Draft Thoughts on Professional Defensiveness (Work in Progress)

If this work is helpful, please consider donating or hiring me for consulting work (see more below) 

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A classic question was posted in one of my online community discussion forums this week...

"Question for professional practitioners: why is it when people criticize therapists and behavior analysts, many of you professionals jump to the defense of it?"

Service users see and experience this all the time. In public spaces. In private. Online and in person. Often doesn't matter how the question or critique is presented. If it's critical in any manner. If it's glowing praise or deferment to authority, the comment is often openly attacked. Might be a patronizing reply. Might be a brush off. Could take various forms, none of which are mutual, open-minded discussion and exploration of the issue being raised. The question is ... why?

Humans are, I would say, far to complex for a singular simple answer. Also, we should mention, not every professional jumps to defensiveness. And there will some instances where the defensiveness is arguably well-warranted. I'm here to say though, that meeting any and all critique or questioning, of any form, with defensiveness is an objective problem. It exists. I see it every day. It's time to address it.

There is no doubt in my mind that there is an identifiable trend of unwarranted and problematic professional defensiveness in modern mental and behavioral health (physical health too, though that's a space I'm less directly involved in, but still engage with enough to have seen it there too).

With those caveats, framings, and assertions out of the way, time to get into the main point of today's post. Which isn't just to point out that yes, this exists and is a problem, but to ask why it exists. Have some initial thoughts below. These observations were formed from personal and professional interactions with literally hundreds of practitioners and literally thousands of service users. 

Some Reasons Why Professional Defensiveness Might Occur

This post is called "draft thoughts" for a reason. This is a first attempt at some thoughts. Consider supporting this work or co-exploring if this seems helpful.

Reason 1: A Crisis of Faith (And Why It's Challenging To Reverse Deep-Seated Care-orrism)

This will take a couple paragraphs laying down some other groundwork concepts before we finally can connect to professional defensiveness, so hang in there. One common pattern I see is what a friend calls "care-orrism". Many people go into the various health professions out of a very genuine desire to care and help. There's real compassion. There's real sympathy. I'd also say there's quite frequently some trauma-based energy going on of various forms, a common form being: suffering happened to me or someone I deeply cared for, and now there's a resultant deep need, including trauma-induced fight-flight franticness, to prevent that suffering in others. There is a lot of care going on. 

Note that care, in this sense, is detached from some other very important things. Care is important too. But these others things include such items as respect and cognitive empathy (correct understanding the perspective of others). The concept of care, as I'm going to define it here, is about the experience of a given individual's personal belief and understanding on what counts as suffering, what counts as health, and then basing compassion on those beliefs. With that established, we can then define "care-orrism" as an unjust, nonconsensual enforcement of oppressive concepts of what health is and isn't on others. A classic historic example of care-orrism are the ongoing legacy of colonial nations supposedly "civilizing" the lands the ingenuous people being invaded and conquered.

Care-orrism is modern times is often occurring because we have this population of people desperately wanting to help others and relieve suffering. We then have society (yes, am blaming you society) selling these people a path toward being helpful. We have giant promotional ads and career guides saying "want to help people? Come be a behavior analyst! Come be a therapist! We totally help people!"

These people believe what they're told. What they're sold. They buy in (often literally, taking on massive student debt) and spend the next few years or decades in an echo chamber being told every day that they're saving the world. It's science! It's "evidence-based"! Trust authority! They are dogmatically lectured in what help is and isn't. And it feels great. Trust these methods, do what you're told, and we promise that you'll be making positive, life-altering, life-saving differences in the world. 

So that's the backdrop. Years of thinking you've helped people. You've trusted the process. You're doing good in the world. And then one day someone comes along and gets right in your face to say otherwise. They say "actually, all that stuff called "help"? Yeah, so, bad news here. Some of that help really wasn't. It wasn't help. It might've even caused a lot of additional hurt.

What we're dealing with here is no less than a literal crisis of faith. Not religious faith. But faith in the capital H Help. Faith that what you've invested years into works. Possibly sunk a huge part of one's identity into ("I'm a healer!"). 

Having one's deep-seated faith challenged can be difficult. Is that an excuse for the defensiveness? No. Is that an acceptable excuse especially given the context of who's doing the challenging and why? No. Context matters, and the context here is community advocates and service users themselves doing the questioning. Not random, hateful agenda-driven naysayers. It's the actual people in need themselves doing the questioning.

