Thien Phuong is a 2004 student of Clinical Somatic Psychology at SBGI.  She is a drug counselor, having made tremendous contributions to those in need.  In particular, as a Vietnamese American, she reaches out within the Vietnamese community, not only as a counselor, but also as a teacher and humanitarian.  Thien travels within the US and also to Asia, reaching out to those in troubled regions and to those who help people in need.  She also has a great interest in cross-cultural counseling, spanning as far as Africa and South America. 

What are you doing now? 

I am a drug counselor/clinician in San Jose, working with adolescents and their families with drug problems.  I have been doing this since 2000.  Right now I like it because I am working with Vietnamese families and there is just a shortage of Vietnamese counselors, or those who know enough about the culture and speak the language enough to be able to give competent service.  So, I am filling the need.  I like using two languages, as it challenges me to think differently. 

What would you say is the fundamental difference between the two cultures, in this case?

There are a lot of givens when you meet with American families that don’t happen when you meet with Vietnamese families.  One is that there is already a concept of what counseling is with American families and so the concept is that we go in to a room, sit and talk, and that’s enough.  With Vietnamese, first of all, you have to explain to them what counseling is.  You have to really get the buy-in from parents.  The kids are more acculturated.  You have to work with gaining trust.  A lot of these people have no idea what therapy is, the notion that you’re going to talk to them and then they’ll get better-- it’s unheard of.  Also, the idea of sharing problems with people outside the family is very foreign. Another thing is there is distrust of authority, because having gone through the war experience, they couldn’t trust their government and people were abused by police and so forth on their journeys here.  So, coming here and talking to social workers is associated with trouble and there is the fear of deportment or going to jail.  Visits from outsiders or visiting an institution is not considered a helpful thing.  It’s a big issue to the family if their child gets called in for counseling. 

I’ve had adolescent clients who would later report to me that they got in trouble with their parents at home, after the parents found out they got enrolled into counseling. 

There are assumptions within American culture about therapy that don’t hold true with Vietnamese families. One of them is the expectation that you get started with therapeutic work within the first visit with a client. You meet with the families, sign some papers and get going.  With Vietnamese families, you have to spend at least a month getting to know them, asking about their family, their emigration experience to the US, and making yourself a part of the family, before you can expect to get any work done or establish any buy-in.  You have to make an effort to sit and listen, listen to war stories, or about who died.  It might not look like real therapy is being done, but that is the work at first. That is the difference. 

How do these families come to you?

I get referrals through schools and juvenile probation and oddly enough, through word of mouth, through families talking to each other.  That’s a good sign. 

I’d like to tell you about the work I did in Cambodia.  I was invited last Spring to go train Cambodian social workers.  This was through a professional acquaintance who started a program of prevention and intervention efforts to stop sex trafficking in SE Asia.  That included Thailand, Viet Nam and Cambodia.  There are not many people in this field who are Vietnamese and so I went to Viet Nam to check on their sponsorship program.  The program sponsored approximately 20 girls from rural Viet Nam.  They found girls who were at risk for being trafficked.   That meant girls who might not be doing well in school, or their families were very poor to the point that $100 would be very tempting enough to sell their daughters.  Most of these families lived along the border of Cambodia and Vietnam.  These girls were given scholarships so they could attend a vocational program.  My job was to visit the girls and check on them. 

There was also a contract with a non-profit organization called COSECAM, a conglomeration of NGO’s doing work with girls who were victims of sex trafficking. They called them “ psycho-social workers” dealing with traumatized kids who were rescued from trafficking.  They had modules that took place every other month.  I taught 2 modules that lasted five days each.  It was interesting, as the content of the training was to left to my discretion.  The social workers before me did pretty much strict protocol, like what is the DSM, forms of abnormal psychology, and how to diagnose.  The person before me did things like how to do an intake.  He said he wasn’t very successful with that because he had to work through a translator, for one thing, and he had an inkling it had to do with cultural reasons too.

