This is a very personal conversation to which TL brings a lot of humour and grace.

To escape persecution, TL’s family fled South Vietnam when she was 8 years old. TL speaks frankly about her refugee experiences, adapting to Australian culture,  and navigating the process of coming out as a bisexual woman in a traditional asian family.

We traverse her social work career  and  explore the values, knowledge and skills that she brings to her current work in LGBTIQ communities, with particular emphasis on narrative therapy.

Research tells us  that LGBTIQ people are at increased risk of a range of mental health issues including depression, anxiety disorders, self-harm, suicidality and suicide, much of which has been attributed to experiences or fears of discrimination and abuse.

We explore the devastating impact that this  has on mental health in this community, and how TL approaches the challenge of confronting discrimination in her awareness raising sessions.

TL  provides us with a good map on how we can help people move from tolerance to true inclusivesness.

Kudos to the overwhelming number of African Americans, both in front of and behind the cameras, who made this movie so entertaining.

But many of the audience will not know or care who made the movie. They will simply enjoy it because it is a bit funnier, a bit smarter, and a bit easier on the eye than the average super hero film. (And a warning – there a plot spoilers ahead.)

So why bother to review this film? Black Panther also offers a delightful thought experiment on the choices that a nation has when it finds itself with the means to become an imperial conqueror.

Imagine a country with superior weapons, and a belief that its technology, culture, language, religion, medicine and forms of rule are the best on the planet. It could, like the ancient Romans, set about building an empire. Or in a similar vein a thousand years later, behave like the Europeans, fanning across the globe, with lawyers, guns, money, alcohol, flour and missionaries to spread its beneficence.  A beneficence that includes setting nations against each other and enslaving people with no means of defence. Or in an example closer to home it might mean (Like the Russians or Americans), arming minorities just enough to irritate you enemies and maintain an uneasy balance of power.

Alternatively, a potential global superpower might choose a more ethical course. Although we currently lack a worked historical example!

In the world of Black Panther, Wakanda is such a country. Hidden from view in central Africa, it is fabulously wealthy, high tech, and populated with a happy, stylishly dressed and enlightened citizenry. They have great music too!

Although my utopian dreams of government tend more towards decentralised anarcho-syndicalist collectives, I cannot fault the Wakandan King’s decision.

After some elegant CGI battles, the King emerges victorious from an internal civil war in which his opponent was intent on using Wakandan resources to forcibly establish an empire. (A very cool villain, with a heart- tugging back story)

We next see the King at the United Nations, offering his country’s wealth, science and technology to promote peace and prosperity for all.

And why not?

There is a corrupt hypocrisy that operates between governments and their citizens. All nations claim that whatever they do in the foreign policy space is guided by the noblest of motives. But everyone privately acknowledges that any congruence between good ethics and the “national interest” is a happy coincidence.

By and large the drivers of “national interest” are racism, sectarianism, fear of refugees and short term economic gain.

Lets hope we grow before we blow up.

In this episode I bring you a conversation with well known author Patti Miller. As well as her long list of publications, Patti is also well known for conducting writing workshops in Australia and in Paris,  teaching aspiring authors the art of writing memoir.

She’s helped over 40 authors to publish their work commercially.

In our conversation  we talked about one of her memoirs entitled, The Mind of a Thief, and about her writing workshops.

Patti grew up in the town of Wellington in Western NSW. A few years ago Patti noticed a news item about the first post-Mabo Native Title claim in the Wellington Valley.

She began to wonder where she belonged in the story of the town. It led her to the question at the heart of Australian identity – who are we in relation to our cherished stolen country?

Feeling compelled to return to the valley, Patti uncovered a complex history of convicts, zealous missionaries, farmers and gold seekers who had all stolen land from the original inhabitants.

But not until she talked to the local Wiradjuri did she realise there were another set of stories about her town, even about her own family. As one Wiradjuri elder remarked ‘The whitefellas and blackfellas have two different stories about who’s related to who in this town’.

Black and white politics, family mythologies and the power of place are interwoven as Miller tells a story that is both an individual search for connection and identity, and a universal exploration of country and belonging.

In  our conversation-Patti and I burrowed further into the theme of identity as Patti told me how me she goes about helping writing workshop participants find their narrative voices and craft their  stories.

Many of our listeners will relate to the healing power of this process.
If you would like further information about her writing or her workshops- check out her website.