It is still understandable how difficult having the faith-in-help questioned is. It's not pleasant hearing one was misled and not told full truth. It's difficult hearing about ableism, racism, and sexism. Hearing about widespread institutional failures to respond respectfully to critique. It's hard. It's work. And yes, that can really suck. It's not an excuse, but it's understandable. 

Instead of doing of that work. Instead of choosing to bravely walk through that faith crisis, we instead see defensiveness. We see understandable fear-based denial that the help might not've worked. No-one want to be a care-orrist. 

So, that's some of it. 

Reason 2: Lack of Humility 

Another part is cultural. We live in (referencing my cultural circles of Western dominant white supremacy cultural values/attitudes broadly speaking) a deeply self-first culture where true, authentic humility is rarely practices and widely disparaged. We are told to be independent, confident go-getters. Don't let anyone stand in your way. We're told to compete. We live, right down to the capitalist economic core, in a competition filled world of winners and losers and mission in life is to win. Why question your own self when you can instead attack the person doing the questioning. Questioning is a threat. Wrongness is not tolerated or accepted much in this world.

So, that's a part of it.

Reason 3: Prejudice (Who We Call "Experts", Who We Don't)

Reference Article for this Topic: Ivan Illich - The Invention and Elimination of Disease 

On the to-do is to unpack and make Illich a bit more accessible. This passage will likely be a bit confusing but is deeply important...

" Medical epistemology is much more important for the healthy solution of this crisis than either medical biology or medical technology. Such an epistemology will have to clarify the logical status and the social nature of diagnosis and therapy, primarily in physical—as opposed to mental—sickness. All disease is a socially created reality. Its meaning and the response it has evoked have a history. The study of this history will make us understand the degree to which we are prisoners of the medical ideology in which we were brought up."

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This article brought to you by the currently unfunded Peer Voices Network. 

Please consider donating to support this work. I am disabled, financially struggling, and am forced by existing social structures into producing content like this for free. I hope those with means and privilege will eventually shift priorities toward increased support for lived experience content generation and expertise sharing. Donations are never required and always appreciated. 

Donate Link: https://ko-fi.com/socialrealitylab

I am also available for consultation work, curriculum development, trainings, etc.. I enjoy partnering with organizations on development of more accurate understandings of social reality. 

Find us on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/@peervoicesnetwork

I can be reached by email at peervoicesnetwork@gmail.com

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Image by rickey123 from Pixabay

A Brief Note On Neurodivergent Listening Styles

A colleague of mine posted about how they find it comforting and regulating in social conversation to also be on their phone. Here's my reply to that, and a good proto-article for the important topic of why  neurodivergent multitasking if often their way and need to pay better attention to you, while often signaling and being the exact opposite in neurotypical communication.

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 I can unfortunately admit that, if I didn't know you at all, it'd feel the same way to be - feeling and perceiving that I'm being ignored. But .... if there's any discussion at all and I learn it soothes you, it'd probably very quickly stop bothering me.

Also, boy is there that complex "who's responsible". I super appreciate being asked. I can also (as co-responsibility) bring up the topic myself. "I'm feeling ignored, am I?". I think a bit of both can go a long way, and it's also about how others react.

Interestingly, I know some personality types who kinda hate being asked "is this okay" all the time, and operate on a "if there's a problem, I'll tell you, so don't ask!" wavelength with I try to respect but is hugely unnatural to me.

And in a better world, we'd all have "conflict" skills to chill the heck out about different needs and finding mutual accommodation solutions.

Whew, did not expect to go so deep on the reply. Partly to say - as long as I knew you were still attentive and engaging, not a problem scrolling, stretching, etc. A ton of neurodiverse people I know like doing some form of light multitasking and it's a super normative and ableist thing to demand that "full attention" is "best attention". Tons of ND crumple into all sort of dysregulation when normative "full and complete attention" is demanded.

Also one final warning label that some ND people, regardless of attention, are assholes just as much as some ND folks are assholes and aren't even trying to care. Which is very different than working within and accommodating an ND attention span while wanting and, in fact, actually, deeply caring. There's a difference.

Words Matter Series: "Feels Like Disrespect" Versus "Was Disrespect"

A friend today posted a quote along the lines of "Just because it's all inside your head doesn't make it less real".

