What do feelings and emotions have to do with anti-oppression work?
Join me as I welcome longtime VISIONS consultant and counselor Felipe Garcia, who specializes in Transactional Analysis, the liberatory psychology framework at the core of our model. Felipe is the author of several articles, including one you may have read if you’ve been part of a longer VISIONS training called "The Role of Feelings in the Workplace."
This year, 2024, is the 40th year of VISIONS existence, and this is another in our ongoing series of stories from elders in our community. VISION was founded in 1984 by a group of psychologists and others who brought their clinical skills to bear on the problem of racism and other forms of oppression, including the role that emotion and feeling plays in anti-oppression work. Not only has Felipe has not only done extensive work in this area–he still actively teaches what he calls The Responsive Process.
In addition to Felipe sharing about his background and journey, we talk about what transactional analysis is and why it is so useful in anti-oppression work, and, of course, what the role of feelings in the workplace is!
Read more of Felipe's work at https://www.winningtogether.org/
See what's coming up at VISIONS!
About us
Into Liberation: A podcast about transformative change, equity, and liberation is a production of VISIONS, Inc, a non-profit that offers effective tools that help individuals and organizations communicate and forge connections across differences that drive collective success.
Since 1984, we’ve offered research-based, time-tested approaches to cross-cultural learning that invite participants to engage in equity and inclusion work, starting at the personal and interpersonal levels and expanding to include changes toward institutional and cultural levels.
Whether it’s a book club, around the family dinner table, a school board meeting, or within your company, VISIONS offers actionable approaches that empower people to identify actions, explore their motivations, and effectively move through sometimes complex situations with respect and humanity for others and their differences.
Follow us!
Instagram: @visionsinc_org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VISIONS.Inc.1984/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/visions-inc.org/
Music credit: Tim Hall @tv_hall
...
What do feelings and emotions have to do with anti-oppression work?
Join me as I welcome longtime VISIONS consultant and counselor Felipe Garcia, who specializes in Transactional Analysis, the liberatory psychology framework at the core of our model. Felipe is the author of several articles, including one you may have read if you’ve been part of a longer VISIONS training called "The Role of Feelings in the Workplace."
This year, 2024, is the 40th year of VISIONS existence, and this is another in our ongoing series of stories from elders in our community. VISION was founded in 1984 by a group of psychologists and others who brought their clinical skills to bear on the problem of racism and other forms of oppression, including the role that emotion and feeling plays in anti-oppression work. Not only has Felipe has not only done extensive work in this area–he still actively teaches what he calls The Responsive Process.
In addition to Felipe sharing about his background and journey, we talk about what transactional analysis is and why it is so useful in anti-oppression work, and, of course, what the role of feelings in the workplace is!
Read more of Felipe's work at https://www.winningtogether.org/
See what's coming up at VISIONS!
About us
Into Liberation: A podcast about transformative change, equity, and liberation is a production of VISIONS, Inc, a non-profit that offers effective tools that help individuals and organizations communicate and forge connections across differences that drive collective success.
Since 1984, we’ve offered research-based, time-tested approaches to cross-cultural learning that invite participants to engage in equity and inclusion work, starting at the personal and interpersonal levels and expanding to include changes toward institutional and cultural levels.
Whether it’s a book club, around the family dinner table, a school board meeting, or within your company, VISIONS offers actionable approaches that empower people to identify actions, explore their motivations, and effectively move through sometimes complex situations with respect and humanity for others and their differences.
Follow us!
Instagram: @visionsinc_org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VISIONS.Inc.1984/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/visions-inc.org/
Music credit: Tim Hall @tv_hall
...
Hello, you're listening to Into Liberation, a podcast about transformative change, equity and working against oppression. I'm Leena Akhtar, Director of Programs with VISIONS Inc. Welcome. Today I'm excited to welcome Felipe Garcia, a longtime Visions consultant and counselor, who specializes in Transactional Analysis, which is a social psychology framework that is at the core of the Visions model. Felipe is the author of several articles, including one that you may have read if you've been part of a longer Visions training, called "the Role of Feelings in the Workplace. This year, 2024, is the 40th year of Visions existence, and this is another in our ongoing series of stories from elders in our community.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Visions was founded in 1984 by a group of psychologists, among others, who brought their clinical skills to bear on the problem of racism and other forms of oppression, and this, in my opinion, is our secret sauce. One of the things that drew me to the Visions model was its adeptness around the role that emotion and feeling played in anti-oppression work. Not only has Felipe done extensive work in this area, he still actively teaches what he calls the responsive process. In our conversation, in addition to Felipe sharing about his background and journey, we talk about what transactional analysis is and why it's so useful in anti-oppression work and, of course, what the role of feelings in the workplace actually is, and we're recording.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Hi everybody, I'm really excited today to be talking to Felipe Garcia. Felipe is an elder in the Visions community, a longtime clinician and one of my instructors in the Libertory Psychology Framework transactional analysis, which, as Visions consultants, we all went into training around. I haven't talked to Felipe in an extended way before, and so I've been really excited about this conversation. Felipe, before we begin, would you introduce yourself briefly to everyone listening?
