CHP Conversations
Welcome to CHP Conversations, a podcast series produced by the VCU College of Health Professions. The College's mission is to create influential leaders in health care who embrace equity and model excellence through inclusive teaching and learning, thoughtful advancement of cross-cultural knowledge, meaningful service to others, innovative technologies, and scientific discoveries that promote health and health equity and eliminate health disparities. This series includes conversations with faculty, students and alumni who exemplify our mission.
CHP Conversations
Marginal Identity Development
Dr. Jared Schultz hosts this episode in which, Dr. Christine Reid and her graduate students Sonia Meyer and Fran Singson discuss a model of marginal identity development they have developed. They have been exploring the ramifications of when individuals belong to more than one identity group, but are not fully developed in any one group.
Welcome to CHP Conversations. A podcast series produced by the VCU College of Health Professions. This series includes conversations with faculty, students and alumni who exemplify our mission to create influential leaders in healthcare. Okay. My name is Jared Schultz and I'm in the Department of Rehabilitation Counseling, here at Virginia Commonwealth University. I am joined today by Dr. Chris Reed and two of our graduates students, Sonya and Fran. And if you'd like to introduce yourselves, Sonya, why don't you go first and then Fran, and then Dr. Reed. Sure. My name is Sonya Maya. I am a first-year graduate student doing the master's program in mental health counseling and rehabilitation counseling. Fran. Hi there. My name is Fran. My pronouns are she, her, hers. I'm a second-generation Filipino American, and I am also a first-year student in the master's program for rehabilitation and mental health counseling. Hello, I'm Dr. Chris Reed. My pronouns are she, her, hers. For those who are blind, I can describe myself as aging. I have gray hair, I wear glasses. I'm a rather large person, and I've been a professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Counseling for about 25 years now. Wonderful. Thank you all for meeting together. And our purpose today is just to review some of the work that you've been doing. And there's a research project that you've been working on together. And I just wanted to spend some time going over it and having you explain a little bit about it. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen. And this is the poster session that Fran, this is the poster that Fran used in the- to use to present at a graduate symposium. But it outlines a lot of the content of the model and we'll be going through a lot of these different pieces. But would one of you like just to start off by telling us about what the topic of the project is and how it came about? I can get us started and then Sonya and Fran can jump in. I can say that the topic came about quite a few years ago in the '80s, actually, when I was working with deaf students and young students who are in a migrant Career Development Program. So Mexican-American students. As a grad student, I also was friends with some people who are going through a coming out process- coming to terms with their identity as being gay or lesbian. And I started noticing some similarities in terms of identity issues for these three groups. And I started working with another graduate student at the time Patricia Villa Real. She anglicized her name at that time. Well, her family anglicized it. And we worked together on developing some hypotheses about the identity of people who are between two cultures. That might be being between Mexican and American culture, between deaf and hearing culture. So disability was a heavy influence in the development of this, this framework. In, in many different cultures that the idea of being between the two, but not necessarily fully part of either was a common experience. And so we did some development of a plan for how to look at this and presented it to the Conference of the American Counseling Association in 1988. And at the time, we were told that that was the only session in the entire ACA conference that dealt in any way with people who are gay or lesbian. So we were a little surprised at that part. But this, this model then, when I became a faculty member and started my doctoral program, I applied for a grant to try and explore this model and test it out in counseling. And my advisor at the time said that I would need to have a sample size of about 300 people. Luckily, that grant did not get funded. That proposal, it was considered ambitious and ambiguous and they were right. And if if it had been funded, I still be providing counseling services to those 300 deaf people to this day, I think, without being able to finish my dissertation. So I had set this aside. I'd focused on other kinds of research that was more easier to actually carry out. And only fairly recently when I started teaching the multicultural counseling class here at VCU, did I realize that this model that we had started so many years ago actually does contribute something that the literature didn't have, and that it needed a little more focused attention. And so when I was presenting it to the multicultural class, I asked my students, do you think this is something that would be a value to the counseling profession? And I invited anybody who is interested in it