This brought to mind a wording critique I've been frustrated with for years and finally will try to organize some thoughts around. Today is the longtime coming "feels like versus was" critique article. 

This is one that bothered me for literal years. Possibly (probably?) starting as yet again feeling invalidated in professional therapy services. Have also seen it in day to day conversation. Since then, I've had probably two dozen or so in depth conversations about this with a range of mixed reactions, and am hoping to continue exploring and trying to explain my reactions to it, ideally with open and respectful curiosity.

So what is the fuss I'm trying to make? Imagine this common situation. One person is recounting a story of experiencing disrespect at work to a friend. The friend, in trying to reflect and/or be an active listener, replies with "I hear that you felt disrespected".

I'l start with a question - does that, to you all reading this, feel like a validating response? No wrong answer here per se, we all have subjective reactions to language.

What I can report is that, for me, and at least some others I've talked to, we can often very intense feelings of invalidation hearing phrasing like this. And it doesn't have to be about disrespect. It can be about almost anything. You felt ignored. You felt sad. You felt weird. Etc. 

Sticking with the above example, why is it sounding invalidating? For me, it's because the phrase "feel like" implies non-reality for me and my verbal world. It sounds like the person is directly saying "no, you weren't actually being disrespected, you only felt (i.e. perceived) disrespect". And the phrase carries additional implied weight of "also, it's your fault that you're misinterpreting what actually was not in any way disrespect. Even though it felt that way to you, you should not be feeling that way.".

In my verbal world, if a person agreed that disrespect truly had occurred, or at least agrees with or trusts my report of it, they'd say "oh no, you were disrespected! How are you doing with that?" Not "oh no, you felt disrespected!". 

If such a reaction sounds foreign and nonsensical to you, we likely live in different verbal worlds. One early theory why (though not exclusive) - I'm a survivor of severe childhood and adulthood verbal and emotional abuse/violence. My experiences were and are dismissed constantly, and semantics are very much one weapon in that assault. So, that's the background I bring to this. Maybe I need to change my verbal world, maybe you need to change yours. Maybe it's just hard to translate. That's a topic itself.

Here's my pitch for my verbal world, and the underlying concepts trying to be captured where maybe it's the word systems itself failing us all?

An underlying question in the example above - was the person actually treated with disrespect? What does that question itself even mean?

To start with, back to re-inventing humanities 101, it's helpful to remember that we're in the realm of social dynamics, not physics. Human minds are unique, carbon atoms are not. The social dynamics world includes operating with subjectivity. It also includes intent and impact. To understand disrespect, I believe we need to keep all that in mind. This includes two important underlying questions of...

- What is disrespectful, what isn't, who decides, and whose rules are we going to follow? 

- Under a given definition of disrespect, was disrespect intended? Was it accidental?

- Was the situation perceived "correctly" by the person experiencing disrespect. Did they hear all the words accurately, etc.?

- Separate to the question of literally accurate, did they hear the interaction as intended. Were assumptions made? Were the assumptions correct?

We sometimes half-joke knowingly about how hard communication is. The above is part of why. There is so much going on in communication at any given time. All of the questions above, I'd hope, ought to matter if we want to fully unpack the situation of disrespect accurately, where accurate means "accounting for the full interaction". Sometimes that's a lot of effort, and people feel mixed about time, effort, skill, and worth in doing so. I try not to be too judge-y, but I'm very much in the camp of "let's get the understanding right, even if it takes a while".

And, back to the main topic of the article, the point is this. We have at least a half dozen subsets of info and perspectives to consider with the concept of disrespect for any given situation. Given that, what does this phrase actually even mean..

"You were disrespected"

Disrespected according to which definition / cultural / personal understanding of disrespect? Was it intentional or accidental? Was it was it perceived wrong or perceived correctly? All of these are very different scenarios, and none of them seem explicitly specified by the phrase "you were disrespected".

I think what instead happens is a lot of people assume certain answers to these questions are connoted (meant/suggested) by certain phrasing, or by the additional context or subtext of the given conversation. And, finally, to arrive at the thesis of this article, I find that...

 •  One subset of people assume the exact same certain answers to these social dynamic assumptions with both "it felt like" and "it was" as phrases.

 •  Another subset of people (including me myself!) assume two different sets of certain answers to these social dynamic assumptions with the "it felt like" and "it was" phrasings.