He said he had a really hard time.  His main belief was that as a therapist, you must know yourself before you can help others. However, he couldn’t get the trainees to reveal any vulnerabilities, about how they survived the genocide perpetuated by the Khmer Rouge.   They wouldn’t tell him anything.  I assessed my strengths and decided my goal was to help them regain self- awareness and to acknowledge their histories.  These people were 30 to 50 years old, so were survivors of the “Killing Fields”.  This also means they were educated and so the persecuted class.  It is a guarantee that all of them suffered losses, sometimes of entire families, homes, and everything what they knew.  My goal was to have them gain awareness of what they brought into the therapy room, in other words, their counter-transference and any secondary traumatization from hearing similar stories from their clients.  I worked with them from a somatic perspective, teaching them to access their bodies.  I wanted them to learn how to track someone and also track themselves in order to know when they were activated. I taught them a lot of what I learned from mindfulness-based therapy and a lot of what I learned from Christine Caldwell and Raja Selvam.  I also taught from my yoga background, as the trainees really took to movement exercises. 

We had a really good time.  I started with the concept of  “resources.”  I wanted them to speak from a position of competence, because the very fact that they were alive meant they had a lot to offer the other survivors, who were younger.  I bridged culture by asking what their resources were, and encouraged them when they shared stories about traditional healings and shamans.  What happened in the Cambodian culture when the country was colonized by the French, (and these people grew up during this time) was that Western knowledge became privileged over Cambodian knowledge.  Also, some of the trainees I was working with were already trained social workers and felt superior to the others, so I wanted to counter some of that by giving a space for what healing modalities the culture already had.  Cambodians go to healers, shamans, they’re Buddhists, they meditate and they believe in energy.  The people in class who usually sat back, started jumping in, participating, sharing their stories and started laughing about some of the things that happened.  They began to share of themselves. 

The most surprising thing that happened during our discussion about resources, was that our male trainee (and this is big, because he was a man, sitting around with a group of women) began to tell his story about the losses he suffered during the Killing Fields.  He and his brother are the sole survivors of a large family.  He remembered standing by as his younger sister at 4 years old, died, calling out for rice.  After a very long and moving story, he stated that because he survived this terrible time, he must have the strength to help clients.  He said to me, “I think my suffering became my resource.”  I knew at that moment something significant happened.  This was confirmed when one of his cohorts said, “I’ve known you for three years and you never shared that with me!”   The trainees have experienced typical educational structures, but this was probably the first time they ever experienced group process.  So many stories were waiting to be shared.  I’m very honored I had the chance to facilitate that experience for them.

Another way I gave respect to Cambodian culture was by having them move the desks to the periphery of the room and we sat in a circle on the floor together.  I returned to Cambodia the following November to teach another module and to graduate them from their 2 year program.  When he Director of COSECAM saw us sitting on the floor together, he was very moved.  He joined us in the circle, and we conducted the graduation ceremony sitting down on the floor.  This is significant, since this is a very formal culture.

Another story about that experience is that Cambodia and Viet Nam have a very warring history.  The Cambodians resent the Vietnamese for taking away a lot of their land, but –this is difficult to reconcile--- it was also the Vietnamese who rescued the Cambodians from the Khmer Rouge.  I was told by my colleague that had the Director known I was 1) Vietnamese, 2 ) female, and 3) young, he would’ve recommended to not send me there.  These were very influential factors, as Cambodian society is a tiered society where age and race make a difference, not like American society.  There were a lot of barriers I had to overcome.

I didn’t know how they would receive me, but prepared my attitude to be one of appreciation, instead of fear or racism.   Before I taught, I spent 4 days in Siem Reap to visit the temple Angkor Wat.  I wanted to make sure I understood what was beautiful about their culture.   I grounded myself there by spending time getting used to the food (so that I wouldn’t have stomach problems), learned their customs, and learned a little bit of the language.  I gained a genuine appreciation for the people beyond the stereotypes, beyond the fears I myself had because of our shared histories. 

What is it that compels you to reach out to people, to do this work?

This may be an odd answer, but I think it is my survivor guilt.  I survived a very dangerous escape from Viet Nam.  A question I always had growing up is, “Why me?”  Many people died at sea or raped by pirates  -- it really could have been anybody.  It could have been me.  I think I’ve always had this kind of guilt.  I think you have to add to the world versus just take.  The other thing is because I can do it and I enjoy it.  Truly, if I’m not there, there just isn’t someone doing this sort of work.  There’s a shortage.  It really involves all of me to teach. Teaching to the Cambodian culture, I get to draw from Buddhism, meditation, bodywork, yoga, and skills learned at SBGI.  It all becomes synchronized.  They all go together. It’s a rare chance when someone can pull most parts of themselves together for an event. 

