Justice-Centred:
Healing Injustice Through Being Seen and Heard

Injustice

Injustice is suffered when we are wronged in one or more of a myriad of ways: violence, humiliation, unfair/inequitable treatment, abandonment, betrayal, trauma, systemic oppression, scapegoating, silencing and more. Given the breadth of possible injustices, I don’t think there is one person who hasn’t suffered injustice in some way, on some level. The degrees by which we suffer injustice vary greatly, but I believe it is a universal human experience.

As a therapist, I am always listening for stories of injustice even if clients never use the word. 

What often happens is that clients come to therapy describing their suffering with terms like stress, anxiety, and depression. Some clients will be able to name that they’ve suffered trauma or grief. But interestingly enough, it is very rare to have a client name injustice as the specific experience they were suffering. Yet its effects are deeply felt. I have found that when I name it in session, many clients resonate with, “Yes! That’s it!”

The fact that injustice is often invisible yet ever present suggests to me that injustice is doubly suffered:

1. the injustice of the actual event itself, such as the wounding/trauma that happened, and 
2. the injustice of the invisibility and/or silencing of the injustice that was suffered in the first place. 

In other words, we were wounded and then that wounding was never (or only partially, on a surface level) named, seen, or heard by others. This is a painful experience and so many of us are carrying this with or without knowing: the injustice we suffer can be invisible to others, but also to ourselves.

The question then arises, what do we do about it? Well if injustice has been suffered, then we need to do justice as a restorative act. 

What can justice look like?

When I was being trained in Existential Analysis and Logotherapy, we were presented with three important conditions that must be present in order to experience that one is allowed to be oneself: attention, justice, and appreciation (Längle, 2003). The simple, but poignant definition of justice given was “to be taken seriously”. The instructors hit home the point that it isn’t enough just to be acknowledged by another that you exist as a person, but to be given justice: to be met with a “look that lingers”. In other words, to be really seen as who you are, for the other to receive your presence. 

Buber describes the quality of these encounters in his seminal work, “I and Thou”. It is the experience that when I meet with you, you are not an “it”. You are not just another object in the office or my next client of the day who I’ll pay attention to for the next 50 minutes. To be a “Thou” means that I honour and regard you as a person by taking you seriously, really hearing and listening to you, and committing to understanding you and your life. For you to be a “Thou” means that I am also moved and impacted by you. And your impact is felt long after you leave the office. Essentially, you matter. Your ideas, your questions, your words, your tears–all of it, all of you matters. My aim is to be fully present and to take seriously who you are and what you say (or don’t say). 

Which leads me to…

Faces, voices, and justice

C. S. Lewis’ “Till We Have Faces” has been foundational to my work as a therapist. It’s a retelling of the myth of Eros and Psyche from the perspective of Psyche’s sister, Orual. We follow Orual’s story as she wrestles with her anger toward the gods as she feels her sister has been wrongly taken from her. Orual wants justice. She spends most of her life writing a book (her argument) against the gods, and she is angered that they never answer her. Near the end of her life she finally understands the purpose of her writing which is captured in her statement:

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

C.S. Lewis (Till We Have Faces) – emphasis added

What does Orual mean? She finally comes to realize that what she thought she had to say, through her efforts of writing a book, was not actually what she needed to say: all those words didn’t truly capture the “face” of the pain within her soul. It wasn’t until she was able to name– “utter the speech” of how she truly felt that she was able to meet the gods face-to-face and finally experience justice.  

C.S. Lewis named this phenomenon “having a face”: Orual was given justice through being seen: by the gods, yes, but most importantly, seen by her own self.  It has always struck me as interesting that C.S. Lewis used the term “face” rather than “voice”, since it is through being heard that Orual is seen. 

Feminist psychologist, Carol Gilligan, has written extensively on voice:

To have a voice is to be human. To have something to say is to be a person. But speaking depends on listening and being heard; it is an intensely relational act.

