Grief in the time of COVID-19 with Clinical Psychologist Gloria Huh

Season 1, Episode 27

Korean American Clinical Psychologist Gloria Huh on race, grief, trauma and pathways toward healing.

Maggie was unable to record due to illness.

Danielle chats with her friend and colleague Gloria Huh. She is a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice working with oppressed groups, she’s a trauma therapist and teaches university-level courses on intergenerational trauma and diversity.

Gloria, who lives and practices in Seattle, has not had “that much” disruption because of COVID which has led to deep sense of gratitude and also urgency to provide for her clients who are directly affected. She said it’s been a lot of “holding space” for them, helping people to not push themselves to be productive or to overextend themselves but instead to encourage them to be mindful and more patient with themselves.

Smile! Joke around! Gloria tends to be introverted so the shift to working on tele-health has allowed her to connected with her introspective space. She’s able to jam on her guitar or go for a walk and “cry it out” in between sessions which allows her to be more connected to herself making her stronger for others and not get burned out.

Danielle says she loves that Gloria is telling her clients to not try to be over-productive in this time. Danielle has had people give her suggestions for online courses for her kids to take if they are “bored” at home. And while she believes her kids are bored, they simply don’t have the energy for more classes right now.

Many of Gloria’s clients say to her, “What do I do? What do I do?” And she just tells them, “You just need to stay and build a tolerance for the silence. And you body will start adjust and it will be good for your body. We’re not meant to always be at a fast pace.” It’s about being able to stay in the silence, to let out your grief, to be present and themselves in the midst of COVID.

Danielle and Gloria met through the Allender Center, they both took level 1 and 2 certificate training in Trauma Care. [They had the best group, did you hear that Jen?] Their training focused on trauma and how it impacts our bodies and each other.

Gloria’s work is with oppressed groups and people of color and during COVID she is finding there are a lot more nuances; a lot her clients feel guilt for being sad and their trauma work is on hold.

Talking about their childhood emotional pain feels wrong to talk about right now in the middle of a world-wide crisis. She gets them to a place where they can name the fact that they are deflecting from engaging their work in this moment; that the collective trauma somehow overshadows their micro-trauma and family of origin works.

There’s been so much racism exposed and highlight during COVID.

Gloria has noticed that her clients do not bring it up on their own and that she asks how it is impacting them. She has many Asian American clients that tell about the discrimination and bullying that is happening right now and is being reported on the news is triggering for them because it is so closely related to their own trauma growing up. “They feel invisible and it requires for me to name so that we can bring to the surface and say ‘hey I see you. I know this is hurting you right now.’” Her clients don’t feel they can bring the racism up for fear of being invalidated, even though they know it’s a safe place to talk about it with her. She Gloria makes sure bring it up to provide a space for them to talk about.

Danielle says what Gloria is doing is both holding space for silence so grief can emerge and also holding the tension to name certain things that may lead to even more grief.

Gloria’s clients say to her, “You want me to cry!” And she is like, “YES!” It is because the more we look at the details, the pain and the denial, the more you can move towards healing. Grief is a consistent theme with most of her clients and she prepares them even in their initial consultation. Gloria admits she’s an anxious person given her background. She is a second-generation, growing up with immigrant parents who did not know the system. She was thrown in to a predominantly white community and she didn’t know the rules and it created a lot of anxiety for her. So with this in mind, she wants to provide a space where her clients know what to expect and thereby reduces some of their fear and anxiety. Many of them have never had therapy before so she works hard to relieve them of misconceptions and provide structure for a good experience. “Hey, These are things we’re going to talk about… This is what’s going to happen: You’re going to feel worse before you feel better, but trust me in the end it will be so much better. And these are things you will feel… In the beginning there will be a lot of grief, you will feel even more down than you thought you were, and way more anxious.” She asks them straight up: If you can take it, let’s do the work! We can set the pace together.

When clients come some are ambivalent in the beginning (meaning they feel two competing emotions) and so Gloria spends a lot of time upfront going over psycho-education on emotional awareness and understanding your fear response… But the work is always an intentional progressing in the way of more grief that will allow them to make more changes.

Danielle says part of the busyness of life and in being productive is an escape from dealing with the anxiety. Anxiety is already present and what was already there is now coming out. There’s a kindness to slowing things down.

Gloria has intentionally set out to have a multicultural practice that is socially justice focused in order to dialogue about diversity issues and oppression. She has done this so that she could do some of her own healing, with the help of her colleagues, to name her own trauma from being predominantly white spaces where she’s felt unsafe. She has built a tolerance over time. She has learned the hard way to articulate and study her ass off and it’s come at a cost: she’s had high anxiety and it’s affected her body.