Felipe Garcia:Well, I'm Felipe Garcia and I'm a master's in marriage and family therapy and licensed professional counselor Actually, I just let go of my license in Texas marriage and family and professional transactional analyst. Well, that one wasn't a license in Texas, that's through the TA Association. I've been. I was in practice in San Antonio for about 50 years in marriage and family and I did a lot of group therapy and a lot of transactional analysis training. I had training groups here and in Mexico City and in Monterrey and in the Rio Grande Valley for many years in the 80s and 90s and into the 2000s, and then I closed my office about three years ago. Before that I was a teacher of theater and drama and speech for eight years and then before that I was a school counselor and then after that I was a consultant at a regional service center for counselors for two or three years and then I went into private practice in 1975. So that's a little bit about my professional life, my home life.
Felipe Garcia:I grew up in South Texas, a little town called Bend Volts, south of Alice, and it was a small city and a small high school.
Felipe Garcia:There were 100 people in the whole school. There were 22 in my graduating class and most of the people in the community were my cousins, either on my father or on my mother's side. There were two communities, one was called Bend Volts and one was called Palito Blanco, and my mother came from Palito Blanco and so it was a large family. My mother had like 11 siblings, and my father did too, and so I had a lot of first cousins and so I grew up in this kind of like protected environment and I didn't know at the time but we were like probably upper middle class because we had businesses. My father and his brothers had businesses, ranching and general merchandise store, cotton, gin and some fields where they grew vegetables and corn and cotton. So then I went to St Mary's University as an undergraduate and then to the University of Texas as a graduate in theater and then back to the university and I got my master's in counseling there. So anything of that that catches your interest.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:So much of it. I had no idea that you had a background in theater and in teaching before you went into counseling. So for people who may not know, because this podcast it goes out to people who are basically in the vision's community kind of in a very wide sense so for people who might not know what transactional analysis is, how would you summarize it?
Felipe Garcia:Transactional analysis analyzes transactions Transactions meaning we normally call interactions, or when we communicate with each other and we analyze them from the point of view of the ego states and the premise in transaction. I'm going to say TA for now on, and that means transactional analysis. The premise in TA is that people operate from one of either three ego states. There are five behaviors in the ego states, and the ego states are child, adult and parent. And the child ego state is who we were as children, as all the way from infants to 11 or so years old, and it's still recorded and so we can access it. The child ego state, that's our original self, our natural, real self, and then our adaptive child, which learned how to socialize and live in the world, of what to do legally and culturally in our world, and so that's the adaptive child. And then there's the adult ego state, which is the other ego state, and that's that's begins to develop as we begin to have language and think and problem solve. The adult ego state is like our computer. It asks and answers questions like what, where, when, that you know are answerable with facts. So it's a separation between feelings and facts in terms of adult and child. And the parent ego state is what we took in from the people that were racing us either our parents or whoever was racing us and also the environment, teachers and other people around us when we were children and so we kind of took it in. Some people don't take it in because it's harsh and that leads to problems, but we normally take in our parent and then we find ourselves behaving and sounding like our parent, pointing the finger, using you a lot, and the parent ego state is controlling, but it also can be nurturing. The parent ego state also is nurturing, particularly if you had nurturing parents. Unfortunately, if you didn't have anybody who was nurturing in your youth growing up, you may not have too much nurturing parent in your parent ego state and you have to use your adult to develop it in the here and now. So those are the three ego states. So we analyze you say hello and I say hello. That's a complimentary transaction, that just seems nice. But if you say hello and I say shut up, that's a different kinds of transaction. We call block train or cross transaction and we want to analyze what was that about? Where did that come from? So that's transaction analysis.
Felipe Garcia:There are two other concepts that are important to transactional analysis, and one is script, which we call the script, the live plan that children decide on when they're very young in terms of what's going on in their environment.
Felipe Garcia:So they'll make decisions like I'll never be happy, or I'll never be loved, or I'll never love anybody, or I'll never let myself do this or that, and those are early decisions that we make that may still be impacting our lives, and so we analyze script through games, and games is what we do over and over, out of awareness, to reinforce those decisions that we made early on as children.
Felipe Garcia:And so we analyze what you're reinforcing life positions, because transactional analysis believes and operates out of the assumption that people are okay, you are okay, and that means you have value and worth and deserve dignity and respect, and so do I and so do all others, including individuals or groups. And so if something is happening that is not reflective of that okay, okay relationship, we analyze it, because it may be that the persons are operating from either an I'm not okay, you are positioned, or I'm okay, you're not positioned, or I'm not okay and you're not okay, position, which is very depressing. So, analyzing those positions that the person might still be reinforcing, we move into helping and trying to point that out to them and inviting them into change.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Thank you. Thank you for that wonderfully succinct summary of the big concepts in TA.
Felipe Garcia:So it is big and it's easy to describe a quick level like that. But I've been analyzing transactions for over 50 well, 50 years and it's still very, it's still a learning curve. I'm still learning about it because what it does is analyze humans, and humans are complex and unique.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Absolutely.
