Into Liberation: A podcast about transformative change, inclusion, and building a more just and compassionate world

A Conversation with Dr. Sarah Stearns

• VISIONS, Inc. • Season 1 • Episode 12

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Longtime VISIONS consultant and psychologist Dr. Sarah Stearns shares her story, starting with her rural Connecticut upbringing to becoming a founding consultant with VISIONS Inc. In addition to talking about her personal and professional trajectory, she shares how her own experiences with discrimination fueled her commitment to multicultural work and systemic change.

This is the final episode of Season 1 of Into Liberation. Please make sure you follow us on your favorite podcast platforms, and sign up for our newsletter to stay updated about what we’re doing. 

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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.

VISIONS offers actionable approaches that empower people to identify actions, explore their motivations, and effectively move through complex situations with respect and humanity for others and their differences.

Any opinions and views expressed by the speakers are their own and do not reflect the positions of VISIONS, Inc.

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Music credit: Tim Hall @tv_hall

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Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Hello, you're listening to Into Liberation, a podcast about transformative change, equity and working against oppression. I'm Lina Achter, director of Programs with Visions Inc. Welcome. I'm pleased today to be speaking with longtime senior Visions consultant, dr Sarah Stearns. In addition to serving as a consultant for Visions basically since the organization was founded, sarah is a psychologist who has been in clinical practice for several decades.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Sarah is actually my first introduction to Visions. She facilitated a PACE workshop that I took in Los Angeles back in 2019. I remember the workshop being radically transformative for me, and little did I know then the journey that it was starting me on. Sarah has been a mentor and model for many of us at Visions, and hearing her story reminded me of how far things have come, as well as of the deep importance of the work as it continues. Hi, everybody, I'm very excited to introduce you to actually one of the people who introduced me to the Visions model, one of my first who introduced me to the visions model my first, one of my first PACE instructors, dr Sarah Stearns. Hi, sarah, hi Lina. Thank you so much for agreeing to sit down. We've been planning this for a while and I've been really looking forward to this conversation For folks who don't know you would you introduce yourself briefly?

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Sure, I know we'll probably get into this in more detail later, but I always introduce myself in these sessions as as a white girl who grew up in a rural new england town and basically had very little experience of diversity growing up, except that my my dad, taught at Wesleyan in the beginning of my life and he was very connected to the international community there.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

So we oftentimes did have people from other countries and that included people of color in our home, which was, I think, unusual for this little town that we grew up in, that I grew up in think, unusual for this little town that we grew up in, that I grew up in, and I always appreciate the fact that my parents were both politically minded, in the sense that they cared deeply, I think, about what was happening in our country, and my father in particular had grown up at a time during the depression when his family had really changed, their economic status, had lost a lot because his father was in the financial sector and I think that gave him a lens through which he really understood the dynamics of class. And I came to understand that he didn't understand many of the other dimensions. He certainly didn't understand whiteness and that was, you know, part of his era. So anyway, about me I grew up and have lived in many parts of the country. I now live in California.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

I was trained as a clinical psychologist in my late 20s and early 30s. Before that I had visions of being an actress and a director. So I was very involved in the theater for my developmental years and then I also was a competitive athlete and I think those things very much shaped the way in which I probably over internalized a sense of having a lot to bring to the world. You know, a lot of options and a lot of permission to do things that I loved, and I think growing up, coming of age in the 60s was also a time when you know the kind of go find yourself and who you are. Messages were much more just a part of the culture, and so I think I really benefited from growing up in that before I finally landed in my program to study psychology.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

So I'll stop there. You've been with Visions basically, before Visions even came to be.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Well, you know I was talking to Dr Valerie Batts about it because I wanted to be accurate in this description. She and I were in graduate school together and that is how I came to know her and John Kappenman, and being in their circle meant, you know, in some ways being a part of the ways in which Visions was born. But I was not. They had moved back to the East Coast how to say this? We both had moved to the Bay Area of California to do our internships, so we were able to stay in close contact. And then they moved back to the East Coast, to Richmond, and it was during that time that the actual foundational work of the founding of Visions happened. But then I got a phone call saying you know, we're doing this thing and I want to invite you to be a part of it.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

I probably we couldn't pin down the exact date when that happened, but it was probably 85 or 86, not right at 84. And what it meant for me was very much a wonderful way to think about how was I going to carry forward some of the I don't think at the time I would have called it progressive, but I would have called it activism that I was involved in during my college years. And then, you know, there were many reasons why I felt like I really resonated with what Visions was trying to do because I really valued the notion of being in relationship, I valued the idea that having difficult conversations is part of growth, and I also knew that I had a lot to learn.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Fantastic. Well, there's a lot that I want to ask you about in there, and I'd love to start with your upbringing in Connecticut and what that was like, what it was like to leave that context, and also how you bring that experience into your I'll ask you this later, but how that experience still comes into your work.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Well, the little town that I grew up in and it was truly little it was. There was no commercial area of town. It was very diverse, mixed, in terms of the class status of people, but I would say that I often describe it more as a working class town because of the probably 35 to 40 total kids. In my year, my grade, I think there were only three of us that went to college, maybe four, and so it was very interesting growing up with people who had a very different perspective on what the trajectory of their lives would be. And my parents obviously presented a very different model for us. They were both college educated. My father had an advanced degree and, you know, education for them was the absolute essential to life in terms of giving, you know, guaranteeing that there were options in terms of what you could do with your life. And it was interesting because my family ended up being five daughters.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