The College commissioned an independent report that contained shocking findings. These included,

• 49% of Fellows, trainees and international medical graduates report being subjected to discrimination, bullying or sexual harassment
• 54% of trainees and 45% of Fellows less than 10 years post-fellowship report being subjected to bullying
• 71% of hospitals reported discrimination, bullying or sexual harassment in their hospital in the last five years, with bullying the most frequently reported issue
• 39% of Fellows, trainees and international medical graduates report bullying, 18% report discrimination, 19% report workplace harassment and 7% sexual harassment
• the problems exist across all surgical specialties and
• senior surgeons and surgical consultants are reported as the primary source of these problems.

You can find the full report here.

There is nothing new in this- and surgeons may be no better or worse than any other professional group, including social workers. We ought to commend the surgeons on their honesty. But why is it so bad? Let me restate the blindingly obvious.

1. Bullies get short-term results. We live in the world of the KPI, the financial year, and the spreadsheet. For many organisations these are not just tools, but substitutes for real values. So let’s get real about the causal factors between “performance” and bullying cultures.
2. Bullies successfully “manage up” and accumulate power and influence. They seek to make themselves indispensable. Many are charming- some are just threatening. The result is the same- wrapping themselves into power structures with octopus-like tenacity.
3. Bullies don’t care about their victims- their empathy stretching only to those who share their world view. Ironically, bullies often see themselves as victims, making the tough decisions, and doing work that others cannot stomach. This theme is eloquently captured in the Hollywood courtroom drama, A Few Good Men. In the climactic scene, a Marine Colonel, pressed to justify the death of one of his men says, “You can’t handle the truth! ..we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? ..I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You..curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like “honor”, “code”, “loyalty”. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said “thank you”, and went on your way.” (You tube clip here)
4. Policies and procedures meant to investigate and remediate are not used -or do not work. Whilst there is important work to be done to assure real justice and protect human rights, these processes will never be perfect. The best analogy is an ambulance waiting at the bottom of a cliff. And to be sure- if you need an ambulance you want a good one! However I have yet to see a workplace with a truly independent process, and sufficient to power to prevent the organisation from shielding the bully, together with the authority to deliver timely justice. Even the quick removal of a bully still leaves post traumatic scars and necessary repairs.
5. Whistleblowers are often ostracized and punished. Like a surgeon seeking consent for a dangerous procedure, we need to be honest with victims about the true chances of proper redress, as well as the consequences of alternative choices. We all have stories of traumatised colleagues, who in hindsight, could have and would have protected themselves better.

And so lasting remedies will rely far more on prevention than cure. If your workplace rates highly on the following parameters, it will seriously reduce the oxygen that bullying needs to survive. Does your organisation

1. Identify and reward respectful behavior
2. Honor truth
3. Encourage cultural diversity
4. Acknowledge the need for work/life balance
5. Plan for the long term
6. Reject quick fixes and addresses root causes
7. Nurture talent and innovation
8. Seek to promote talent from minority groups

If your workplace does not have real metrics to monitor progress on these things, it will continue to be a haven for bullies. And no matter where you sit in your organisation you can have some effect on promoting a positive culture.

Sigmund Freud

Last year Helen Garner published a book about Robert Farquharson, the man found guilty of drowning his three young sons by driving his car into a dam. Garner attended his trials, finding it both a compelling and gruelling experience. In a piece she wrote recently for The Monthly, reflecting on her own and others’ reactions she said,

What people find really hard to bear, I’ve noticed, is the suggestion that they themselves might contain their share of human darkness, hidden inside their souls. I believe this refusal lies behind the strange hostility I encountered, many times, when I was trying to write about Robert Farquharson’s trials. Friends would ask me what I was working on. When I told them, they would be at first quite curious – what’s he like? What sort of man is he? I would be barely three sentences into an account of his family background, his broken marriage and his broken heart, when my questioner’s mouth would harden into a straight line and she would make a sharp stabbing movement at my chest with a straight forefinger and say, angrily, “You’re making excuses!”

Well no….she was simply trying to put herself in his shoes. And as we know, any social worker in direct practice does this routinely in her daily work, immersing herself in the lived experience of others. Being empathic is often straightforward, but sometimes it means bearing witness to the unbearable: a death or trauma, bringing fear, rage, loathing, shock or impossible grief.

The memory may be fresh or a recollection from 50 years before…it matters not.

Nevertheless it is an essential component of our work. We travel the liminal space between high and low tide, love and hate, compassion and fear – the no man’s land between monsters and angels.