Felipe Garcia:So as.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Visions consultants, we take workshop called TA101, which is a two-day overview of the major concepts, and I was reminded when I sat in on a PACE2 workshop this past fall how deep and intricate and rich this framework is. Now you just gave us a high-level overview and, for people who are listening, could you tie it to why this is so profoundly applicable, which it is? It's a really powerful and generative framework for anti-racist and anti-oppression work.
Felipe Garcia:Well, there's a concept in transactional analysis called contamination, and if you see the three ego states that I described as three circles sitting on each other on top of each other at the top one is the parent, one in the middle is the adult and the one in the bottom is a child Contamination is when either the child and or the parent ego state overlaps the adult and confuses opinions and feelings for facts, and so it's very important in the work of anti-racism and anti-sexism work, and all the anti-work is to help people get in touch with their own prejudices, both about themselves and about others because of the environments they grew up in, and learn those prejudices and their call contamination, and that's a very effective way to help lead people into understanding their out-of-awareness behaviors that may be impacting others negatively or themselves negatively because of internalized depression.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Is that exactly, or?
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Yeah, thank you so much for that.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:It struck me as I deepened my learning and deepened my training just how much the visions model, the whole thing, everything that we do, the learnings, the exercises, and especially the deep introspective exercises that we do in the PACE trainings, are rooted in this framework of transactional analysis, and it took me a couple of years before I was able to see the direct links.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Now, philippe, you've done a lot of work on affect and emotion specifically, and I think we have this long list of questions and I'm really enjoying nerding out about this with you, so I hope you'll indulge me. One of my favorite settings in which to do visions work, and especially the affective work, are places like academic institutions and STEM institutions, places where there's this longstanding kind of deeply rooted hostility and distrust of affect and emotions, and introducing them to the visions model and giving them a framework for how important and useful and valuable and really vital to this work getting some adeptness with emotions is. So, whatever, you want to speak to that, especially in light of the workshop that you gave recently and its connection to anti-racism work. I'd love to hear about that.
Felipe Garcia:Well, the first thought that came to my mind as you were describing academic settings and a lot of clinical and professional settings where feelings are considered not germane is very sad, because feelings lead the way and they're at the bottom of everything. I had a trainer once in transactional analysis that used to say that when he had a client that he was talking to, he always saw the child of the client sitting on his lap, and so that's a way of getting helping, staying in touch with the fact that you're really dealing with a child in many ways, regardless of their behavior. So it's unfortunate that in many settings feelings are considered not useful and actually are tried to avoid them. My work has been from very early on, both when I was in education as well as when I was in doing clinical transactional analysis work, of the importance of feelings. Envision the work dealing with feelings is called feelings as messengers, and that is that the feelings send important messages about needs. The ones that we're used to are like having to go to the bathroom or being hungry or being tired and sleepy. We automatically respond to those, although some people didn't discount them. They don't even pay attention to those very well, and we get into trouble when we're not paying attention to our bodies messaging us through our feelings. I call it the responsive process because we respond to it both in ourselves and in others when they address us about their feelings or when we want to address them about their feelings or ours. I call it the responsive process and I have written several articles about that, three in particular. And then, like you said, I just did a workshop on that.
Felipe Garcia:So there's the feelings and then there's thinking about the feelings in order to decode the feeling and identify what it is that our body is needing. For instance, if we're angry because we're being treated unfairly, discriminated against or with prejudice, there is a feeling reaction to that and how to deal with it. So thinking about that feeling and then figuring out how to deal with that feeling in terms of the person that's doing it, and what's effective and not effective and what might be useful and what might not, is important. So that thinking is about what is this about? And then how can I? What can I do?
Felipe Garcia:And then the third part to the feeling response is to act, to do something, and it may be that you do something yourself, directly with the person, or it may be that you do something with hopefully a support group of same, like people For instance, if it's people of color or women or GLBT people to get support from them to impact the system rather than try to impact at the personal level, because very often that's doesn't go anywhere. So we have to analyze it through this thinking step. So thinking about feelings and taking feelings into account is very important in the work of anti-racism work. Thank you.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:I have to say I watched the workshop before this recording session and I really appreciated just the elegant simplicity of the responsive process and it actually got me thinking about a couple of things that were happening in my own life in a different way, because I realized in the triangle that you had up there I was going like a pinball between feeling and thinking.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:I was like wait, there's a third step, I could act. So, and even being that methodical about it, like okay, here is this feeling, like what is it telling me, etc. And then what can I do about it? Even that is more, by leaps and bounds, more emotional literacy than I certainly grew up with. So thank you for that and thank you for. Wonderful.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:So I love that and I would be very happy to link to your articles in the show notes. So if you send them to me, I can make sure that anybody who's listening can just look at the show notes and click on them.