I'm the second of five daughters. I'm the second of five daughters and I often wonder, you know, how having all sisters changed my parents' way of thinking. I don't think it did dramatically, because both of my grandmothers had also attended college, but you know to think, if there had been boys in the family whether there would have been a differential in terms of what got prioritized, in terms of the ways in which our future lives were talked about. But because education was so central and the only options, the school in my town only went up to the ninth grade, so it would have taken being transported to a neighboring town, a high school that I think my parents worried was not going to be a good setting relative to already feeling somewhat like it wasn't cool to be smart. I don't know whether you know that social set of messages was just because of the ways in which people's lives weren't centered on education. But they thankfully decided that they would send me away to school for the 10th, 12th grades and I went to an incredible all-girls school where the messaging couldn't have been different.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

It was all about incredible wealth of options there were in terms of the things that you could learn, the ways in which the pedagogy was about learning from primary sources, so really engaging in critical thinking. You know, being in a setting where I didn't feel like I had to compete with girls for boys attention, which I think already something I was not just aware of but probably had low self-esteem around, so you know it was, you mean, certainly not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, but absolutely clear that I could have that I could self-determine what next. And, and that was just incredible. So back to my town.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

I mean, I think it was interesting looking back, especially when, in visions, we would kind of think about our early growing up experiences and, you know, remembering that there was one black family that was in, you know, the school system, there were Jewish families. It happened that, you know, because the town was so small, we, I didn't experience any kind of exclusion of those families and I really felt, you know, like attending birthday parties and sleepovers and that kind of thing happened, you know, for me, with those families.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

And so there was an awareness of some differences, seeing families from the inside a little bit more even at that age and noticing I mean, one of the evocative memories was the, just the smell of the food that was being cooked in those houses and you know, just a way of recognizing those differences. But it wasn't until high school. And then you know, of course, as my circles expanded, that I think I really had a sense of the things that the so-called monoculture of my upbringing hadn't exposed me to. There were so many things that were new to me and again, I think that invitation to be open to it through the international students visiting my home et cetera, was just that. It was almost like it was so exceptional that it was exoticizing a little bit. It wasn't a true immersion experience in difference experience, indifference and kind of owning. That white wasp culture was really something.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

I was steeped in because it's all that was around me, and then so boarding school, that was still in New England.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

No, it was in upstate New York. Oh, okay, okay.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

And then your college experience. I know that a number of things happened in college and what was that like? Was that your first? So boarding school? I'm assuming that it was somewhere upstate, right?

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Yeah, Okay. So I'll tell a bit of a funny story. I you know, back in the day, when I hear kids now having to apply to 15 schools or whatever, I only applied to three and they were very different, and the one that I immediately was accepted to was Middlebury College, which is also New England school, small, but I was waitlisted at Harvard.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

And so, even though I had mailed my letter accepted to Harvard and I sat by the mailbox and begged the postman to let me take back that letter and, frankly, there was so little thought given to well, where do I really want to be?

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

You know, it was much more about feeling like I couldn't imagine you know how how different the experience would have been. You know, sometimes I think, because of the number of things that that I was good at or I succeeded at in high school, that I would have been so-called a big fish in a little pond at Middlebury. But I was a very small fish in a very big pond at Harvard and it was, you know, daunting. It was. Luckily, I was academically very well prepared, but I think socially I wasn't. There were so many things, so many people who came from wealth or came from social power positions or you know just the. The amount that each person showed up feeling comfortable in their skin was very different than how I experienced myself and and it took a while for me to figure out, you know how to claim my space there.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

And then that's where you got introduced to, as you mentioned earlier, a lot of the activism that shaped your life and your outlook.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Absolutely, I mean I think. So. I started college in 1969. And Harvard had been one of the so-called hotbeds of the anti-war movement in 68. And so I stepped into that and went to the March on Washington that November of my freshman year and so I had the first experience of being in a really powerful sense of collective, you know, expressing our beliefs, getting tear gassed for it. Getting tear gassed for it, I mean being kind of on that edge in a way that I think was much more familiar to people who had been more politically active or had found avenues for political action before that. And my roommate, who was in some ways much more radical than I was, who was in some ways much more radical than I was. She belonged to the Socialist Workers Party and also was very active in the anti-war movement, and our tiny little dorm room became a place where people who were on their way to Canada to escape the draft could come and stay Again, just this opportunity to see people in action or have contact with people who were talking about things. And she even dropped out of school because her sense that being at an elitist institution didn't fit her description of herself at that time to go unionize factories in Massachusetts. So there were ways in which people were expressing themselves.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

