wellnesswithkini, Oakland, CA (2026)

10/23/2026

Welcome to Kini Chang, LMFT Scholar 👩🏻‍🏫 Series! Dr.
Rupa Marya indicated that colonization means disconnection. From our ancestors, from the land, from the ways our people used to live with the earth. She reminds us that all of us, somewhere back in our family line, come from people who lived that way.

Growing out of that is an economy built on taking. And it’s held up by systems of supremacy: white supremacy, patriarchy, and the idea that humans get to use up the land, the water, and every other living thing.

All of that produces trauma. Trauma keeps the body stressed. And long term stress turns into inflammation, which sits underneath so many of the illnesses we’re told come from bad choices.

Marya calls them diseases of colonization. Her example that stays with me is Standing Rock. Diabetes used to be rare there. Then the Missouri River was dammed, the forests flooded, people lost their traditional foods and
medicines, and diabetes rates climbed. The people didn’t change. What was done to their world did.

I think about my clients. And I think about my own family. Where did our chain start?

Here’s the hopeful part. Marya says healing means reconnecting what was split apart, and taking
apart what keeps splitting us. She even points to research from Alberta showing that First Nations communities who kept their languages alive had lower rates of diabetes. Culture protects us.

💟 Where do you see how culture protects and supports you?

10/21/2026

Welcome to Kini Chang, LMFT Scholar 👩🏻‍🏫 Series!! Rupa Marya is a physician who I deeply respect and admire. She with Raj Patel, wrote Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. Her argument begins in the body. Inflammation is how we respond to threat, and colonialism created threats that never end: displacement, racism, extraction from land and labor, food built for profit.

She calls the usual response shallow medicine, which finds suffering inside one person and treats it there. Deep medicine asks how our social structures are producing illness and sets out to redesign them.
Therapy has a shallow version too. Deep medicine asks more of us.

💬 What has your body been responding to that no one asked about?

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10/19/2026

Welcome to Kini Chang, LMFT Scholar 👩🏻‍🏫 Series!! Have you ever been told your stress is all in your head, while your body was falling apart?

Dr.Rupa Marya and I are suggesting that maybe it was the stomach issues that started the year everything got hard. The headaches. The exhaustion no amount of sleep could touch. And somewhere along the way, someone made it sound like a personal problem.

Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, and she would push back on that. In her book Inflamed, written with Raj Patel, she starts with inflammation. Inflammation is your body’s alarm system. It’s supposed to go off when there’s danger, and then quiet down.

But what happens when the danger never leaves? Racism. Money stress. Unsafe housing. Food
that fills you up without nourishing you. Your body doesn’t sort any of that into “social issues.” It
just keeps the alarm on.

Marya calls the approach shallow medicine: find the problem inside one person and treat it there. She’s asking for deep medicine, which looks at what’s making whole communities sick and works to change that.
I see this in therapy all the time. Someone comes in sure their body is broken. And part of our work together is saying, maybe your body is doing exactly what it was built to do, in conditions no body should have to live in.
That doesn’t mean we stop caring for you. It means we stop blaming you.

💟 If your body has been carrying something no one ever asked about, save this. And follow along for more of the Scholar Series.

10/17/2026

Welcome to Kini Chang, LMFT Scholar 👩🏻‍🏫 Series!! How do we shift from surviving to thriving? Let’s start by first acknowledging what happens when the crisis ends. You are sleeping again, functioning, no longer in danger. And then everyone quietly stops caring, supporting, connecting with you, checking in on you. The system says you no longer need treatment.

Thema Bryant’s Dr. Thema work names why that is a problem. Surviving and living are not the same thing, and a field that measures success by symptom reduction can decide you are finished when you are only stable.

Notice who this happens to. It is disproportionately people whose lives have been hard in structural ways, where stability starts to feel like enough, like asking for more would be unrealistic. Meanwhile others get to talk about purpose, joy, and meaning.

That is not clinical judgment. That is a bias about who is allowed to want a whole life. Joy is not the reward at the end of healing. It is part of what makes healing hold.

💟If someone asked what thriving would look like for you, not coping, thriving, would you have an answer?

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10/14/2026

Welcome to Kini Chang, LMFT 👩🏻‍🏫 Series. Today, I’ll be talking about another concept Sunil Bhatia and I share in common. First, let’s orient ourselves to Globalization. Globalization sells a Western self as universal. What gets called development is often assimilation given a gentler name.

Psychology exports a particular kind of self around the world and calls the result human nature.

Bhatia spent years interviewing young people in urban India as globalization reshaped what was available to them, and what he found complicates the usual story about progress. These young people were not passive. They were building what some of them called world
class selves, taking what global culture offered and using it. But the terms were not neutral. To become legible as modern, successful, employable, there were things you had to become and things you had to leave behind. Accent. Language. Ways of relating to family. Ways of
understanding obligation.

He describes what that costs psychologically, and it is not the cost of failure. It is the cost of succeeding on someone else’s terms.

Psychology travels with globalization. It exports a model of the healthy self, autonomous, self actualizing, individually responsible for its own wellbeing, and presents that model as science rather than as culture.
So when we bring therapy to communities that organize the self differently, we are not delivering something neutral. We are delivering a set of assumptions about what a person is.

CTA: Comment below if you are therapist doing global
global or cross cultural work. Thank you!!

10/10/2026

Welcome to Kini Chang, LMFT Scholar 👩🏻‍🏫 Series. This is one of the most beautiful concepts I share as a sentiment with Dr. Thema.

As the 2023 president of the APA, built a framework around one word: homecoming.