to contact me. And Fran and Sonya stepped up and we started a research team and have been developing a model from that point. So Fran and Sonya, What was it that made you think, you know what, I need more to do with my time. I think I'm going to jump on this project. I can start if that's okay, Sonya. Yeah, go for it. For me. Oh thanks, Sonya. For me going into this program, a lot of it was the desire to represent my Asian-American and Pacific Islander community. And it's extra salient just because it is a PI heritage month. But for me, I really wanted to increase the visibility of specifically Filipino Americans in research. And when Dr. Reed brought up her model that she had begun in grad school. It was kinda full circle just because we talked about living in the hyphen. And I've always been that Filipina American and trying to balance those two vastly different parts of my identity. But the parts of my identity, that identity that are equally important. So in one way it's me rationalizing these two identities that for so long I felt were at odds. And then also learning about other identities that have similar experiences. I know Dr. Reed kind of attested to the deaf and hearing community and that's been something that I've been learning a little bit more about through the process. And then also the LGBTQ community and how they experience living in-between the accepted binaries of identity. So a lot of it has been self-exploration, but also the exploration of other cultures that I may not have been exposed to in the past. And my interest in it, almost opposite to Fran's. I have never had a strong tie to my ethnic or racial background. And I found the idea that cultural identity could be something that wasn't necessarily those racial or ethnic identities. To be really interesting. And then the fluidity with which you can move in-between multiple different identities and take on these different roles and feel more one way at one time, and a different way at a different time was really interesting to me because I've done a lot of travel. I feel like I've moved in and out of different groups and just being able to align with that and feel like that is part of your cultural identity, but not having to have it as your significant identifier was really interesting for me. So I wanted to sort of explore this really broad idea of what a multicultural identity could be and how you can move between it and all of the things that it encompasses. And the first research that I had really seen that with like that. So let's spend just a little bit of time defining what you mean by in-between and Fran did you say 'living in the hyphen' is how you (Yes.) is that, how you express that (Yes.)? So what, what does- just help, help us to understand in fairly decent detail what that means. Fran or Sonya, would you like to take a first try at this? Well, that particular phrase have actually come from a video that we watched called 'Living in the Hyphen'. And was talking about people of different ethnic identities or racial identities and not feeling like they were really one or the other. A lot of the times it was like a racial identity didn't actually fit with the area that they were living in. It was a Canadian video. And so they spent a lot of time feeling like 'Am Asian or am I Canadian? How did these two things align?' Instead of being able to live as both of those things and trying to find that space sort of in-between where they were both. But at sometimes they were more Canadian, that's sometimes they were more Asian or whatever identity they aligned with. But really feeling like they had to be sort of in-between those two things as opposed to being able to be fully one or the other. Right. And to kind of bounce off with Sonya has said, if you look at the poster, there's a part that says different dimensions of identity. And I think this would definitely be a good manifestation of that in-between just because it shows the diversity of not just racial and country of origin in between, but also deaf and hard of hearing. The in-between between gay and straight, male and female. And for me, I put Filipina and American just because I do feel like I exist between two worlds. And then under that is first-generation, second-generation. How it feels to be in that 1.5 generation where you moved at a young age. But you don't necessarily feel assimilated to the new culture that you're being immersed into. So I feel like there's so many examples of this in-between this and when you look at a lot of the existing models for identity development, it doesn't necessarily cover all of these areas. So that was kinda like an area that we had wanted to expand upon. I think those are great points that part of what we were seeing in existing models of multicultural identity development was either focusing just on say, race and what, how to develop a biracial identity. Or on an assumption that one is moving from one into another. And it's an idea of adjustment that ends up with a specific endpoint that you have this changed identity. Whereas we wanted to show that it can be not just race, but multiple different kinds of cultural identity can, can fit the idea of being betweenness and being in-between identities. And also that it can be very fluid. That it can change in different circumstances, it can change at different times. It isn't necessarily a linear process that you go from point A to point B, and then at