In particular, for me, the phrasing "felt like" was "was" is very much (in my perception of it) us having a conversation about whether the person should've felt disrespected or not. Which is just one of the half dozen dynamics we could be talking about. But it's the one that's always on my mind, probably because I suffer from both internalized and externalized neoliberalism syndrome (excessive and unjust fault placed on the individuals instead of on external circumstance). Fault is always top of my mind.

To me, "feels like" says that, while you did feel disrespected at the time, with later reflection you are no longer agreeing that it was actual disrespect. It's, in a sense, a mistake that you felt that way. An error.

Whereas "was disrespected" is no mistake. Something wrong actually did happen, at least as you see problem. And likely as you'd want others to also it. There is no mistake or error in how you are feeling. You should be feeling disrespected, because you were disrespected. Whereas in the prior case, even though you did feel disrespected, there was actually no real need to (though it did happen) and it was just a mistake. 

Even that, I'll admit, sounds a bit shaky to me as a description. It really confusing to talk about all feelings as real, in the sense that we feel what we feel (in that sense, feelings are never "wrong"). If you're sad, you're sad. Telling someone they aren't is just sort of invalidating or gaslighting them. We feel what we feel. 

But then there's the next level of analysis, where we might assess what to make of how we feel. Are the feelings justified? And other such questions. At the level, we can start to make value judgements. Looking back, we were confused? Were our perceptions correct or not? Are the feelings lingering, and why is that?

And to me, my thought is that current language is absolutely abysmal and astoundingly ill-equipped to empower us to have effective conversation about all these dynamics at play. It disempowers us from being more effective navigators of emotions, conflict, and other personal and social dynamics of the mind.

 Which leads to one of the reasons this blog was founded, which is to ask for support in exploring these  sorts of words and other "failures of concepts themselves problems, make them more understandable, and offer starts into co-developing potential solutions. 

Hopefully the above made sense. Writing this made me still understand that I still feel (and am!) only about 70% sure what I wrote above even makes sense to me. But I am 100% sure that something is going on with this "feels like" versus "was" phrasing, and I really want to nail down what it is because it's bugging the crap out of me and makes me uncomfortable everyday. Which itself is a good window into the world of Hypersemantic Sensitivity as a condition. 

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This article brought to you by the currently unfunded Peer Voices Network. 

Please consider donating to support this work. I am disabled, financially struggling, and am forced by existing social structures into producing content like this for free. I hope those with means and privilege will eventually shift priorities toward increased support for lived experience content generation and expertise sharing. Donations are never required and always appreciated. 

Donate Link: https://ko-fi.com/socialrealitylab

I am also available for consultation work, curriculum development, trainings, etc.. I enjoy partnering with organizations on development of more accurate understandings of social reality. 

Find us on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/@peervoicesnetwork

I can be reached by email at peervoicesnetwork@gmail.com

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Image from WordsForIntroverts on Instagram 

Why Telling People to "Accept Reality" Can Be Deeply Problematic and Oppressive Phrasing

If this work is helpful, please consider donating or hiring me for consulting work (see more below) 

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A problem is the word "accept", which quite literally (by definition) has at least two very different meanings.

A) One is more about "consent to receive"

B) One is more about "understand to exist"

The spirit of what you're writing about is B. But, even by the unclear label alone, it hints at pressuring abuse survivors into A - that they "consent" to having been abused. That they "accept" the abuse, meaning saying it was okay that it happened.

The semantic are unclear, and it's horrifically irresponsible communication to not come up with clearer language.

Rather than be held accountable for clearer language, almost EVERY SINGLE professional I've talked to (in the hundreds at this point) insists that it's a problem of the listener and reader for "hearing the meaning" wrong.

Throw out radical acceptance as a term. We deserve better, less hostile and potentially damaging language.

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This article brought to you by the currently unfunded Peer Voices Network. 

Please consider donating to support this work. I am disabled, financially struggling, and am forced by existing social structures into producing content like this for free. I hope those with means and privilege will eventually shift priorities toward increased support for lived experience content generation and expertise sharing. Donations are never required and always appreciated. 

Donate Link: https://ko-fi.com/socialrealitylab

I am also available for consultation work, curriculum development, trainings, etc.. I enjoy partnering with organizations on development of more accurate understandings of social reality. 

