Demystifying the model minority complex

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

This group is for Asian American therapists and healers to explore the “Model Minority Complex” - an intertwined set of projections and racial, cultural, intergenerational, familial and personal stories that cast Asian Americans as docile, hard-working, high-achieving, apolitical, socially inept, frugal, self-sacrificing, and inscrutable. These stories, absorbed from various sources—often indirectly—can have a deep unconscious impact.

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 in Asia, oppressive dynamics and systems; and ancestral, intergenerational, and personal trauma.

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?

  • How can we shift unsolicited, intergenerational debt into responsibility within the web of life?

  • How can we embody our liminality as a gift?

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

  • Inspired by Rob Hopkins’ work, what does a future that we long for look, smell, feel, and sound like?

participants will GAIN:

  • More conscious relationship with their own Model Minority Complex

  • Psycho-decolonial-spiritual lens through which to help their Asian American clients

  • A seed of their own unique medicine for the world and potential next steps for nurturing it

  • Resources and supportive community for ongoing transformation

  • Roadmap for further healing

WHY DOES THE MODEL MINORITY COMPLEX MATTER?

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 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 it by seeing where the strands originated, examining their contours, identifying where they touch other strands, and slowly picking them apart. Over time, the water can begin to flow freely through and out of the hose, nourishing whatever life it needs to.

This matters because in not attending to it, we are blocking access to our voices, our power, our potential, and our collective strengths. It matters because it may be stopping your own flow, and that means less goodness for the collective in a time when we need your unique medicine 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.

Content

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 experiences to unpack the psychic, social, material, and spiritual implications of the Model Minority Complex on Asian American lives.

FORMAT

Each 90-minute session will include a brief didactic introduction to a topic, group discussion, experiential/reflective practice, and resources for further learning. We will not meet the week between modules to allow for integration of the material.

Throughout the group container, opportunities for creative expression and ritual practice will be offered. Finally, at the conclusion of the series, Natalie will provide support for the group to continue meeting independently if they wish.

This group offers:

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

  • Sociohistorical, liberatory, and spiritual lenses through which to view symptoms, presenting concerns, and personal and collective trauma

  • A supportive, playful space in which to clarify your own purpose and unique medicine

  • Belonging with like-minded Asian American wellness professionals

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

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

  • Increased understanding of the links between Asian American racialization, current (social, eco, spiritual) polycrisis, interlocking systems of oppression—white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, settler colonialism, American Imperialism— and how these may show up in your everyday life

YOU MAY be a good fit if you:

  • Are an Asian American psychotherapist, wellness practitioner, or space-holder who has been socialized as a model minority

  • Want more clarity about the Model Minority Complex its impact

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

  • Want to contribute during the current polycrisis, but don’t know how, or feel powerless, stuck, or isolated in your path

  • Long for liberation from internalized oppression and greater accountability

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

  • Are spiritually curious and want support, feel skeptical, and/or don’t know where to start

  • Hunger for nuanced conversations about Asian American racialization

  • 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

Module 1: February 5, 12, 19, 26
Module 2: March 12, 19, 26, April 2
Module 3: April 16, 23, 30, May 7

Thursdays
11AM-12:30PM ET | 10-11:30am CT | 9-10:30am MT | 8-9:30am PT

INVESTMENT: $800 / $650 (sliding scale)
Bespoke payment plans available

details

Interested? Book a free consultation

 FAQs

  • This group is intended to be inclusive while also maintaining integrity as an affinity space. Any healing practitioner of Asian ancestry who has considered the US “home” (however tenuous) and who feels you have been socialized as a model minority is welcome to apply for the group. I’ll acknowledge that this usually refers to people of East, Southeast, and South Asian ancestry, but this is not an exhaustive list.

    I’ll also explicitly invite multiracial people and transracial adoptees.

    All that said, it’s complicated, and I want to honor at least some of the nuance involved. Much of the presented material in Modules 1 and 2 will focus on the relationships/dynamics between the U.S. and East and Southeast Asia (and people with heritage from those parts of the world) because these early histories set the stage for the racialization of more recent waves of Asian immigrants. In the second module, we will touch on the racialization of the “coolie,” a figure strongly associated with Chinese and Indian indentured laborers. And this group would not be possible without a deep debt to Palestinian scholar Edward Said and his seminal concept of Orientalism, which originally referred to West Asia, but whose influence has since reached far beyond.

    I want to be forthright about all of this so that 1) we don’t fall into the very traps and elisions we’re trying to avoid and 2) potential participants feel empowered to make the right decision for them. I would be happy to discuss this further in a consultation.

  • During the COVID-19 pandemic, I experienced a condensed 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.

    This group is the culmination of my many projects over the 12 years: writing my dissertation about Asian Americanness in psychology and psychoanalysis; clinical work with 1.5 and 2nd generation Asian Americans; IFS-informed groups for Asian American womxn; a course on the Material and Psychic Preoccupations of Asian Americans for The Center for Asian American Psychoanalysis; my ongoing research on Asian American racialization; and my training in Ancestral Lineage Healing through the Ancestral Medicine network. All of this makes me uniquely positioned to offer a viewpoint that integrates psychological, familial, cultural, decolonial, sociohistorical, ancestral, and spiritual perspectives, which I haven’t seen represented in other Asian American affinity spaces.

    Finally, I love to teach, and hope that working with Asian American healers will have a greater ripple effect for the collective.

  • Animism is the worldview that everything around is alive and has a spirit—plant, land, other animals, etc.—and that humans are but one expression of creation and nature. Contrast this with the more commonly adopted modern viewpoint of human supremacy that places humans in a position above “nature.” This hierarchy allows humans to feel entitled to do whatever they wish to the other-than-human entities, and this same hierarchy and attitude of entitlement gets applied to other humans who are considered lesser (e.g. BIPOC, working class folx, LGBTQ+ people, and those with disabilities).

  • This largely depends on interest and fit, but I am aiming for 6-8 participants, and would cap the group at 12.

  • I will provide readings/resources to explore between sessions, but I’m not a fan of assigning “homework.” It’s up to you the level and extent to which you engage with them.

  • 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. We will agree to the terms of your payment plan in advance.

  • The sliding scale spots (allotted to at least a quarter of participants) are intended for people who are in financial need: for instance, graduate students or early-career clinicians (first five years since licensure) and/or those who work with underserved populations. I won’t ask you to provide proof, we’ll just have a transparent conversation about it in our consultation.