Felipe Garcia:The articles are on a website that is called winningtogetherorg. Under the tab publications, the articles in particular about this topic are called reactivity and another one called responsivity, and then there's one called the role of feelings in the workplace. So those three articles which are at that website explain into more detail this feeling and the messengers. Fantastic, so glad that you brought up your example, because that's what I was hoping for in doing that, that workshop. I use it all the time by myself with myself, like, for instance, when I was getting ready to talk to you today. I thought you know, I don't have much to say about this, and at the same time, either with the workshop I was thinking everybody already knows it or I'm trying to do too much, but anyway I scare myself. That's a very common feeling for me. In transactional analysis we call it a racket feeling, which is our favorite feeling, and we have to be careful with it because it's often present even though there's not a stimuli for it. I'm a worrier and so I worry, and then I look to see, find something to worry about to match the feeling, because there's not much going on that worries me. So when I was worrying about doing the workshop and scaring myself with that I didn't have much to say in terms of action in response to the feeling. Sometimes it just means that attitude adjustment and it's not always easy because we're so prone to feel that way in our body that is sometimes hard to change the feeling. It may be scare, or it may be sad, or it may be anger. That is our favorite feeling that we go to often in spite the circumstance. So how you want to check for the accuracy of the feeling in terms of responding is that scare is a threat, either imagined or real. And my scare were imagined because I've done this workshop for many, many years and I've talked about this topic for many years and I know it. It just comes out naturally and so there's no seeking any kind of help for the feeling. I reached out and got some reassurance a couple of times. When it's a real scare because you hear a noise in your house outside or something and you want to carefully go, look to see what's happening, that's an action taking in terms of a real scare. You're walking across the street and the cars approaching and you quickly get out of the way. That's action in terms of the scare.
Felipe Garcia:Sadness is about loss and so that needs space to grieve and, hopefully, support, and some people like support and some people like to be on their own by themselves, and anger is an intrusion of some kind, either a denial or an intrusion. And so it makes sense that you reestablish boundaries. When somebody is either shoving you or yelling at you or treating you unkindly or unrespectfully, you want to re in some way reestablish that boundary to protect yourself. And it's important to remember that sometimes we substitute the feeling like.
Felipe Garcia:Very often people will get mad when they're sad, because men are given messages not to feel sad or scared. That's not manly, and so very often they'll feel angry instead, when in reality there I find lots of my clients come in angry when they're really scared. And so it's important that you identify the feeling in response to the stimuli in order to decide how to take the action. And sometimes the action is going to be in response to the stimuli outside, if it's real, like the approaching car, or to respond to the stimuli internally, if it's not real, like. What I do is work at reassuring myself and stopping myself from feeling the scare, although it is a challenge, because life is the challenge.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Right. So the stimuli can be something that happens externally, something internal, like a thought, or just the momentum, as you said, of the dominant feeling state reaching for something to latch onto Right. I appreciate that summary. The article the role of feelings in the workplace. That's one that we include a lot in our pre-work or during session work packets, in pace and other trainings. And for people for whom that idea is counter-intuitive, how would you like playing on the title of your article what is the role of feelings in the workplace?
Felipe Garcia:Well, I wrote that article because I was working for visions, both in the US and Japan and in England, and we were working a lot with engineers and scientists who, as you stated a while ago, neglect or ignore the importance of feelings in relating to in-building and managing people, and so I wrote that article.
Felipe Garcia:I already had reactivity and responsivity, but it was more clinically based, and so I wanted to write an article that was for organizational settings. It was true in most companies that employees were invited to leave their cultural selves at the door and take over and operate out of the corporate frame or culture which denied feelings. And the new, the change that we were inviting them into making and they did to a large extent because they were long-term consults, they were years was to invite them in to learn how to respond to their own feelings and learn how to respond to them what role is being played, and how to respond to the feelings of people who they're supervising or other people in the work team. So feelings are very important in the workplace. That was the reason I wrote the article was to write something that kind of had examples and reflected more about its application in an organizational setting.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:I think it's a great article and I see constantly in organizations bring this up when we talk about processing content. If people aren't happy with the process, they'll make it known, and if people can't speak openly about their feelings it'll come out in different ways. So if people are scared, we might see a phenomenon where people are kind of picking a process, like being critical of minor, minor points when it's really about something else. So feelings have this way of derailing processes if they're not acknowledged Absolutely.
Felipe Garcia:Including and absolutely in work settings as well, absolutely in work settings and I was a consultant in education and I did a lot of training for parents, teachers and counselors, educators in general, and the first consulting job that I got at the Regional Service Center here in Texas, in San Antonio, was called Crime and Drug Addiction Prevention.
Felipe Garcia:It was in the late 70s and because I quit that at 75, that's when I went into private practice, but even then I was really emphasizing the importance in preventing crime and drug addiction is the importance of teaching children how to deal with their feelings, both as parents and as teachers. And at that workshop that you were talking about, I talked about the use of the responsive process in helping children deal with their feelings, their sadness, their scares, their angers. Very often we're afraid of their feelings or we tell them to stop feeling that because we don't know how to deal with it ourselves, and instead what is useful is for us to say I hear that you're feeling really mad or scared or sad or whatever. Would you like to tell me what's going on and what are some options in terms of responding to it, so that we can, from very early on, help children learn how to address their feelings and that they're very important messengers and very important stimuli for us to respond to in some effective way.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Great. So you started in education and in theater and then you moved into counseling, and then tell me about your trajectory from there and how you got connected to visions and how you started applying this work to the anti-oppression, anti-racist work that visions does.
