Demystifying the model minority complex

12-week virtual consultation group for Asian American therapists & Healers

This group is for licensed Asian American therapists and healers to explore the “Model Minority Complex” - an intertwined set of personal, familial, historical, cultural, and racial stories that cast Asian Americans as docile, hard-working, high-achieving, apolitical, socially inept, frugal, self-sacrificing, and inscrutable.  

We will explore the Model Minority Complex as a gateway to our interconnected internal and external topography: sociohistorical contexts in both the United States and on the continent of Asia, oppressive dynamics and systems; and intergenerational, ancestral, and personal stories. In traveling this path together, we will begin restoring our connections with our souls, purpose, ancestors, and the wider web of life through ritual, creative practice, and community.

Guiding questions will include:

  • How can we re-imagine our perspectives on our worth, time, labor, relationships, voices, and bodies?

  • How can we reclaim our birthrights of belonging, dignity, and relationality?

  • What does a future that we long for look, smell, feel, sound like?

  • How we can be part of a story of interbeing with the more-than-human world?

We will draw upon trauma-informed literature, parts work, depth psychology, Asian American studies, anthropology, liberatory frameworks, restorative justice, Indigenous knowledge, philosophy, and animism, as well as our lived experience to unpack the psychic, social, material, and spiritual implications of the Model Minority Complex on Asian American lives.

Each 90-minute session will include a brief didactic introduction to a topic, group discussion, experiential practice, and resources for further learning. Throughout the group container, opportunities for creative expression and ritual practice will be offered. Finally, at the conclusion of the series, the facilitator will provide support for the group to continue to meet independently if they wish.

WHY DOES THE MODEL MINORITY COMPLEX MATTER

I think of the Model Minority Complex as a knot in a garden hose where the water is our life force energy. As long as we’re beholden to the knot, there’s no flow—of energy, of ourselves, our souls of our life force.

We may not even realize we’re tied up in a knot, so acknowledging this is the first step. From there, we can slowly begin to untangle the knot—to do this, we need to see where the strands originated, examine their contours, where they touch other strands, and slowly pick them apart. Over time, the water can begin to flow within the hose and out of the hose, nourishing whatever it needs to.

It matters because it may be stopping your own flow, and that means less goodness for the collective in a time when we need this more than ever.

Three 4-week modules

  • Module 1: Stories of Separation & Supremacy

    This module de-naturalizes Asian American racialization, links it to oppressive systems and the current polycrisis, and explores some of its collective dynamics.

    Topics include: Mapping the Terrain of the Model Minority Complex; Stuck “In-Between”; Containing Inscrutability; Microaggressions as Collective Transmissions.

  • Module 2: Liminality

    Engaging both the psychic and social, this module unpacks the conditions, contracts, and mechanisms that allow the Model Minority complex to proliferate individually and collectively. This “messy middle” will be a chrysalis for transformation through personal and group reflection.

    Topics include: The (Asian) American Dream; Importable/Exportable Bodies; Exploitable Labor; Exile, Dissociation, & Ghostliness.

  • Module 3: Making Medicine

    This module will focus on various realms that call for reconnection, explore practices for cultivating animist values, and offer opportunities for informal case consultation.

    Topics include: Earth & Cycles of Life-Death-Rebirth; Heart, Soul & Purpose; Ancestors & Spirit; Collective Dreaming.

This group offers:

  • Deeper understanding of concepts, vocabulary, history, and social dynamics regarding Asian American racialization

  • Increased understanding of the links between Asian American racialization and current (social, eco, spiritual) polycrisis and interlocking systems of oppression (white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, settler colonialism, American Imperialism)

  • Belonging with other like-minded Asian American wellness professionals

  • New ways to conceptualize your own relationship with and to divest from the Model Minority Complex, as well as your clients’

  • Social, anti-oppressive, and liberatory lenses through which to view symptoms, presenting concerns, and personal traumas

  • Rituals, practices, resources, and community to support reconnection to the Earth, soul, body, ancestors, and spirit

YOU MAY be a good fit if you:

  • Are an Asian American psychotherapist, wellness practitioner, or space-holder

  • Value decolonial, ancestral, spiritual, and Earth-honoring perspectives

  • Hunger for nuanced conversations about Asian American racialization

  • Want more clarity about what the model minority complex is and how it affects you and your relationships

  • Yearn for more internal freedom, harmony, and self-compassion, and access to a wider spectrum of emotions

  • Long for a path toward liberation from internalized oppression and toward greater accountability

  • Want to better position self in the social justice landscape by being able to move through being frozen by guilt, shame, anxiety, rage, and/or confusion

  • Want a different perspective from the usual anthropocentric and strictly political discussions of power, privilege, and disadvantage

  • Are spiritually curious, but skeptical and/or don’t know where/how to start

Thursdays, 10-11:30am ET | 9-10:30am CT | 8-9:30am MT | 7-8:30am PT
Module 1: January 9, 16, 23, 30
Module 2: February 12, 19, 26, March 6
Module 3: march 19, 26, April2, 9

$900, two sliding scale spots @ $700
bespoke payment plans available

details

 FAQs

  • Group work is potent for a number of reasons I can try to articulate.

  • Short readings/resources to explore between sessions, but I’m not a fan of assigning “homework.” I will provide materials for you, and the onus is on you to make time for them if you wish.

  • During the COVID-19 pandemic, I experienced a condensed and accelerated process of what I’d been undergoing my entire life—an exploration of my Asian Americanness (through writing, my clinical work, and therapy). It was painful and necessary, and I wish I hadn’t had to do it alone.

    Dissertation, class with The Asian American Center for Psychoanalysis, recent ancestral Medicne training, I also love to teach…and I believe I have a particular viewpoint that I haven’t seen offered in other Asian affinity spaces.

  • Yes, I’m happy to offer a payment plan that works for you. You can set the amount and payment dates. — I just ask that the first payment be made before the first session and the last payment be made by the last session. And that we agree on a payment plan in advance.

  • Animism is the worldview that everything around is alive and has a spirit—plant, land, other animals, etc.—and that humans are but one kind of expression of divine source.