by Dr. Bergkamp of DSPAI Appears on The Seed Field Podcast
Last week Dr. Bergkamp of DSPAI appeared on The Seed Field Podcast. The episode is entitled “Reconciling Psych’s Problematic Foundations With Its Transformative Potential”. A description of the episode is as follows:
Episode Notes:
How do we train doctoral psychology students to tolerate distress, ambiguity, and complexity? How do we teach them to think with complexity, allowing them to be therapeutically curious, open, and humble while staying mindful of their own strongly held ideas? Positive psychology has begun to explore the concept of intellectual humility, one’s insight about the limits of their knowledge, openness to new ideas, and ability to receive contrary ideas without taking offense (Davis, et al., 2016). Intellectual humility is considered to be negatively correlated with a strong need to be right, or a strong personal investment into one’s own convictions. The ability to maintain emotional regulation when one’s strongly held ideas are at odds with the other is an essential skill of clinical psychologists, allowing effective psychologists to maintain curiosity, openness, and full engagement with clients who hold different perspectives (Kim, et al., 2019; Markey, et al., 2021). This ability to remain mindfully aware of one’s own perspective while also empathically connecting and understanding the value of another’s seemingly contradictory perspective is perhaps one of the most difficult and essential things to help doctoral psychology trainees develop (Placeres, et al., 2022). When psychological trainees are faced with incongruent belief systems, members of the dominant group tend to exercise their “privileged safety” by becoming defensive, minimizing others’ experiences, and/or offering solutions to “fix the problem” without self-reflection (Bergkamp et al, 2022). Simultaneously, members of non-dominant/marginalized groups are often mentored to censor their anger and frustration in order to avoid being viewed as disruptive by the dominant group. Thus, training programs must recognize how safety is constructed and managed between polarized groups (Bergkamp, 2022). Please click the button below to listen to the full episode.