Felipe Garcia:Well, my career and my life has been kind of like directed by some other energy rather than me, because I went to a small school where there was no guidance and counseling and guidance to help people with their trajectory in terms of their careers. So I was interested in theater because I love theater and I love musicals and so on, and so that's what I, and there was a small theater department at St Mary's where I went to undergraduate school and speech. Actually I was interested in design and I didn't know how to put that into my life at work and that was the closest that I could find at St Mary's. But then later I was teaching school and then it came time to get a master's in San Antonio, and the only master's that I could get in San Antonio, because I had gone to the University of Texas where graduate studies in theater was either to become a principal or a counselor, and I didn't want to be a principal, so I got my master's in counseling. I started working with junior high school children and it became apparent to me that the problems that the children were having were often family problems. So I started addressing, going to home rooms in a junior high school and inviting the students into counseling to say counseling is not when you're in trouble, it's when you want help. And so it changed the environment of the counseling process, just being a scheduling office and disciplinary office to one which was office for help and direction. And I did a lot of my work in terms of training educators was in training them to help deal with their feelings and the feelings of their children.
Felipe Garcia:So, oh, the question was the trajectory. So, and what got me interested in this? So I've always been interested, from very young, first of all in people. I'm just interested in people and differences. What makes you difference? In my community there were mostly Latinos, and the only white people that were there were either because they came during the Dust Bowl and the government had given them some land, and or the child of the superintendent of the school. And I remember asking the child of the superintendent of the school who I played with, what did you all have for dinner? And it was an attempt for me to figure out how they were different. And so I had these two interests One was about people and how they were different, and what was the other one? And the other one was why don't people get along? Why do people fight and why do people have wars and what would prevent that?
Felipe Garcia:So I wrote an article. One of the first articles that I wanted to write was the article which is also in that website, called Winning Together, and it was an article about how to work together to create collaborative community and collaborative team building. And so one of the elements in that article, in terms like the elements, include vision, contract, cooperation. Those are the elements in building collaborative communities and one of them is communication, and for communication I wrote.
Felipe Garcia:When I went to write an article about all of this, it just seemed too overwhelming and big, so I thought well, I'll just write the one about communication, which I call reactivity, and the reason I called it reactivity is because I was wanting to help people identify and move away from being passive. Passive is doing nothing effective about a problem. That's when you're being passive is you have a pain and you're not paying attention to it or doing anything about it, or you are you lose your job and you get depressed and don't do anything about it. But this one was about getting along with each other and building teams. So it was, I was doing that work and, like I said earlier when I was introducing myself. I had a lot of training groups and then Val invited me. Val and I were friends. Val and Angela and I were friends before vision, so when vision was getting born.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:So that's Dr Valerie Bats and Angela Bryant who are two of the co-founders of visions.
Felipe Garcia:That's right. So Valerie invited me to come to New York to what was then called Four Day and now it's called a PACE workshop, which is a four day introduction to the visions model. And so I went and Val invited me to do some teaching of transactional analysis at that group and then to be a participant in the visions work. And that was very exciting and interesting to me and I learned a lot. Because I didn't know a lot about racism. I knew. I knew that my family had experienced it in terms of being Latino, but also my family had property and it was easier for them to address that than it was for poor people who are at the mercy of employers. So I learned a lot at that first visions four day that we did in New York and that got me into learning vision, the visions model, which was very enriching for me. And then Valerie kept inviting me to do more training for visions at different settings and that's how I got involved with visions and that's how I got involved in rent. I racism work Fantastic.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:So a lot of the people who are in the visions orbit, like a lot of our elders, have literally been around, if not since its inception, then certainly for decades. So what is it that led you to stay and what kept you coming back? Like what keeps you being part of the community? What keeps you being part of the community?
Felipe Garcia:Well, I came into visions. Not knowing visions breaks out into people of color or white groups.
Felipe Garcia:In order to address to support groups, to build support groups, and I didn't know which breakout group to go to, because I'm white but Latino people of color, and so it was so I would go to each.
Felipe Garcia:Sometimes I'd go to one, sometimes I'd go to the other. But now I realize that I really was a non-target, that I should have gone to them, although I really can relate to both parts of it, to both the target and targets, a non-target side, which I think most of us can, and so. But in general I came as a non-target in terms of exposure to the work. So I learned a lot about the target group population and their experiences and my my out of awareness, prejudices and contaminations that I was talking about earlier. And the other thing that was very useful that I learned was that I hadn't put a lot of thought into was the levels of oppression, which is personal, interpersonal, institutional and cultural. I had been paying attention to the personal, interpersonal, a lot more than institutional and cultural at that time, but visions open up my eyes to those other levels of application and impact. So, in a kind of like indirect way, that's how I came to visions.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Beautiful. So you continue doing am I correct in thinking mostly your clinical work, as well as doing some consulting and training for visions? Do I have that right?
