed in psychological textbooks, but that does not make grandmother's knowledge invalid.

As local clinicians, we acknowledge that it will take time for us to reclaim or even rediscover our Caribbean ways of knowing and doing within our respective fields. However, public awareness about reclaiming and applying our own wisdom traditions within education, psychology, social work, and even politics is a good place to start. We want to stress again that "doing something that is we" does not mean throwing away everything we have learned. Rather, it means questioning what we have learned and assessing its relevance and applicability within our Caribbean space. Because we have always been producers of our own knowledge, this questioning may, at times, require us to develop alternative frameworks rooted within our “Caribbeanness.” Our Calypsonians promoted Caribbean ways of knowing long before Western universities created academic language to describe it.

Authors

‍Sherritza Peterson, M.A.Ed., M.A., Community Advocate, Social Workerdrs.

& drs Xiomara Balentina, Community Activist, Psychologist, Therapist

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