point B, you're done. And so we wanted to show that. And then another thing that we wanted to look at that seem to be missing in some of the existing models of cultural identity development is what can help. What kinds of factors facilitate a positive identity of being between two cultures versus what might have somebody feeling more isolated and part of nothing. So we took a look and a lot of these hypotheses for what can make a difference came out of initially the deafness literature- looking at identity development and things like for many deaf people born into hearing families, there's this big moment of realizing, 'hey, there are other people like me out there'. It's been called in deaf culture like a 'deaf Wow!' experience. And there seemed to be similarities between that and some of these other identities. For, for somebody who's a young gay kid in a farm town where there are no gay role models to finally meet other people who are gay and go to something where it's normal to be who you are, can be a 'gay wow!' experience. So trying to look at what kinds of things facilitate development of a positive, possibly integrated, but but not isolated kind of experience. We wanted to look at some of that. It's interesting, Chris, when you're talking about that concept of moving from one spot to the other? What came to my mind was this assumption of all or nothing. Yeah. You know, it's you're all this or You're all that and- that sounded funny. You're all that. But it has a different context. But that assumption of movement towards and not just occupying that interdimensional space, if you will. That it's, it's gotta be something different. You know a question that came up as you were all describing is, is, do you feel like that that challenge of multiple factors playing on an individual is that because of a backdrop of assumptions about those different pieces. So what does it mean, you know, Fran, to be Filipino and what does it mean to be American? And this assumption that there is a way for that to be. And that's the comparison point for how I fit in or don't fit in. Does that make sense? No. Can you elaborate a little bit more, Dr. Schultz? Well, as we've talked about the challenge of of bringing those differences together. And the recognition that I don't necessarily fit entirely in this group or that group. That comparison is done with some assumptions about what that group is. And those assumptions may or may not be accurate? Right. I don't know. I think if I can take this and I think you're talking a little bit further about what an in-group and out-group feel is. That different cultures and different groups sort of need to have that idea of what that group is in order to know who's in and who's out of it, and figuring out how you align with that. And this is sort of dealing with people who maybe have multiple in-group, but are also kind of out of the group and don't quite align with these set ideas and expectations of what that group is. And I think the big push of embracing this in-between, being able to embrace that they are in both groups and can be in both groups. And looking at the factors that would make them feel more in or more out of certain groups that they align with. And being able to maybe see what those expectations are and know that even if they don't fully align with that, but they can still be part of it and embrace it as their own without necessarily fitting the whole expectation of what that might look like. Right. And I really like what Sonya said and to kind of bounce off that, I think as human beings, we have a tendency to want to put labels on things. It makes us feel safe and makes us feel like we have an understanding of the world. But I think with this project, what we're trying to highlight is that there are a lot of unique environmental factors between every individual. And it must be taken into account that nuance of each person's individual experience, but also honoring the cultural protective factors that make them so special. So finding that balance between looking at the individual and their own environment, but also appreciating the greater culture that informs the individual. Go ahead, Sonya. I think this research- Oh I'm sorry- I think this research is also especially important at this point in time because the world is really blending more and more. Oh, yeah. And you're seeing a lot more of those identities become mixed, become merged. There's a lot more travel, there's a lot more communication online, everything sort of blending a little bit more. So it's harder, almost, to find those groups that you're just like, "No, this is my group I fit into this. I'm perfectly aligned with the thing." That's almost becoming more and more rare, and I think this will continue to be that way. And for some people, it isn't necessarily identifying with either. It might be that they identify with an in-between as their group. People talk about third culture, for example. That if you have say to parents from two different cultures that the kids are of a third culture. And that can be a choice as well in terms of identity development. So being aware that you could identify with both, either, none, a third, or in different situations- identify with one more than the other, over time- identify with one more than the other, and that it can go back and forth situationally and over time. Chris, do you have an example? Because that's an interesting idea that the over time thing I think is easy to grasp where it's like, well, yeah, people develop over time. But even situationally, do you have an example that you might whereas I might identify with one more than the other? Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Often people will code switch and be engaged in, in one culture in one way and another culture in another way. So my friend, who's Mexican-American, obviously with her family speaking Mexican, speaking Spanish, with Mexican dialect. When she was in classes at the university, she would be English and her English had no no trace of accent. You wouldn't know. You might look at her and think she's Italian. Okay. When she would use both, she was bilingual counselor. Initially bilingual teacher, then became a bilingual counselor, and would use whichever background language, culture was needed in the situation. So that would be an example. Somebody who is bisexual. Maybe when at a gay pride event relating more to gay people. Might be at an event with the PTA, with your kids, might be functioning more in a straight mode. It could be situational, depending on the situation. Somebody who is hard-of-hearing, who is between those two, functionally, not quite deaf, not quite hearing. Culturally that may change both over time and in different situations. Maybe they grew up without sign language. And then when they discovered sign language and started interacting with the deaf community, became more deaf-identified, culturally deaf. Whereas when they're not with other deaf people, might be relying on hearing aids, might be trying to function in the hearing world as best they can with the hearing tools that they have. So it can be situational, it can be over time. And it can flow back and forth in terms of which modes people might take on as part of their identity. Fran, you mentioned something that I wanted to circle back to because I thought it was really an interesting. You were talking about the need to. And I'm summarizing here, so correct me if I if I say this incorrectly. But the need to be able to recognize the individual's place, but also to honor the established cultural groups. And I didn't say that quite right, but could you talk a little bit about how in the midst of someone feeling different and not fully identifying with a group, how did how does someone still honor that, that heritage or that background or that influence? That's a really good question, Dr. Schultz. And honestly, it's something that I'm still trying to figure out as someone who lives in that in-between space. But something that we talk a lot about in class is that biopsychosocial model and the fact that there are so many influences on the individual's life that it's hard to just pinpoint one when discussing, you know, what's the most impactful thing when it comes to mental health struggles or struggles in general. I'm not sure where I was going with that. And it's definitely- the gears are kind of turning in my head to be completely honest, but I do think it is possible to balance like that individual, individualistic desire to understand oneself, but also that collectivists desire to appreciate one's culture. Mhm. Any other thoughts from Sonya or Chris? I think that was a really good explanation of that. Yeah, that's something that we're probably still sort of figuring out and trying to see how this model would work with that idea. And some elements of the model that might relate a little bit to what Fran has said and what you were asking about. That some of the things that we hypothesize are important, are the tools you need to function in either culture, so knowledge and the function being able to, being able to sign, for example, being able to speak Spanish, being able to speak with your culture of origin. If you don't have that language, then it's harder to relate to and connect to that part of your identity. Another factor is support from the cultures. Do, do the cultures accept you as a person in-between or is there some kind of discrimination against you that makes it a little harder to relate to? There was a time, for example, when the gay community was not as accepting as it is now of people who are bisexual. And the attitude was pretty much "Come on. Get off the pot, decide what you are. Who are you really?" You're just holding on to this. This can't you know, where you fit in. There's more tolerance now, more acceptance. So it's easier for people who are bisexual to have that identity without quite the discrimination that they were experiencing before. So those kinds of things also support from people who are also in-between, from people who are like you. Where you can learn more about how to negotiate between these things and to know you're not alone. A real nice thing about that, that documentary that we see in the multicultural class, that "Living in the Hyphen" is it shows people that they're not alone. That there are many people who are living with this experience of being between two cultures. Identifying in part with each, but feeling some, not being fully part of either. The idea that you're not alone and finding out how you can function well between the two can be really helpful. And we've identified some examples of the kinds of support groups that we hypothesize are going to make a difference for people. Looking at deafness because that's where this was born. We have what used to be called Self-Help for hard of