Trauma shows you which parts of yourself are safe to show, and you adapt. You put things away, the loud part, the wanting part, the part with opinions. That adaptation was not weakness. It worked. It kept you safe when safety was not guaranteed.

But nobody announces when the danger has passed. So people arrive years later, high functioning, successful, and quietly estranged from themselves. “I don’t know what I actually like.” “I don’t know who I am when no one needs anything.”

Bryant’s frame points somewhere specific. This is not self improvement. You are not building a better person. You are going back for one who already existed.
You were not lost. You were set aside.

💟 What is one part of yourself you had to put away, and are you ready to go back for it?

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10/08/2026

Welcome to Kini Chang, LMFT Scholar 👩🏻‍🏫 Series. Survival was never the destination. Today, I’m introducing in partnership with Thema Bryant, the question, “what becomes possible once you are no longer only enduring?”

There is a moment in trauma work that does not get talked about enough. The crisis ends. The client is sleeping, functioning, no longer in danger. And then everyone quietly stops. Bryant’s work names why that is a problem. Surviving is not the same as living, and a field that measures success by symptom reduction can accidentally decide that a person is finished when
they are merely stable.

I think about who this happens to most. It is disproportionately clients whose lives have been
hard in structural ways. Poverty, racism, immigration status, violence. There is an unspoken experience where stability starts to feel like enough for them, like asking for more would be greedy or unrealistic. Meanwhile clients with more resources get to talk about meaning, purpose, joy, and creative fulfillment. That is a bias about who gets to want a whole life.

Bryant insists on the full question. Not just, are you safe, but what do you love. What are you curious about. Where is your joy, your rest, your pleasure, your sense of the sacred. She treats those as clinical territory rather than luxuries you address after the real work is done.

And practically, this is not a reward at the end. Joy and connection are part of what makes the healing durable. People do not sustain recovery toward nothing. They sustain it toward a life they actually want to be in.

So the question I try to keep asking, well past the point where the crisis has resolved, is what would it look like for you to be thriving. Not coping. Thriving. Most people have never been asked.

✅ Save this if nobody has asked you that question yet.

10/06/2026

Welcome to Kini Chang, LMFT Scholar 👩🏻‍🏫 Series! This is a follow up to my video on Sunday where we had a very candid conversation about cognitive dissonance, racialized trauma, whiteness in America, how is shows up in the therapist room, and how we are all impacted by this.

Baldwin made a psychological argument about white supremacy that rarely gets quoted, and clinicians should sit with it.

Whiteness, he argued, is a fabricated category built to justify power. Maintaining it requires suppressing your own moral knowledge, over and over, until the suppression becomes automatic. What results is not guilt. It is numbness. A person who has traded feeling for comfort.

He was not asking for sympathy for the oppressor. He was describing what self deception costs the person doing it.

In session, it looks like the client who cannot stay present when race enters the conversation. The flatness that arrives near certain topics. The defensiveness that fires before thought does.

Nobody in this arrangement comes out whole. Not equally, not with the same stakes, but not
whole.

✅ Clinicians: where have you watched numbness show up as a defense in the room?

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10/04/2026

Welcome to Kini Chang, LMFT Scholar 👩🏻‍🏫 Series. In today’s discussion, we are diving into what James Baldwin and Joy DeGruy Publications said that racism costs the people who benefit from it too.

This is the Baldwin idea that gets quoted least, and I think it is the one clinicians most need. Baldwin argued that whiteness is not a description of anyone’s skin. It is a category that was invented to justify a distribution of power, and it has to be actively maintained. His claim was psychological, not just political. To keep believing you deserve what you have while watching what it costs other people, you have to suppress something in yourself. You have to not know what you know. This is cognitive dissonance. Dr. DeGruy has also spoken to this in her lectures.

His word for the result was not guilt. It was numbness. A kind of spiritual flattening. He described people who had traded their capacity to feel for their capacity to remain comfortable, and he did not think that was a good trade for them either.

I want to be careful here, because this idea gets misused. Baldwin was not asking anyone to feel sorry for the oppressor. He was making an observation about what moral self deception does to a person over time.

In the room, this shows up in ways clinicians will recognize. The client who cannot stay present
in any conversation touching race, who changes the subject through their body before their mouth catches up. The flatness that appears when a topic gets close to something they have decided not to look at. The defensiveness that arrives faster than thought.
That is not a character flaw. It is a defense that was trained and rewarded.

Baldwin’s argument is that liberation runs in both directions. Not equally, and not with the same
stakes. But nobody comes out of this arrangement whole.

💥 Clinicians: follow for more on what oppression does to everyone in the room. Share this with a colleague sitting with it.

💫Follow for more wellness tips, self sustainability and care, decolonial practices rooted in liberation.

10/03/2026

Welcome to Kini Chang, LMFT Scholar 👩🏻‍🏫 Series! A recap on Angela Davis position on Abolition. Most argue this as removing or subtraction. Close the prison, end the practice, remove the thing. That is the easy half.

Davis has spent decades on the other half. Build housing, care, schools, and income until the cage has nothing left to do. You are not removing an institution from a working society. You are building the conditions in which it has no work. Clinically, this is the same move. Symptom reduction tells you what is gone. It says nothing about what took its place, and a person whose anxiety dropped but whose life did not change is
often just holding on harder.

So the better question is what would have to exist before the symptom is no longer necessary?

Sometimes that is a relationship. Sometimes it is money, or a door that locks. A lot of that sits outside the room. Naming it anyway changes the work.

✅ What would have to be true in your life for the thing you are managing to no longer be necessary?

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