Gilligan, 1993, p. xvi

The essence of being a person, with an embodied presence, is born through having a voice. In other words, our authentic self comes alive through voice and through this voice being received by another. 

Inspired by both Lewis and Gilligan, my close friend and colleague, Elizabeth Chan, captures the meaning of Lewis’ work in her brilliant thesis on trauma and voice (note the nod to Lewis in her title, ‘Till We have Voices:  A Feminist-Relational Approach To Understanding The Process Of Healing And Becoming Whole Through Lifespan Integration Therapy” – it is well worth the read).

In it Elizabeth writes,

With our voices, we convey the multifaceted actuality of our lived experience, and with our voices we make known what it means to be us, what it feels like, what comes up for us, how we are impacted.

Chan, 2017, p. 21

When we suffer trauma, wounding, or injustice, we often find our voices are silenced or stolen. This in turn perpetuates wounding as a lost or silenced voice impedes our ability to root in relationship. Gilligan expresses this beautifully:

Voice destabilizes the notion of separateness, renders it illusory, because we are constantly taking in other people’s voices. Speaking and listening is like breathing out and breathing in, and psychological troubles come when people start holding their breath, when they cannot take in what others are saying or let out what they are feeling and thinking. Voice is an instrument of relationship, and in losing voice, one loses relationship. This is what makes trauma so devastating, so isolating.

Gilligan, in Kiegelmann & Gilligan, 2009, para. 66

justice and our work

Our experiences, our pain, trauma, suffering, want to be heard and want to be seen. Doing justice means to give voice to our experience and to feel re-connected in our relationships. Whether or not we know it, we are looking for justice. And just like Orual, it takes more than talking about it (which can really just be talking around it) to feel heard and seen: we need to be able to name it and feel the effect of it. To have it witnessed and held by another: to have a voice and for this voice to be heard. This is my aim in doing justice through our work together: I aim to help you “utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul”. 

In order to utter that speech, we need to be able to name what it is that we suffer from. This is far more difficult to do than many of us realize.

For example, have you ever had any of these experiences?

• You keep talking about the same situation with others again and again but you never feel like you can scratch the itch. The situation continues to bother you and there is no resolve.
  
• You go blank when trying to describe how you felt about the situation. You can express what happened, but not how it impacted you or how it made you feel. 
  
• You stick to the same words to describe the experience, and often the words you choose aren’t very descriptive or are quite broad: “It’s stupid” “It was interesting” “I felt weird”.
  
• You have a deep knowing of what you mean, but you struggle to find the words to articulate this knowing.

If you have, you’re not alone. This is often because we have not yet been able to name what we are suffering from, and the effect it has had on us. We may be able to name the symptoms we are having (anxiety, low motivation, etc), but naming symptoms is a lot like talking around the issue. And we will continue to do that in search of justice where we can finally name the experience and have it witnessed and understood by another. 

Many of us assume that naming and identifying our suffering should be easy–I mean after all, if we are suffering, shouldn’t we know what we are suffering? Ahh yes. I wish this were the case, but such knowledge is not so easy to come by. The pain of injustice lives in a territory beyond words: the realm of the body, the heart, or as Lewis wrote, the soul.  That’s where I come in, with the classic ‘talk therapy’ approach (paired with somatic exploration too): it’s part of my work to put words to experiences–to help clients move from a place of not knowing to knowing (cognitively, emotionally, somatically, spiritually). Or more so, help clients shed the belief that they ‘don’t know’, when in fact, they have known their experiences deeply and need to step into trusting that inner knowing.

I’m sure you’ve heard the axiom “knowledge is power”. We are empowered when we have knowledge and understand our experiences. We are empowered when we are able to articulate/express what we know. We have an experience in which we are doing justice to ourselves when we are aware of what we know and feel and can accurately, authentically express it–in other words, when we have a voice. We have a feeling of justice being done to us by others who listen to us, take us seriously, and try to understand us.