hearing, which is now the American Speech. Shoot. I keep remembering the old name, which is so convenient for my model. But Association for- people, forgive me for getting the name wrong, but I'll come up with it later and email it to you. But that really won't help the podcast. But that can be contrasted to the Association for Late Deafened Adults, which is for people who have suddenly become part of a new group. Instead of all along being in-between as 'Okay, before I was hearing, now I'm deaf. Big change.' But that all the group has been so helpful for so many people in terms of gaining the skills that they need, figuring out how to navigate this new world, identity development, things like that. Hearing Loss Association of America is self-help for hard of hearing used to be. I knew if I would just let go of it, it would come back to me. Okay. So looking at Mexican-American. My friend who was a bilingual counselor develop this, [inaudible] group for young Mexican-American adolescents. And they did things together where they could relate to their Mexican heritage and negotiate how to work within the American culture. They would do things like Christmas carols in Spanish, and things together like that. And yet, talking to parents about breaking some cultural traditions such as young girls going to college, when that wasn't considered the traditional role in the family. So a group that can help bring people together like that. There are lots of helpful groups for other people or between cultures. There are organizations looking at folks in third culture, for example, lot of resources that can be helpful there. A lot of helpful support groups for people who are going through a coming out process. So the idea of peer support is a big part of our model. And it's also a big part of how we're testing out the model in terms of looking for hypotheses that we develop, such as saying, do, say, kids born into families with deaf parents have an easier time with emotional development, than kids born into hearing families. Well, there is some research out there related to that, so let's find out what's the answer. If the answer is deaf kids tend to have better psychosocial development and identity, then that's evidence of support for our model. And we have several hypotheses like that that we are checking out in this next phase of our research. Fran and Sonya, I've got a question for you and this will be our last one. Chris, you can jump in, I guess at the very end if you want, but so assuming that you're sitting around with some of your, your student colleagues and you're talking about this. And they say, okay, we're gonna be counselors here, we're graduating in a little bit and we're going to be out there. How would you help them to take this into account and be better counselors and include this in their practice? What are some things that you think they should be doing are considering, or what advice would you give them? That's a really great question. The first thing that comes to mind is the importance of reflecting on one's own identity. I think, in our multicultural class with Dr. Reed, we kind of had been tasked with the challenge of understanding our identity in relation to other individuals around us. And I think that's so important in the counseling relationship just because we are considering the differentials between power and privilege and oppression depending on one's identity. And I think it all starts from internal reflection, but also taking that extra step to learn about other cultures and really immerse oneself and advocacy and social justice practices. So there's a lot of layers, but starting with oneself, I think, is the best way to begin. I definitely agree with that sentiment. And being able to use those to look at yourself and your own identities and how you move through different things is a great point. I also really like this model because you sort of continue to revisit it. And a lot of the time in counseling cultural identities starts with like an intake form and that's okay. What are you, how do you align? Check one of these things. And it doesn't really revisit that you might be multiple things, that you might feel more one way at a different time that a new situation might challenge that identity and what you put on that intake form. It really allows for you to have a lot of different identities and to be able to feel like you can move through them and talk about that with ease. I love, sort of, the sliding spectrum. Look back-and-forth in-between identities because it gives you a really great way to talk about where you feel at one point or another. I mean, a lot of clients come to you because they're facing something difficult and stressful. And being able to talk through maybe how this might be changing their sense of identity is a great way to acknowledge these other pieces and really have that conversation. I would agree with and appreciate what both Sonya and Fran have said. I would add to it, that counselors should be aware of some resources that might be helpful to refer people who are struggling with an identity between two cultures. It might be they don't know of resources that might be very helpful and we can make a big difference with helping make those connections. Thank you all. I appreciate your time and your willingness to participate in this. Thank you. Thank you for your work. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Thank you.