Felipe Garcia:Yeah, I'm not doing very much anymore. I don't take in clients Sometimes I'll see a client that I've seen before and I'm not doing training groups and I'm not doing nothing much with visions anymore. I'm kind of retired and enjoying it. And retired is a whole other. And being old, it's just so interesting. It's another target group being old and it's so interesting how it plays out.
Felipe Garcia:The most common one that I noticed is that I belong to a men's group, which I had a lot to do with starting it, because I think men have a lot of work to do in terms of learning about their own oppression from the sexism environments they grew up in. And I noticed that how often people will talk to each other is, if I'm not there, assuming that I'm too old to get involved. I don't know what the assumption is, but I noticed it and, of course, in terms of you know I will intervene with making a comment or something and joining the conversation rather than feeling bad about it, but it's very interesting to me. I noticed it somewhat in my own family. What I mean by my family is that I'm very close to a lot of nephews and nieces, so that's what comes to mind.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:I'm also curious about from when you joined visions. Was it mostly that you were doing your own clinical and training work and then consulting work as well, or were you heavily involved in consulting? That's just a curiosity question.
Felipe Garcia:I was heavily involved in consulting myself in my own practice and Valerie Batson invited me to do consulting work with visions, so for me it was like another consulting job.
Felipe Garcia:But, it was not like all consulting jobs, because there was a lot for me to learn from the visions model, my experience there. But both when I went to train my first TA 101 was with Tom Harris who wrote I'm okay, you're okay. And it was a week long workshop and at the end of the week they had what they called a marathon, where you engaged in doing your own personal work, because, like visions, transactional analysis training requires a lot of doing your own personal work which is one of the great important values of transactional.
Felipe Garcia:I mean both transactional analysis and visions in their application, because the visions model so much emphasizes your own personal work and both in visions and in transactional analysis, I came to learn to help others. I didn't come to learn to help me, but it was through my process of learning, learning transactional analysis and the visions model, that I get in touch with a lot of my own issues and actually, the older I get, the more I realize like I was just talking to you about my worry ward part that I'm addicted to worry. I'm doing pretty well in terms of managing it, and one of the ways that I manage it is not to give me stimuli that will make me nervous. That's really smart.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:So that gets into my next question, which would be would have been some of your biggest lessons as you've done this work, either externally, in terms of interfacing with clients, whether that's organizations or people, or internally.
Felipe Garcia:Well, one of the biggest lessons was to learn and continue to learn about the impact and the intervention at all four levels of work, and to always think about that the impact that the cultural and institutional levels are having on our interpersonal and personal lives, and the need to impact at the other levels. But the other thing that I've learned and continue to learn about is the barriers to the work, the difficultness of the work, because there I used to think that my dream was to create a world where people were getting along and respecting each other and cooperating. And what I've learned and continue to learn is that there's a lot of people who don't believe in in I'm okay, you're okay. They believe either I win or you lose and you lose, or you or you win and I lose. They operate from a competitive frame of reference and I didn't say this earlier, but I meant to, because it's very important describing the responsive process that we operate out of the assumption that people are okay and deserve respect and that the goal of our work is to create success and happiness for people.
Felipe Garcia:And so, in terms of creating the environment in which to work, it's important that we teach people how to deal with their feelings in ways that are going to be respectful of themselves and others. So what I've learned is that there's a lot of people that don't believe that happiness is possible, that getting along with people of difference is valuable or useful. So I think it's just a realization of there's a lot of people that don't believe the way you do, and so the learning is how to deal with that. One of the things that I say about the responsive process is that I practice it, even if people don't believe in it or practice it themselves. I can practice it for myself, and I think the vision of work is in the same way. We can do the alternatives to the modernism behaviors, whether people are doing them or not.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Right. I think that's a really important point, because we give people the tools and resources to generate different outcomes, either externally or internally for themselves. I mean, obviously we do our organizational work and we also give people supportive tools to make outcomes happen differently or at least feel different, even if they're applying things just from one side.
Felipe Garcia:Right, exactly Because the goal, actually one of the goals I'm not saying the goal, but one of the goals is to live an okay life in spite of living in a competitive, racist world.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:So when you say competitive, Felipe, I think that that might. I think people, most people, will have a sense of what that means. And when we say it, we do mean certain specific assumptions that are operating. Would you give a quick overview?
Felipe Garcia:Thank you for picking that up, because I did a chart also when I was working in England, for visions differentiating healthy from unhealthy competition and I think it's on my website and I think it's in the winning together article. But visions, I think, has it as a handout and it's called I think it's called living cooperatively in a competitive world but, it's a chart that has positive and negative behavior.