Systemic injustice

It is not possible to fit everything I want to express about justice in one blog post. This is particularly true in regard to the topic of systemic injustice, however I’d be remiss not to mention it at all–specifically Miranda Fricker’s work, as it intersects with this post’s discussion on the intersections between voice and knowledge (=naming suffering) and justice. In “Epistemic Injustice: Power and Ethics of Knowing”, Fricker describes the ways people are systematically wronged in their capacities as knowers. Simply put, epistemic refers to knowledge: what and how we know what we know; therefore, epistemic injustice means suffering injustice in the domain of knowledge. Fricker’s work explores the way epistemic injustice is experienced on a societal level. And what is felt societally is also felt personally. 

The injustice of a given collective shows up in the counselling room in very personal ways. Along with our personal woundings, many of us carry the pain of systemic injustices: we feel the weight of injustice that ripples across generations, across people, place, and time. When you come for counselling, it is important for you to know that there is space for both your personal experiences of injustice, as well as the injustice(s) of the collective that you carry. And although we are meeting in a one-to-one capacity, my hope is that our work together will ripple out and be felt in other relational spaces beyond the counselling room.

in conclusion

If it isn’t already clear, justice is a topic quite close to my heart. It still feels mysterious, and I’m continuing to learn and reflect on the form it takes in relationships. I’m writing this in a particular moment of time, knowing that this guiding principle will continue to evolve (they all will). 

With that being said, here are some ways I commit to justice-doing as a therapist that can be felt and experienced in our work together:

• Listening, curiosity, and understanding: I’m committed to hearing what you are really saying and will ask you many questions to ensure I understand you in a way that feels resonant to your experience.
  
• Empathy: I come close to your experience, take it in, and am moved by what you share. I may even cry with you. Sometimes clients are concerned that what they’ve shared will negatively affect me, but not to worry: Along with feeling it, I also metabolize your experience, move it through my body, and release it too.
  
• Dialogue: Through engaging with you in dialogue, we can find the words together to accurately name and give voice to your experience so you can arrive at a place of being able to lay it to rest or let it go if that is what you need.
  
• Education: I share with you the information/knowledge I have so that you can decide what you’d like to do with it: learn more about it, integrate it, or leave it behind. My hope is to counter the effects of injustice* by sharing language and concepts that may help to illuminate your experiences and empower you with understanding.
  
• Resourcing: If applicable, I will recommend other interventions, healing modalities, practices or places where you can get other needs met or supplement our work. I will also be transparent with you if I am not able to meet your needs or where another practitioner is better equipped.
  
• Contextualize: I will factor in and openly discuss the effects of systemic oppression and societal structures that perpetuate injustice on personal and collective levels. This is especially important when so many of us have internalized shame that does not belong to us, but rather belongs to the systems that oppress us.
  
• Advocating: For some clients, I take a more active role in ensuring their voice is heard with other professionals (or others in their lives) so their needs are taken seriously and better met (always with client consent).
  
• Creating a hospitable, safe dynamic in which you can honestly share with me how you experience our work. My hope is you feel safe enough to give me feedback if you feel uncomfortable or don’t like something so I can continue to do justice in our work together.

In summary, my guiding principle of being justice-centred means that I aim to help you find the name for what you feel/experience, provide a supportive relational container so you can come close to the feeling of it, and to be with you in it, witnessing, hearing, and sharing in your experience.

*Fricker refers to this type of injustice as hermeneutic injustice.

References

• Buber (1923) I and Thou
• Chan (2017) Till We have Voices: A Feminist-Relational Approach To Understanding The Process Of Healing And Becoming Whole Through Lifespan Integration Therapy
• Fricker (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing
• Gilligan (1993) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development
• Kiegelmann & Gilligan (2009) Making Oneself Vulnerable to Discovery
• Längle (2003) The Art of Involving the Person – Fundamental Existential Motivations as the Structure of the Motivational Process
• Lewis (1956) Till We Have Faces