I too dropped out after my freshman year, but I did it in a very different way. I just needed to get out and I was, as you remember, very involved in the theater at that point and I went abroad to try and to get into theater school and, you know, pursue more of a professional career at that point, and that didn't work out. But you know, again, it was a good experience because I got outside the US and could talk to people who had a very different perspective on the US than just having grown up there, then just having grown up there again, being able to see the United States through the eyes of countries that had very different ways of thinking about their role in the world than the way in which the US then, and I would say even now, can presume that it has a positionality of, you know, moral dominance or something like that. And it was, you know, all the cracks were showing, I think, given the behavior of the US in the Vietnam War, right, right.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

So how long? Where did you go abroad?

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Right, right. So how long? Where did you go abroad? Sometimes where I would sleep, because it was easier to sleep on a train and find a place to sleep. But so I went all over, including went to Czechoslovakia while it was Soviet occupied, went into the far reaches of Northern Scandinavia, which was a place that I would subsequently return to because I loved it so much there. And so I had, you know, and again, looking back, what gave me the sense that, as a just turned 18 year old, I could travel independently with that level of freedom. It's not that I didn't have you know level of of freedom, it's not that I didn't have you know the scary experiences of sometimes feeling like there were predators around me, but I, thankfully, was able to escape any kind of actual attack and I I had just an incredible, again eye-opening, experience yeah, there's nothing like traveling at that age.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Yeah, absolutely so. Then what took you back to? Back to university?

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

one theater school that seemed like it would accept me, but not until the following year, and my parents believed that I should come back. In fact they re-enrolled me without even insulting with me. So I got back and literally the following day was sent back to school and that year again was. I would say it was difficult, in part because I was, I had had this completely other experience and to kind of go back to the structure and requirements of being so focused on classwork and that kind of stuff. And by that time I was doing a lot of theater. I, you know, would close one production and go into the next.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

I sometimes even wonder how I, you know, was ready for my exams and stuff, because that was really the center of my life and I was also playing on the tennis team and the basketball team, so there were lots of things going on. But once I was back, there were lots of things going on. But once I was back and I got re-engaged, ultimately I'd I ended up choosing to stay at university during that time. Okay, okay, and then?

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

I recall you told me that it was I have the impression of it being almost by accident that you ended up in psych.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Absolutely. I mean, if there had been a major that included being in the theater, I would have done it easily. But because there wasn't, I felt like I had to choose either between. English literature or psychology were the closest things I could think of to the theater and I just didn't imagine myself wanting to write papers of literary criticism. You know, I was much more interested in the workings of a human being and the human mind and the human experience and I knew at least that would stimulate my interest.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

And I think that's one of the reasons I stayed, because in my sophomore year I actually was lucky enough to kind of be mentored by the head of the department and put into seminars that were in some ways much more. They were smaller scale, which I liked that, you know, there were probably 12 people in a room as opposed to a lecture style class of, you know, 200. And I just found myself really intellectually challenged in ways that were really wonderful to me and I got into really having a different position from which to look at myself. So I would say that's when my sense of introspection and, you know, trying to understand where I'd come from, what the dynamics of my family were, you know, what were the ways in which it fueled a lot of my insecurity and ways in which I don't think I would have used the word healing at the time, but that I needed some healing was clear to me. And trying to remember, I don't think that I began therapy until maybe my junior year and that was not something my parents had any sense of or approved of. I think my poor mother thought that therapy was only about blaming the mother, which there was a grain of truth to that. No, for me it was about absolutely wanting there to be a place that felt like I could explore and feel safe and deal with the pain that I was in. So that kind of kept me involved in in staying at Harvard.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

I did drop out one other time and that was basically a mental health break for me. I dropped out for one semester. It was good for me. I I had to work, so I became a house painter and you know there were just ways in which it got me once again kind of outside the Harvard community and some of the things that I found difficult about being there. But you know, ultimately I decided that I did want to finish and again my goal was not to continue in psychology. In fact, I really couldn't imagine myself going to graduate school, because it was again something that didn't come easily to me to be so focused academically as was required at Harvard. But there's more to that story.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

You went to college in 1969. That was the same year as Stonewall. I cannot imagine that that was a particular. I cannot imagine that coming to an awareness or coming out was an easy thing in that period.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