Felipe Garcia:Football games, for instance, are okay, being competitive behavior although I wonder about that, but anyway, because in general they work in a cooperative environment. You notice, after they finish the game they hug each other and congratulate each other and we're competing to do your best to get an advancement in your job or to get a higher degree. You work real hard and so people are often don't like to think about Confronting competition because that's what got them to where they're at. But that I'm talking. The negative competition is interpersonal competition. Relational competition is when I'm operating, you say something and I say yes, but or you share a feeling of what's going on with you. This happens very often is I'll say I was feeling very tired about that or very scared, and we'll say a little bit about that, and then the person responding will say I was real scared about something else and they go on with their, their story. That's a the frame of reference. That's a competitive transaction, because it's not a response to my feeling is introducing another topic which is their feeling. So Competition, interpersonal, is the one that is negative. That I'm talking about when you want to win an argument or when you want to put someone down. So that's, that's a competition. That is not useful.
Felipe Garcia:And what I'm more interested in, I've always been more interested in finding the solution rather than spending a lot of time and defining the problem Once you define the problem. That's why I wrote winning together is what do we need? How can we work better together? And I wrote this article with I think it has about 10 or 11 elements to it and I think that I'd like to rewrite it and cut those down a bit. But it was like we have to have a mutual vision and then we have to have identify goals to meet that vision. And if people are working together towards a mission, they cooperatively, they will. I have a chance of being successful better chance of doing that in our government today. It's so sad how infrequent we see them identifying a problem and working together at solving it. They start arguing about whether there is a problem to start with, or what is the problem and then how to solve it. That's, that's unhealthy competition. Did that help?
Dr. Leena Akhtar:explain it. Yes, absolutely, thank you, and I appreciated something that you said a couple of minutes ago about it's very obvious and this is not the first time I've heard it and about oppressive environments, oppressive systems being inherently deeply competitive in in the way that we define competitive. I win, you lose, whether that's at the interpersonal, personal level, or at the group, systemic level.
Felipe Garcia:So I'm right, you're wrong, I'm better, you're worse, I'm smarter. There's many ways in which and none, like I said very often that's done out of awareness, and so the work that visions does, particularly since they emphasize feelings, is to bring that out of awareness behavior into awareness, in order to be able to change it, not only in how we treat others, but how we treat ourselves. Right I, I was a youngest of five, and one of the feelings that I often deal with is, as a young is what do I have to say? You know, it's. The older people are the one to know. So that's an internalized depression that I have to address in my own life.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:It's amazing how impactful that is how those old scripts can still run Absolutely, and those out of awareness behaviors. So, just to be explicit, some of the things that we're referring to are when we introduce in the portion of our trainings that we call modern oppression and internalized oppression, slash survival behaviors. So behaviors that are out of awareness, that we were sort of scripted into, caught and taught that we might be engaging in, not realizing it. And you're right, it's very powerful how just even the naming and the categorizing and the sometimes, actually frequently uncomfortable work of identifying those behaviors in ourselves this is certainly true for me Identifying those behaviors in myself was a very powerful step towards being able to choose differently.
Felipe Garcia:Right Good.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:So you mentioned that you're retired and enjoying it and you know, I feel very fortunate that I was able to attend that TA 101 where you were training, and even more fortunate that it's available on YouTube. That was like quite a find and I'm curious as somebody who's been doing this work in various settings and who's seen it evolve and who's written on it what would you want to teach or make sure people who are doing this work or who are interested in bringing about a better world? What is it that you would want them to know?
Felipe Garcia:Well, what comes to mind is what I've always wanted to teach, which is one of the ways in which we can make teams and organizations work cooperatively together, and how to identify and change oppressive behaviors. And what I was thinking of as you asked that question, was that, to a large extent, I've always led my life in terms of wanting to do what I call God's work, whatever I'm here supposed to be doing. So, even though I'm retired and I'm not doing a lot of teaching, opportunities come up, like this opportunity. You just ask me if you could interview me and I thought, well, that's a way that maybe I can be of help to somebody, and daily there are ways in which opportunities come up for me to be of service in some way or another. So when I did the workshop that you attended or you viewed recently, called the responsive practice in the responsive process, I thought, well, here's an opportunity for me to do some teaching, and so I did that, and now this interview with you. So I'm trusting and I was to say hoping, and I think I trust that I will be shown opportunities to be useful and helpful. Either, I thought of maybe doing the supervision group, practicing the responsive process.
Felipe Garcia:So I'm waiting to see what the next steps are going to be for me in terms of teaching and impacting people, but in terms of what I want to help people learn is the importance three things that I did in the workshop. One of them is the importance of self focus, paying attention to what's going on internally for me, whether I stimuli or where my sadness, my scares, my loneliness or my ideas, my judgments. What's going on for me internally is the very important first step that I wish for people. Secondly is to learn the power of what I can do about what's going on for me in terms of me personally doing it or and or getting support to address it. And the third is to behave in a way that reflects the OK, this in myself and in others, and to reinforce and to operate out of a place of forgiveness and love. So those should three behaviors that I see, that I'm hoping that people, that I can help people, impact people with change.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Beautiful, beautiful, thank you. I love that. So those are my formal questions. And, felipe, how's your energy level Like? Can I ask you a couple more things? Sure, yeah, so when we connected last week, you were talking about how you first connected to visions, and I'm aware this may or may not make it into the recorded podcast. And I do want to just ask because this is part of the Elder Story Project. As I mentioned, most of the consultants in my cohort didn't ever get a chance to meet or get to know Joe Lewis, and you shared a couple of memories of her. I'd be curious if you'd be willing to talk about her a little bit.
