Seiyu Institute for Health & Training, L3C

PERSONAL STATEMENT

My name is Liem. I’m thrilled to learn and practice intensive psychotherapy as part of Seiyu IHT. I’m drawn to the intensive psychotherapy model for the spaciousness and intentionality it creates for the healing process to unfold.

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I come to the work of individual, collective, and intergenerational healing as a pre-licensed clinical social worker with the lived experience as a white, neurodivergent, queer, and genderfluid/nonbinary person just under 4’10” tall. I live on unceded Abenaki land otherwise known as Brattleboro, Vermont. I experience who I am through music, rhythm, and sound. Some of the musicians whose music has rearranged my DNA and my altered my life path include the Mountain Goats, Joy Oladokun, Quinn Christopherson, and Ani DiFranco. Prior to my degree in clinical social work, I spent four years facilitating weeklong intensive training programs on behavioral health careers for high schoolers in rural Alaska. I support all ethical non-monogamous relationship structures, am sex & kink positive, & believe in sex workers' rights.

I am aware of and attuned to historical, inter-generational, persistent institutional and personal trauma; that is why I spend so much of my free time resourcing, which is therapy-speak for making brunch with my loved ones, making up silly songs, staring at a blank wall and coaxing my cat to sit just close enough to me that I can feel her body heat and my own heart swelling with unreasonable love. I believe in that love, even when I sometimes don’t or can’t have access to feeling it. I believe I cannot teach anyone what I have not practiced.

Some of the lineages that influence how I move through the world and what I bring to clinical social work practice in terms of my therapeutic orientation/approach include:

Somatic abolitionism – “living, embodied anti-racist practice and cultural building —a way of being in the world. It is a return to the age-old wisdom of human bodies respecting, honoring, and resonating with other human bodies” In the words of Resmaa Menakem, “liberation is nothing less than the stoking of the creation energy to be who and what we were supposed to be in the first place.”

Generative somatics - An organization that works with a politicized body-based methodology to support healing individual and collective trauma and addressing privilege and oppression.

Rapid transformation therapy – A healing process accessed through guided deep breathing exercises that taps into stored emotional energies and repressed memories, with the intent to learn how to “allow oneself to fully feel one’s feelings by staying with those feelings, following them to the core of the being and not abandoning oneself.”

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