It wasn't, and I was not out, in part because I was not even aware that that would be a choice that I would make. And I do talk about it as a choice because I think as my identity evolved, because I think as my identity evolved, part of what I became aware was that, even when I was in relationship with men who I thought had a consciousness around it and were invested in the values of sharing power, the society that we lived in was still so structured in that way that I always felt, like you know, that it didn't suit me. So at the time, honestly, what I would talk about, lena, was that I would be Isidore Duncan. I don't know if you remember that she was a dancer and quite a flamboyant. Now, I was not flamboyant, I can tell you that, but her lifestyle appealed to me because she was nice and she basically moved comfortably, seemingly, around in the world because of her art and she had lovers and, you know, she basically had much more control of her life. And that's what appealed to me. It was that I was uncomfortable.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

My older sister, who was two years older than I, got married the week after she graduated from college and I think that template, you know, still existed. Again, I wouldn't consider my family traditional or conservative, but I think you know, literally after her wedding, my sister's wedding, it was kind of like, oh, you're next and good, wow. And I was like, no, I don't think so. By that time I had a sister. My family spanned it many years with the same parents. I had a sister who was probably six at the time that my older sister married and I said I'll tell you what I'll have a joint marriage with Jennifer, my sister. That way we could postpone any decision-making around seeing me partnered. So anyway, you know, back to your question. I think I was, because I was in the theater. I was very aware of gay men.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

I wasn't aware of gay women at all and would not have, you know, thought of myself. So it was more. I don't know if you want to jump to this, but after college I was starting to play more competitive tennis and in that setting that I met my first women who, who and many of them didn't identify as lesbian. They were in marriages but it was clear that, you know, that was because they weren't given a choice wow, that they had. It was almost like a secret society. Back Back to your point.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

No, it was not easy for them to identify and many of them did not live out in their lives, and so it was for me, you know, something that was kind of a surprise and not something that I felt I don't at all have the coming out story of like finding my true self or something like that.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

It felt much more like, oh okay, this is an option, and how would my life be different if I partnered with a woman and how would I be able to have, you know, a different? I mean again, it's hard to know how much this would have been the language I had access to at the time. I think I was very aware that I didn't want to be in the power structure of a heterosexual marriage. I had seen that with my parents and it was appealing to me. So it took me a while before I experimented, and it felt like that experimentation with being, you know, in a relationship with a woman. And then it was only at graduate school that I I actually allowed myself to be, you know, much more drawn to and choose a relationship with a woman, and that began my experience of dealing with homophobia.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

You talked about that because you were out in graduate school to the point where it caused you difficulties in terms of finding a committee to Well, I was, you know.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

It started actually at the very beginning of my time. I was at University. So that's North Carolina, this North Carolina, and I was very aware that, as much as they claim to be, you know, very influenced by, I think, what they would consider more Northern or Northeastern culture, it's very Southern and there were very clear messages about what was okay and not okay. I won't go into all of it, but it was clear to me that once it was known that I was dating this woman, that things changed for me, that there was a sense of my being less trustworthy, my ethics were called into question, my behavior clinically was called into question. There were ways in which, even when I remember walking in to receive a paper that I had written from a professor and she said, sarah, this is actually quite good. And I said you sound surprised and you know, and because I was in friendship with Valerie Batts, who was a colleague, classmate of mine, she helped me understand. You know, it's kind of like, when you are seen through that lens of being less than it is pervasive, and you will start to feel like you're starting not on, you know, the level playing field, so to speak, but in a ditch, you know, or in sand or whatever, that there's a way in which dealing with people's attitudes and assumptions about you are part of systems of oppression. And you know, I don't think that I would say that I had experienced that so directly as a woman.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Again, being in an all-girls school was, I think, a big escape during my adolescence from having any kind of pervasive sexism that I was dealing with. And then I had white privilege, I had relative class privilege, whatever. This experience was a first for me and it was like continuously being kicked in the gut by you know the surprising attitudes of people. I had the person who had interviewed me to come to Duke say you're the worst choice we ever made. There was a point when I completed the requirements for my master's that even though Duke didn't offer a master's level degree you know you were kind of in the doctoral program they offered me an exit master's to try and get rid of me no-transcript professor emeritus who was willing to support me. I kind of put my did my doctoral dissertation work in behavioral medicine because then I could draw on the faculty from the medical center. And you know I got through. But it was clearly, it was almost like they felt it would be a stigma on their department Graduate me.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Wow, so I can't imagine just that must have been quite a cloud to exist under for however many years.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

You know, lena, it was and it wasn't because, I think, as painful as all that was, it also was outrageous enough for me to mobilize around that feeling. And again, would I have been able to do it if I wasn't in relationship with Arlie Batts? I don't know. I mean, her perspective, her ability to translate what I was experiencing through her experience of racism, was, you know, it was such a gift.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

I don't, I can't imagine, if I hadn't had that perspective, that I would have been able to mobilize my outrage as much and see it, as you know, just something that further committed me to changing the world. I mean, I sometimes feel like it's so grandiose, but back in the age of Aquarius, when I was in college, I just know that in that circle of people that I belong to, there was a sense that our generation was going to make the world a different place, you know, a place that was defined by love and defined by peace and defined by, you know, a preferred way of being in relationship not just to human beings but everyone. You know the whole ethos would be governed by that kind of you know, inclusivity would be the word that we would now use.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