Felipe Garcia:Well, joe and I were friends and colleagues and we used to get together, usually with two conferences a year in transactional analysis, usually once in San Francisco and another one in the wintertime in warm places like here in San Antonio. We had a couple of times, yes, and then we were training together and Joe and Mark developed what they call the cooperative process and they had training groups that they called the cooperative. What did? They had a center for cooperative, for cooperative I forget what it was called, but it had cooperative in the title. And I was doing the same work, except I had my own process of addressing it and they have theirs. And when we got together at visions it was just so obvious that all of us Valerie bats and the reason I mentioned Valerie and not Angela is because Valerie was also a transactional analyst and so was Joe Lewis, and so was myself.
Felipe Garcia:So, was I, and so we just could work together so easily because we had the same frame of reference.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:And from my understanding, the answer to me is obviously yes, and cooperative process. That's directly out of transactional analysis, right?
Felipe Garcia:Well, I'm not. I'm not sure, because the originators of transactional analysis were quite competitive themselves.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Interesting.
Felipe Garcia:Well, they were humanistic, they were a man.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Sure, yeah, yeah.
Felipe Garcia:A medical model, yeah, but we're really wanting to learn to be more collaborative. And Claude Steiner was very influenced by a woman named Hoge Wycov. They were creating a kind of a kind of a cooperative commune sort of thing. They were very popular in the 70s and so he was developing tools to help build teams together. And I'm assuming that Joe Lewis was also impacted by Claude and by Jackie Schiff I know she was, because she and I were Jackie Schiff's training groups together. So I just found it very compatible working with Val, I mean with Joe Lewis, and so also with Val Bats.
Felipe Garcia:What else can I say about Joe? She was a great clinician and she was a great trainer and I had the honor of working with her many times. We were doing the keynote speech at a conference at San Francisco when she died. We were, we had planned we were going to do a keynote on the vision's model, applying it to the group, and she passed away and I had to end up doing it by myself. That was another time that I got myself real nervous, but it went out very well, yeah. Yeah, she was a lovely woman, really powerful.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that and I also know what an influence she has had on this community and the organization and the model, so it's lovely to hear stories from people who knew her as well as you did. Yeah, is there anything that I haven't thought to ask, that is top of mind, top of heart, that you want to share or talk about?
Felipe Garcia:No, I think you covered it very well. I'm very interested in asking you the same question Is that the only thing that's left to unlever? Because I know that's an interesting story? But no, I think you covered the. I think you asked some interesting questions and it made me think, and the only thing that I haven't said is that I I thought this morning before we started, I thought I'm assuming that Lena knows that when she's dealing with elders, it's not only the the memories that they have, but also that they made me feel that they may be a little wobbly and remembering and in their speech. And I have Parkinson's that I've been diagnosed for about four years and fortunately it has a minimal impact, but it has an impact. And.
Felipe Garcia:I think, how I verbalize things and memory a little bit. And in terms of energy, I think, as you were asking earlier, how's your energy? In general, I'm fine. I do everything during the day, but I have to rest and take care of myself around that. So, like I said earlier, being an elder is quite a learning stage. Yeah, we never stop learning. Yes, yeah, life is about learning.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:So that is on the list of questions. Is there something that you'd still like to learn?
Felipe Garcia:How to deal with, how to continue to deal with life in a way that I can feel good, and good about myself and good about others. Beautiful, beautiful In this world, because this world has it's gotten real scary. We're living in a very dangerous time. Yeah. And so my hope is that we impact people in a way that will help them vote right, and for us to get people in Congress and in the White House who, at the institutional and cultural levels, deal with oppression and sexism and racism.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Yeah, yeah, sometimes when I'm talking to people about what I do, one of the very potent things about the vision's model to me is how it gives people the tools and skills that they need in order to show up is who they want to be in the world, and that's work that I'm very grateful to be able to support people in doing.
Felipe Garcia:Yeah, that's great.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Well, Felipe, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. This has been such a pleasure. It's a pleasure to get to know you better and to hear about your experiences and to hear you talk about your work.
Felipe Garcia:Well, thank you very much, Lena. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you and getting to think about these things, and I hope it was helpful.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Wonderful. Thank you very much, thank you.
Felipe Garcia:And I look forward to meeting you in person again.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Likewise, we have a few exciting things coming up. This year, which is our 40th anniversary, we want to flag for you our 2024 Spring Summit, which is called In it for the Long Hall Trauma informs strategies for sustaining laboratory work. We have a wonderful lineup of speakers and workshop facilitators, including Dr Gabor Matei talking about compassion fatigue, longtime vision consultant Emily Schatzau and her collaborator, trauma theorist and author of Trauma and Recovery, dr Judith Herman, teaching about the importance of community care. Our 40th anniversary celebration is going to happen on September 27th, 2024 at the State Room in Boston. Follow us to hear more. Links are in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening, until next time you.