Find us on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/@peervoicesnetwork

I can be reached by email at peervoicesnetwork@gmail.com

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Lived Experience Inclusion Effectiveness - Literature Review Gallery

Literature Review of Participatory Research and Community Co-produced Health Services Project

Article: What Is Lived Experience

...

1) Recovery Colleges Characterisation and Testing in England (RECOLLECT): rationale and protocol

The purpose of a recovery college is to support people's recovery from mental health difficulties through learning and education that is co-produced by people with lived experience and people with professional expertise.

Reported benefits for service user students include increased confidence and self-esteem, reduced self-stigma and sense of identity, hope, new skills and knowledge, improved social networks, healthier lifestyle adoption, quality of life, wellbeing, and achieving goals, particularly regarding education. Mental health staff attending Recovery Colleges either as trainers or as students have reported increased knowledge and skills, along with attitudinal changes. The experience of co-production is described as stimulating a renewed motivation for their work generally, and particularly for working more collaboratively with service users. For some, it resulted in decisions to change the language they used and in how they shared information with service users.

2) ‘People should be allowed to do what they like’: Autistic adults’ views and experiences of stimming

Autistic adults highlighted the importance of stimming as an adaptive mechanism that helps them to soothe or communicate intense emotions or thoughts and thus objected to treatment that aims to eliminate the behaviour.

3) Lived experience research as a resource for recovery: a mixed methods study

This paper seeks to answer the research questions: a) Did exposure to lived experience research increase hopefulness for participants?; and b) How else did interacting with lived experience research resources influence participants’ lives?

Findings indicated that the resources promoted hope, but that increases in hopefulness may not be seen immediately. Other impacts include that the resources: encouraged helpful activities; provided a positive experience; increased valued knowledge; encouraged people to reflect on their journey and think constructively about mental health issues; helped people to feel less alone; and assisted people to explain their situation to others.

4) A case study of enhanced clinical care enabled by Aboriginal health research: the Hearing, EAr health and Language Services (HEALS) project

Ongoing disparities between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal health outcomes demonstrate the need for policy that brings about tangible and sustained health benefits for the Aboriginal community. HEALS demonstrates that, with proper funding, efficient management, and a dedicated and collaborative team, health services needed to help Close the Gap can be made more accessible to Aboriginal families, and that such enhanced clinical care can be piggybacked onto an existing research collaboration. The rapid delivery of services (5,822 speech pathology sessions and 219 ENT operations) for 653 Aboriginal children was achieved primarily due to existing partnerships with five ACCHS developed through the SEARCH research project.

HEALS was built on partnerships, founded by the SEARCH study that upholds the research guidelines advocated by the Aboriginal community, including the principles of close community consultation, capacity-building and the philosophy of “no research without service”.18-20 From research identifying Aboriginal children with otitis media, hearing loss and speech delay, the SEARCH network facilitated a rapid delivery of health services that became the HEALS program. HEALS provides an example of how strong relationships between researchers and the Aboriginal community that are built on mutual respect, trust, and common goals can be leveraged to enable the strategic delivery of health services for Aboriginal people.

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Urban Institute Reports on Inclusive Practice Recommendations for Justice System Reform Efforts

1) Designing Data and Technology Projects for Criminal Legal System Reform

2) Best Practices in Community Surveys for Criminal Legal System Reform

3) Strategic Communication of Reform Efforts in the Criminal Legal System

Another Update / Overview of the "Peer Inclusion in Health Systems" Movement: Why We Need Support

Letter to a mid-level university research director. Dialogue was on themes of funding in research, the role of science in broader social advocacy, and ongoing lived experience (peer) exclusion. 

Conversation Excerpt

Regarding research v advocacy, have you seen this paper yet? Fantastic read: Academic, Activist, or Advocate? Angry, Entangled, and Emerging: A Critical Reflection on Autism Knowledge Production (Botha 2021). Am excited to see science at times slowly come out of its shell (like the March for Science) movement, and in part come to its own realizations of advocacy not being something society tends to support, broadly speaking. Scientific neutrality has an important aspiration but is also impractical and a myth. Acknowledge that there will always be bias. Acknowledge that science exists within and impacts larger society in complex and at times deeply problematic ways. 

And yes, the funding struggle is something I was completely unprepared for and seems astoundingly under-discussed and under-addressed. Both within and beyond research. It exists as a problematic struggle on the axis of time spent hunting for funding in and of itself. And it exists on the axis of absolutely brutal inequality. The scale of that inequality seems profoundly underemphasized, in a way that no words seem up to task of capturing. And there are such low fruit starting solutions out there.