And so I'm not saying that it originated through those experiences at Duke, but I think it what would I say? It got strengthened, it got more steely, it got more. It was more commitment to it, because once I was so clearly targeted and I could understand and have the experience that, you know, I had only listened to through the voices of people who were the targets of oppression that I'd met with and talked with in my life. You know it, it really it was life changing. And that was even before. I mean, I don't think I even, despite the fact that I had that relationship while I was in graduate school, I didn't claim the identity of lesbian. I mean, I just felt maybe this is just a one-off experience, I don't know. So I didn't come out till I was 30 with an acknowledgement then, and I think it was because there was more that I understood.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

And once I moved to California, to the Bay Area, of course there was a much. There was a flourishing gay community, and so you know, I really had a sense then of not having to live in this small, closeted world of North Carolina, that there were many more options and I could really think clearly about. So where do I see myself in this, in this story? And I remember someone saying you know there are lots of reasons that one can you know. If you don't feel like I was born this way, which was still an argument, that was being you know, if you don't feel like I was born this way, which was still an argument, that was being you know, used oftentimes so that people couldn't be converted or whatever. But I think you know I much more embraced the sense of choice. You know, sense of choice. You know that I chose this community, I chose this power set of relationships. I chose to be in in that kind of community because that's where I felt most free to be myself interesting.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

I want to, I'm curious to go back to okay, I'm thinking about like 10 things that you just said, which is why I'm a little bit quiet and I'm curious to go back to when you first struck up a friendship with Dr Val, what that was like, what that initial meeting was like like. Clearly she helped you, as now she's helped like many, many, many thousands of people and, yeah, what were the early days of that encounter like?

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

well, I think it. I think it helped that how to say this it did not feel like I was entering a relationship that was unlike any other relationship I'd had, because in college and you know, in other contexts I had been how to say it? You know, I had had strong and even intimate relationships with, in particular, black people, so there wasn't a foreignness to it to me, and I think I wonder, I'd be curious to ask whether that was something that she sensed. I think she's also someone who's such an amazing bridge person, in other words, who bridges, you know, very intentionally, across difference, and so that may have helped. I think she heard, in what I shared with her the level of vulnerability that I felt and, again, my, my sense is that that oftentimes that's a hard place for white people to go, and yet it is. What I've learned is it's essential to be able to be in that level of vulnerability and feelings, sometimes to make connections, especially across race.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

For white people to be in their vulnerability and feelings.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Yeah, yeah, okay, okay those are some of my guesses. I I remember that we both kind of felt like we were, you know, swimming rough waters when we were in our statistics class together, so that was a very concrete bonding experience.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

She was in you know kind of a subset and I remember interviewing her because we had to practice doing clinical, clinical interviewing and you know, there were things that that happened in that interview where, you know, she gave me some real feedback about places where I had it gave me some real feedback about places where I had made assumptions that were probably racially based. So, you know, even in the early stages of our relationship, I felt like those were the conversations we were having and I think, I hope that that's part of how the trust was building.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Interesting. So then I want to ask about so you both moved to California and were in the Bay Area, and then they went back to Richmond, as you said, and then you got a call when they were starting this organization. I'm curious to know what doing the work in those early days as a white person was like.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Well, part of what was, I think, compelling was, I think, even then while we didn't really understand it in the way we do now, it in the way we do now the commitment to being in a multicultural community and valuing the white perspective in addition to the other perspectives. It wasn't kind of like I came in and I was in any way to be what I think many white people think about in terms of this, that they're going to get beat up or they're going to somehow be confronted and shamed or something like that. That was not the community that Visions was even at the beginning, although there were so many instances that I can recall where I stepped in it, so to speak. You know, I said or did things that were clear evidence of my limitations in terms of understanding race and racial dynamics, and, and so I was challenged about that, and yet it always came about in a way that further connected me as opposed to push me away. To basically put together you know how we would deliver the model, you know what were the ways to teach it, what were the things to anticipate.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

What happened in the process, as well as just the infrastructure of the organization, was all you know. We were building the boat as we were sailing down the river, and so I sometimes was shocked by how much of those those times which in my mind were very precious because we were just kind of gathering from different parts of the country someplace, but a lot of it was was relationship building and that meant, you know that any at any point in the process or conversation, if something happened, the, the content issues would would kind of fade and very deliberately and intentionally and with a lot of and intentionally and with a lot of my mind. You know I sometimes share when I'm teaching PACE and other things. You know this was so beyond my emotional bandwidth. You know it's kind of like intensity of feelings and the capacity to rocket between anger and love and laughter and all sorts of things.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