Danielle asks how Social Justice enters Gloria’s work, through the classes and courses she teaches? Gloria has to keep her limitations and strengths in mind as she pursues social justice work. Social Justice to her is righting wrong. So anywhere in your community or personal work that you are righting wrong, it’s empowering and increases social justice. Many of her clients don’t even really know racial trauma. They blame themselves, thinking they are the problem. Gloria helps her clients to put the responsibility where it is due, on the oppressive forces, and that relieves them from shame. It gives them freedom and thriving in their own lives. Danielle believes that what Gloria is going is really practical.

Gloria say there is “so much harm done by naming social justice as a progressive movement and having no intention to actually follow through. There is such hypocrisy in even using that word.” She takes a rather conservative approach to social justice and makes sure to pay attention to clients who may have fragility around racial work.

In regards to fragility, as a clinician, here are the markers she looks for:

ASSUMPTION OF TRUST: A clinician should never assume that a client trusts them, because you have not earned it. You are a stranger. “That is privilege to think that just because you have your badge that you can say you are trust-worthy.” There needs to be HUMILITY: If the clinician is too comfortable, too all knowing, it assumes that they believe themselves to be trustworthy without having done the work.
GO SLOW: If someone is wanting to diagnose you a label quickly, to type-cast you… than you are just a number and they are trying to follow some specific manual or script and they don’t really care about you.
NOT MENTIONING CULTURE: If culture is not brought up in the space that is a problem. Even with people of the same ethnicity they will have very different experiences and assumptions. Assumptions need to be explicitly talked about. Whether the same or different, there needs to be naming.

Clients have intersecting identities, you can’t assume sexual orientation or gender identities. Gloria says the goal is not to put them in a box, my goal is to understand them and make the known, so they can understand themselves better.”

Gloria says, “I love complexity. I love going deep."

Danielle says it’s clear that “You really want to know who they are. You’re curious. And there’s a commitment there.

Gloria notes that body language is so important, especially from a cultural standpoint. There is so much “said” non-verbally with unspoken things as subtle as eye contact and smiling. Without knowing the cultural context one could miss a lot about a person. In order to engage someone deeply you have to know the narrative behind, the nuances of culture.

Danielle shared about how at a friends house she would burst into the conversation when things were getting exciting and her friend pulled her aside and asked her why she is always interrupting. She realized that with her own family everyone is talking at the same time and it doesn’t feel like anyone is interrupting it’s just the way they all engage each other in this settling when things are happy and exciting. There’s a certain amount of shared excitement and joy. It was then that she realized in that moment at her friends house she wasn’t interrupting she was trying to show that this is a good joyful moment and that is how she participates. It’s the context and perspective for why Danielle acts that way in those moments.

This is what Danielle believes Gloria is trying to offer her clients: perspective. The intention behind it is so loving but looking at it from another lens, the context matters.

Danielle shifts the conversation to COVID. The president has called it the “Chinese Virus” and there are so many acts against people with Asian ethnicities. The death rate among African Americans us much higher. In Washington state, 17% infected with COVID are Latino, compared Latinos only representing 8-10% of the population. The question is how do we make sense of that. Access to health, where they are exposed…

Danielle says “It’s important to know particular stories about ourselves so we can know particular stories about other people. And we don’t make assumptions.” The coronavirus has really exposed it.

Gloria says the way the nation is responding to race in the midst of people dying, trying to downplay it’s significance… “there is something so familiar about that.” There’s a movement towards blaming and trying to fix “the bigger problem.”

Danielle asks what she would do if some of these high level government officials came into her office. She said that she does have some majority privileged clients in her practice and she always starts with a conversation at the start: “Privilege is going to be named. Are you open to conversation? Can you look at it with some humility and also not shaming? To bring curiosity to the way you’ve grown up in our society…” Gloria says trust building happens before there can be naming. But once naming has happened she empowers them to leverage their privilege to help others. To let go of the false narrative of them earning their privilege in order to be allies for others.

How do you naming without shame?

Gloria quotes Brene Brown saying that shames breeds in secret.

Her gut sense shows her while she’s in a session when she feels that internal cringe to not want to talk about something. That’s the give away that it’s something that needs to be talked about. It might be uncomfortable and they might get defensive…. They may try to pretend they didn’t say it… She focuses on how much she likes them as a person and it builds curiosity for them. There is intimacy, vulnerability and trust in those [client-clinician] spaces that they have the capacity to go there and repair rupture should that occur.

Naming shame is one of the most scary things for her clients but it’s also the most powerful. Once they start naming there is affect change the next session: they are already freer. It’s a difficult process. There is unconscious emotion in the room. And she brings her own trepidation in those spaces from her own stories.

Danielle is eating ice cream while recording.

Gloria says she is still a work in progress and it doesn’t always work with her —sometimes they can’t meet her where she wants to go and sometimes it’s not a good fit. The focus is family of origins, trauma, diversity stuff. But if there is help rejecting and deflection of responsibility makes its really hard to do the work.

Gloria is listening to Esther Perel

Gloria is reading “When Rabbit Howls” by Truddi Chase

Gloria is inspired by Fred Rogers

Connect with Gloria Huh:

Email gloria@interconnectionshealing.com