For example, in Minnesota there's an effort in the nonprofit world right now to try and get a Common Grant application widely accepted again. Why write one grant ten different times in ten different formats for the same project? It's ludicrous. One proposal written one time ought to suffice. Could easily be something the research world could adopt. Well, "easily". The social dynamics and politics are hard, but in practical terms it's so incredibly sensible and simple. 

The other thought for you is something I've been calling "Forced Unpaid Advocacy". In research, if you don't get the funds, you move onto something else. Still a massive problem, but it is what it is. In advocacy, there is often no walking away. You can't leave the community you're, by definition, a part of. I've also been calling it the "Limited Power to Walk Away". Technically, you could stop advocating. But if, for example, transgender people stop advocating there is no care on offer for them and that's not a real option. It's a direct health risk and even a death sentence. So, paid or not, the work must go on. 

One example I can share is the work of Marion Davis. And my goodness, look at the work she does on spinal CSF leaks and broader patient advocacy, very often as unpaid labor. It's not a "choice". Not really. Her community is being failed. It's do the unpaid work or remain silent and unhelped/failed. And yet we decide to call that "choice"? What an appalling and oppressive framing of that situation. I'm not sure how to phrase this point better but it's something that ought to be written more eloquently and convincingly than I just did. Work in progress (yet more unpaid and unsupported communication work).

And a last point to conclude this problems and challenges overview is the absolute dearth of funding avenues on offer. This includes reports like the recent NIH Working Group Report on Anti-Ableism (which I've seen no evidence of NIH taking meaningful action on yet, including senior NIH staff directly refusing to engage with our broader peer coalitions). And dozens of reports like Black Funding Denied: Altogether, only 1% of grantmaking from the 25 foundations that we looked at was specifically designated for Black communities, even though a combined 15% of these 25 cities’ populations are Black.

I've myself directly written to groups such as the leadership team at Boston University School of Public Health: Letter to Boston University Asking for Co-Empowered Peer Inclusion in Public Health Research and Support Efforts. Yet they've continually ignored that email campaign. We aren't going to solve racism and ableism overnight. But there is almost zero excuse for individuals like Dean Galea at BUSPH to not foster more active and equitable stakeholder co-development with authentic peer communities. He didn't give a flip that disability rights icon Judy Huemann herself (rest her soul) recommended him working with groups like mine, but was all too happy to look good hosting a webinar with her as a speaker (for no speaker fee either mind you, I'd guess). And it was a great webinar, with great content, but what really came of it? It was performative allyship of the highest order, and it makes me so sad and enraged. 

To end on a high note of sorts, there is a community out there hungering for better. If it could just be given any momentum or support at all, so much could be done. Webinars, articles. Yes, also direct advocacy campaigns. It just needs some empowered group somewhere to finally buy in on the vision and its extremely clear avenue toward better health outcomes. I have development contacts interested in helping (but they need to be paid for their labor). I have skilled advocacy contacts like New Disabled South. There's already models for lived experience inclusion development institutes like University College London's Co-production Collective. For months now I've been getting weekly emails, such as one from a Center for Disease Control research group last week, wanting guidance on how to do better on lived experience inclusion. And I'm absolutely destroying myself trying to be that resource for them. I've made exactly $1,300 in over three years of doing this 5 to 40 hours every single week while suffering through unsupported chronic illness. Note that the CDC made no offer to bring us all in as consultants (and probably is given no budget from on-high to do so, but also are they even asking for such a budget?).

The potential to do something great is there, and yet very accurately still feels miles away and out of reach to build. Happy to keep a conversation going about how to defeat that barrier.

Sincerely,

- Peer Voices Network

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This article brought to you by the currently unfunded Peer Voices Network. 

Please consider donating to support this work. I am disabled, financially struggling, and am forced by existing social structures into producing content like this for free. I hope those with means and privilege will eventually shift priorities toward increased support for lived experience content generation and expertise sharing. Donations are never required and always appreciated. 

Donate Link: https://ko-fi.com/socialrealitylab

I am also available for consultation work, curriculum development, trainings, etc.. I enjoy partnering with organizations on development of more accurate understandings of social reality. 

Find us on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/@peervoicesnetwork

I can be reached by email at peervoicesnetwork@gmail.com

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