That was not my experience as a WASP. I came from a very muted kind of family, internal family experience, and sometimes I would just kind of like I'm sure I hope my mouth didn't drop open, but you know there was a sense that I hadn't been in this vital an exchange before in my life and you know, and so it so profoundly, the changes that were happening in me were happening at that level, not just at the level of, you know, the cognitive. How are we do this work in diverse community where people come and inevitably be at odds or, even worse, you know, hurtful to each other, and you know so. I feel like you know so.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

I feel like that was the ground in which I made what I now see is a lifelong commitment to visions and was teaching and doing a lot of other things to generate income. I wasn't concerned about income relative to visions. I mean, it was nice but it was not essential to me and I think that that's one of the things that has really shifted. That has really shifted is that, I think, for us in the early days, that notion of reciprocity, that notion of what you do for the betterment of, or even the survival of community, goes beyond what it is that you might receive in return, and and again.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

That was that resonated so deeply with me that I really felt like you know, even when there were tensions around, you know what was happening. Usually it was intentions around administrative issues or whatever. I never imagined feeling like I can't be here any longer, because the gift to me is that Visions has I mean, I say this about my clients as well but the gift to me is that I get to be a better person, to feel really propelled to learn something because I didn't understand it before or I didn't have the context or the contact in which to understand it. I mean, all of that was just like this continuous invitation to live in this community invitation to live in this community.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

When you were talking about feelings. It's interesting and ironic because my introduction I consider my introduction to emotional literacy as having happened at a pace that you taught, at where the feeling wheel was up, and then we went to the next slide and I remember thinking no, no, no, no, no, I want to see that again. I would like to look at that. What is that? Yeah, so that's an interesting full circle moment and I'm curious also to know a little hold on, let me just just where I'm sitting. Okay, I'm curious also to know what client work was like in those early days, as you know, with this model that you know you all were pioneering and where white people were being invited just as much into the work, like how was that? And and like what, what might have been present there that you don't see so much anymore now? Very curious about that.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Well, I wanted to get back to what it meant being a white person, because I think that back then there still was a sense that first of all, it was only called diversity work it wasn't DEI and it was really about understanding the meaning of difference and understanding the experience of people who are the targets of oppression.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

To me it felt like there was more focus on that than there was on understanding the experience of privilege.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

And so, even as a white person doing the work and early in the day, you know, we had one big corporate client that really supported our work big corporate client that really supported our work and then there were lots of small nonprofits that we would oftentimes work with quite, you know, not exactly pro bono, but you know it was kind of like a lot of our work was in these smaller settings. You know that that whole part of our name about intact ongoing natural settings you know that whole part of our name about intact ongoing natural settings, you know, was very compelling to me Because basically what it meant is here are people who are in a, who maybe experience a common purpose or are brought together because of their work, and as important as the work they're doing are their relationships with each other, and so back in the day, it felt to me like so much of what was happening internally at Visions was this idea that when we do our work with each other internally, we will be prepared to do our work with our clients.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Right right and I love that because, again, it really meant that it wasn't. It didn't position me as the all-knowing expert that came into these settings. It was like I'm in a process and I'm going to invite you into the process that I'm in and, as the white person in particular, I began to learn. So what are the barriers for white people in doing that? Like what were the issues of shame or fear of confrontation or conflict, or you know the things that go into the model of modern racism. You know just watching people white people scramble around wanting to deny, avoiding contact, having. You know the positionality around. You know being good or being kind or welcoming to people but not really getting how inevitably the power dynamics were going to play out if they didn't own what it meant in the systems they were in to occupy whiteness. And so it was very and some of the best experiences of my life have been where I feel like I'm only like two steps ahead of the people that I'm leading. I'm very close to being where they are.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

I remember where they are because I remember where they are, because I was just there and I remember, you know, for example, coming to be aware of that one when white people start to have a sense of you know kind of what's wrong with this. You know, when they kind of have a breakthrough moment, the first thing they often do is want to turn around and strangle the white people around them. That don't get it, you know, and I can remember sitting in circles. We always were in circles wanting to leap across the room at somebody and shake them, and always being held in a vision's model that said, people don't learn because of that. If anything, they will become more guarded or defensive because of that. So how to do this work, as I say with love, how to hold people, meet people where they're at is another way that we say it how to be engaged fully in taking someone and, of course, being trained as a psychologist really helped because you know, you wouldn't scold your clients.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

You know that wouldn't be helpful. You know what are the ways that that invitational model of? Have you tried this? Have you thought about it this way? What are the ways in which you know you would feel like this is something you? You know something's in it for you to change and so all of that just felt so I mean, natural is is I don't even know if it felt natural, but it felt right. It felt just like where I wanted to be.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

So the early days were about the continued learning about how to hold people on that journey, how to manage being in a co-facilitation relationship.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

I mean now you know there's so much that I take for granted because I've co-facilitated with the people of color in forth, for example, or when there was conflict in the room which one of us made, it made sense for us to handle that, and often that was race-based.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

