Listening with Your Heart in Indian Country

The author centers and anchors her therapeutic and psychoanalytic work in the community and her years working in Indian Country, by braiding threads of her personal and familial narrative to emphasize the crucial value contextual self-understanding brings. She explores how a multi-dimensional awareness in creating and building epistemic trust is centered on recognizing and supporting those who have experienced abuse and neglect, proximal and historical violence and intergenerational grief and loss, and the layering of epistemic trauma that many with complex trauma are burdened to carry. The work highlights the application of Reflective Network Therapy (RNT), a unique intensive psychoanalytic treatment modality provided in the classroom for children aged two to seven, impacted by trauma, abuse, behavioral difficulties, developmental delays, and disorders, via its “mentalizing” networks and the alignment with Narrative Therapy, and the Tribal tradition of storytelling. The author reminds us that the foundation for recovery is to start a new narrative, but this can only occur once historical issues have been addressed. The practice of working in social networks, listening deeply with attunement while using the process of mentalization, and working in the transference helps inform and guide the working clinical relationship and provides culturally informed trauma care and treatment. When we offer a place that is safe for spirit to rest, the soul has an invitation to join and a place to settle in. Listening with our hearts and minds to the reverberations allows the conversation to be one of transformative healing.