Vicarious trauma is an ever-present possibility. Without supportive colleagues and good supervision we would burn out, stumble and fall. But as dangerous as this space is, it is the space of shared understanding. How can we possibly help our clients if we do not truly understand them?

Yet increasingly we live in a world where empathy is conflated with agreement; (If you see it from their point of view -you can’t be one of us!) The monsters are cast out and the liminal space is simply denied. If monsters do exist, they live in another country entirely- never in our own hearts. ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ is replaced with membership of ‘Team Australia’.

In this brave new world of black and white, marketing plays an essential role- expunging monsters and polishing our claims to membership of the just and righteous brigade. Politicians surround themselves with flags, and we too burnish our images on Facebook and Linkedin reflecting a world without fear, rage, doubt or failure.

Professional bodies of all disciplines manage their marketing with great care. In our sphere the promotion of counselling or psychotherapeutic intervention is so relentlessly upbeat, that a visitor from another planet would conclude that a kind of utopia (of the Stepford Wives variety) has already arrived. Writing about this issue in 1913 Freud said,

A friend and colleague of mine.. once wrote to me: What we need is a short convenient form of treatment for outpatients suffering from obsessional neurosis. I could not supply him with it and felt ashamed; so I tried to excuse myself with the remark that probably physicians would also be very glad of a treatment for consumption or cancer which combined these advantages.

 The talking cure has gotten longer and shorter, gurus come and go; solution focused, narrative, CBT, mindfulness, and so on. Whatever the form, the variables make it impervious to randomized controlled trials – but easy to promote as the next good thing.

But the need for empathy and understanding will never go away; nor the implicit knowledge that we all carry darkness in our hearts. To be understood is a necessary and visceral experience- not achievable via text message, website or user manual. In the real world therapeutic gains are often hard won and provisional; bullies thrive and the oppressed are permanently damaged, along with those who try to help them. Too many of us are depressed and despairing because we cannot live up to the shiny expectations of our social milieu.

This however is not an invitation to cynicism or despair; it is a reminder to temper hope with reality, to know our limits, to use language for truth rather than propaganda, to admit that our best is sometimes not good enough and to acknowledge that we are both monsters and angels.

 ..much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness

Sigmund Freud

The seeds were sown back in the day by John Howard. Tax cuts and the Tampa. He lost an election- but not before these policies became bi-partisan. From 2005 to 2012 we bled $169 billion on tax cuts we didn’t need…Money that should have been invested in health, education and public transport. And to cap it off, 42% of this money went to the top 10% of income earners. How do they keep getting away with it?

Many of us cringed as asylum seekers baked in the sun on the deck of the Tampa. And now we routinely incarcerate innocent men, women and children in conditions that would trouble the RSPCA.

John Howard certainly tapped into the dark side of the Australian psyche. Manning Clark famously described two strands of the Australian character; the enlargers, and the punishers and straiteners. These dark times have thrown up plenty of leaders who seem to take real pleasure in punishing and straitening. Joe Hockey has inherited the mantle of Peter Costello, and Scott Morrison has taken the baton from Philip Ruddock. Encouraged, these kinds of leaders are popping up in all our institutions, large and small. Bring on the KPI’s and efficiency dividends.

The seeds of Tampa and tax cuts have now grown to a full toxic bloom. Universal Medicare hangs by a thread, the unemployed have had their dignity stolen from them, and higher education waits for a straitening dose of free market medicine. And by the way…climate change is some other countries problem. We just need to sell our coal while it is still worth something. The fair go is being hollowed out.

We will end up being defined, not by our common collective humanity, but by our individual spending power.

Nevertheless we refuse to give up or give in. Trade unions, churches and many other progressive organisations keep standing up for human dignity, a fair go, and a genuinely civil society. See for example the Sydney Alliance.

And-“If we all light up we can scare away the dark.” These are not my words- they come from the song Scare Away the Dark, by singer-song writer Michael Rosenberg. (Passenger) My favorite lines…..

We want something more not just nasty and bitter We want something real not just hash tags and Twitter.

We’re scared of drowning, flying and shooters But we’re all slowly dying in front of fucking computers.

So sing, sing at the top of your voice, Oh, love without fear in your heart. Can you feel, feel like you still have a choice.

If we all light up we can scare away the dark.

You can see and hear it here on you tube.

To all my readers- Thank you for all your encouragement. I hope you have a festive season full of love and kindness.