You know that my role as the white facilitator was really to take on what was happening in with the white participants, and this was even before we were using a lot of the intra-cultural group by race, where I would be specifically dealing with with just the white folks in the room.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

But all of that was what it was about, evolving away and it wasn't like so we could write it down and turn it into a script.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

It was about being present in the moment, to what was happening, in a way that was, you know, much more intentionally attuned to racial dynamics than I had ever been in my life, that was and power dynamics overall, you know, and there were times that I stepped in it because I, you know, I remember oftentimes when I was working with white men, I didn't take into account the sexism that was also present, the sexism that was also present, and the white men would be clearly infuriated at me, you know, because I had done something that they did not expect through the gender dynamics of the interaction. So, again, it wasn't just about race, but it was about learning all of those dimensions and how to attend to. You know, like the Jewish people in the room who oftentimes wrestled with how much anti-Semitism they felt and therefore couldn't immediately connect to white privilege, you know, it was like a three-dimensional moving puzzle that you were always learning the new ways that the pieces fit together.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Interesting. I mean my cohort coming in 35 years in is at the benefit of learning from all of this experience, which felt very well established actually by the time I came in. So I appreciate hearing you talk about it and I also appreciate it as a whole for how it evolved and and really sounds like it coalesced through all you all's experience like as you did it.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Yeah, I mean I don't want to skip over what the hard moments were. I mean there were some really hard moments where people, for their own reasons, felt that they couldn't stay at Visions reasons felt that they couldn't stay at visions. You know, whether it was because the work that we were doing or the way we were doing the work didn't fulfill that same sense of calling. You know, they had a different way of thinking about it and I remember there being some, a lot of sadness in those losses for me, or people whose own wounds would emerge so persistently that it really got in their way of doing the work effectively. So I mean, there was a lot of that.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

There were you, the obvious challenges of being a small organization led by, you know, a woman of color, and you know, in the fee for service, time was the whole question where, you know, should we be trying to get grants or whatever? But we were trying to survive on fee for service or whatever, but we were trying to survive on fee for service. And it was remarkable, Lena, how thin those times could be.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Yeah, oh, I can imagine yeah.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

And what it meant again to have the strong leadership Valerie Betts and others you know who were just willing to say this work is too important. Let's, let's figure out a way to do this.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Again, it was so I oftentimes feel, especially in this day and age when, you know, I'm appalled by some of the ways in which the direction our country is moving that the people who seem to have the most resilience and optimism are people who have dealt with the most oppression in their lives. And so I kind of turn it and I say, okay, so how is this coming from my privilege to think that everything should work in the way that I one expected to? Because it doesn't. You know, this world is too broken and it brings me back down to earth, and you know, then I can kind of say, okay, I'm back up for the yeah I mean, that's a whole other question now.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

And well, okay, I want to make sure to ask the work you did with visions, the training in the model, and your concurrent, if I'm not mistaken, work, as you know, psychologist in clinical practice how did they dovetail and how did they influence one another? Obviously, we're an organization that's very clinician heavy. That's what I love about it. I don't have formal training myself and I think it's just. I think it's like a dominant ingredient in our secret sauce.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Well, I'll tell you, I mean, that's where, looking back now, that I can do that, I just feel like it was almost magical is the wrong word. But you know, it was such a blessing because each part of my work life influenced and informed the other parts of my work life. So when I was teaching, for example, I was always thinking about, you know, broader systems, the context of people's lives. I wasn't just focused on their interior life, clinically lives. I wasn't just focused on their interior life clinically, I was thinking relationally, but I was also thinking about the broader social forces and the histories of those forces in people's lives and so, passing that on to new clinicians who might be tempted to have, you know, just this very limited lens through which thinking about the work that they would do, especially because, you know, in some places I was teaching, they were still very influenced by psychoanalytic thought. Yes, they hadn't contextualized it all in the ways that I think now people are more familiar with doing. So, with each thing that I was learning through visions I could bring it into my teaching. Or when I had the experience of sitting with a family and watching how relieved they were that there were things I understood or ways that I supported their resourcefulness or the ways in which I really could see that their suffering was not a product of their individual failure. I mean, I could just see how that opened up the sense of possibility for them in navigating whatever. They had come to see me for clinically. I did a lot of work in cross-racial relationships because in some ways I was a white person that could hold both perspectives. And you know, a lot of good therapy is about especially in couples or families is about the capacity to hold multiple positions, and so my ability to do that really had come from my vision's work.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

My teaching, my clinical teaching, for me was how I kept myself abreast of what was happening in the field. You know, it kept me reading so that I would be able to bring new materials to my classes, and one of the things that in the last, my last teaching, was at Smith School of Social Work and I moved from teaching family therapy into some of the anti-racism work that was happening in the school, which was also coursework. And then they invited me to do the gender class and you know, again, I had some exposure to gender issues and it was at a time when gender fluidity and non-binary ways of thinking about gender were really new to academics, and so I got to be on the cutting edge of that and then bring that back to visions. So I mean everything was such a beautiful. So I mean everything was such a beautiful weaving together.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

You know, I think of it, as you know, like sweet grass that gets braided. It just felt like and I don't feel like I did that. It feels like that happened to me. The way that I could, you know, was about just going with it as opposed to trying to control it being willing as opposed to being willful about it.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Willing as opposed to willful I really like that. I'm going to borrow that Fantastic. So when I got on the call with you, you said you were in Hawaii and I was like, what are you doing in Hawaii work or leisure? You're like I'm retired, I'm just in Hawaii. So now that you are retired, and noting that we're in just this, what feels to me unprecedented and quite chaotic moment, having done the work that you have done all your life and also having lived through other chaotic moments from from what I understand, what is it that you would say to people who are doing the work now?

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Wow. You know, one of the things that's very difficult for me now is to feel like I have the right to step back, because there's so much need, much need, and I happen to believe that this particular life that I've led has allowed me to have a set of skills that are much needed in the world right now. So that's hard for me to balance. You know my wish for a kind of spaciousness in my life now, that when I was working I didn't feel much about a constant process of becoming who they are, you know, weaving together what appeals to them about the model or what you know where they find joy or excitement or passion. I mean, I always am grateful that I did my work with passion, because to me that confirmed how in alignment it felt with things of spirit in me.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

And I think what I would say is continue to find what's important in the work other than just the practical matters of, you know, a career.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

And I think I say that because my sense is that unless, unless someone continues to evolve and develop and become at a personal level, the work will get stale, work will feel too hard, the work will be too frustrating.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

There are too many challenges that exist, and especially now that somehow, and especially now that somehow, taking it on simply professionally will lead people to burn out or drop out. So for me, if there's any lesson from my life story, it's find what sustains you at that much deeper level. And you know I am so grateful because some of what has sustained me is that some of the most important relationships in my life are within the visions community, are within the visions community, that what I've learned about being in relationship in a way that you know hopefully translates to the other important relationships of my life, are about staying in, not giving up, being, you know, willing to be in in those challenging moments Like those are the blessings that came to me through my work with visions and I wouldn't even call it work through my life in visions is a much better way to put it through my life in visions is a much better way to put it.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

It brings me back to something that I heard you say before that I found quite striking. Probably two years ago you said this is a glimpse of the world that I want to live in.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

I oftentimes, when I have what I consider a more successful consultation experience, is when the people in the room in let's use the model of a multi-day training feel like sitting in the room is now different than when they entered the room, yeah, that there's something that's happened that they couldn't even have set an intention towards, because they didn't even know what was possible. And yet, because of the container that was created, because of the conversations that were had, whatever they now sit around and they recognize a level of connection, a cross difference, that they didn't have before. And so in those settings, I often that's my way of saying goodbye to the group is saying you know, take a moment and reflect on what it feels like to sit in this circle. This is the world I want to live in and, you know, frankly, I find that it is.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

In many organizations or other settings it's so far from what's true. I mean that people are living at a much more fear-based level. They're so subscribed to a model of competition, to a model of competition they're, frankly, scared of dealing directly with difference, so they either deny it or paper it over, and they certainly don't see themselves as being able to change anything. And that's the other thing that I think you know really comes through in the work that I've done towards the end of of my work with visions is wanting each person to imagine the changes they can make.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

I use that word, you know, kind of how do you see yourself as a change agent? And that can be in their relationship with their teenage child. It can be, you know, in the ways in which they relate to their people who are in higher positions of power, where they don't underestimate that they also can have power in those conversations, underestimate that they also can have power in those conversations. Wanting people and maybe this does go back to what I shared with you about coming of age in the late 60s, the age of Aquarius. I mean, I think that maybe I romanticize it, I probably do. What I remember and bring back often is that I felt like we were being called to change the world and to create the world that we wanted to live in, and so some of the greatest satisfaction that I have in my life is feeling like I was able to try and do that in my life is feeling like I was able to try and do that.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

Beautiful Sarah, thank you so much for taking the time and for speaking to me and for sharing your story so generously.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

I hope it was helpful to someone. Oh, my goodness, I think it will be helpful to a great many people and I'm so glad to you know, have been able to hear it and like be in this conversation with you Again. You were like my first exposure, in many ways, to visions.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

So it was like a personal connection that I really appreciate having with you, Lena, Beautiful Same same.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Thank you so much, Sarah.

Dr. Sarah Stearns:

All right, have a good rest of your well, you're going to bed. Right, I'm going to bed same. Thank you so much, sarah. All right, have a good rest of your. Well, you're going to bed. Right, I'm going to bed, yes.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

This is the final episode of this inaugural season of Into Liberation and my last as Visions Program Director. Please make sure you follow us on your favorite podcast platforms and sign up for our newsletter to stay updated about what we're doing. Thank you so much for listening. It's been a pleasure, Thank you.