You also did some work in the aftermath of Katrina?

There is an astonishingly huge population of Vietnamese in the South.  You didn’t hear about them on the radio or in the media.  I found an article about the re-building, about a Vietnamese Catholic congregation pooling their efforts to rebuild in New Orleans.    There was no mention of the people who didn’t get served.  There were a lot of fisherpeople who lived there.  They came in 1975.  They were fisherpeople in Viet Nam, and continued to be fisherpeople in the US, living outside of the system.  They were transient, living on boats, using a cash economy.  They lived day by day, work by work.  They lived and ate on their boats and sometimes rented a room from someone, so they had a place to stay during the in-between months.  They didn’t have a savings account, never heard of it.  They didn’t know about Social Security.  They never learned English.  They were not integrated into our social fabric of life.

I heard about a huge migration of people going to Houston.  There are three hot spots of Vietnamese in the US.  First is Westminster in Southern California, second is San Jose and third is Houston.  Through word of mouth, the Vietnamese from New Orleans, Jackson, Mississippi, and Biloxi, Mississippi all went to The Hong Kong Mall in Houston.  They didn’t know about the Astrodome.  They crowded and waited at the mall for services, because they didn’t know any other way.  All they knew that this friend or that said to go there.  The non-profit in the area was over flooded.  Staff worked practically 24 hours a day.  I belonged to a listserv and was told I should get there and help however I could.  The PR person for the nonprofit Boat People SOS told me to bring pens.  They needed pens!  I was lucky enough to have time to do it.  I went there and worked for 10 days. It was tremendously heart breaking.  People heard about a FEMA number they needed.  This was their gold card, through it they could get access to food, housing, medical services, everything.  But the process to get it was online!  These people didn’t even know how to write.  Part of my duties was to help them apply for their FEMA number.  This was a very frustrating process, as I watched people get turned away.  FEMA aid depended on an address, bank account, car insurance, house insurance--- all the things these people didn’t have.  I remember watching the light die in this man’s eyes died when I told him he wouldn’t get a FEMA number.  He had waited in line for hours for help with this process.  He could have spent that time taking the bus to churches to get food, to get clothing, to find a place to sleep.  The reason he was rejected was because he was a shrimper, and he shared an address with other people.  With FEMA, only one person or family could get aid per address.  This made people compete for addresses.  They also didn’t get money for things FEMA would reimburse, like cars and houses, because they didn’t have them or they weren’t on record.  Even after a successful application, they had to wait for weeks before they saw any money.

The most successful thing about the effort following Katrina was from the grassroots organizations.  Churches opened their doors and turned their parking lots into places for people to stay.  There was one Vietnamese man who owned an apartment complex, and offered it to people free of rent.  The help came through word of mouth, through contacts like that.  Kaiser Permanente sent out a team to the mall and we set up a make shift clinic.  We used a sleeping bag for a table.  I did translation for the nurses and doctors. I also taught the doctors some yoga, to help their backs after their long shifts.  I even did a PPN intervention.  There was a baby who was so underweight that the nurses were worried.  The nurses didn’t have a scale, so we went and talked to a cashier at the grocery store downstairs.  She agreed to allow us to use the cashier’s scale to weigh the baby.   The baby was very listless and the mom was oblivious.  The nurses were very worried.  I translated for them and mom agreed to came back several times over the course of the week.  While she waited to be seen, I sat down and talked with her.  I asked her how she had been feeling.  Most of the people in this situation gave hearty, stoic answers.  I asked her if she had ever been depressed.  She started admitting to bouts of depression during her pregnancy.  At these words, the baby perked up.   Mother and baby started making eye contact and talking to each other.  The baby couldn’t speak, but her mouth opened in a very purposeful way and mom responded. Then the baby started eating. 

The makeshift clinic was the ideal setting for therapy, because they were there for medical reasons.  Vietnamese people present with a lot of psychosomatic symptoms.  They believe in the medical system, but not in the psychological system.   However, I worked at the triage station.  When they started talking about symptoms, such as headaches that went on for weeks, or pains in the stomache that had no apparent cause, the triage nurse could refer them over to me or Todd, the Kaiser Social Worker from Sacramento.  Numerous times, I listened to men talking about headaches and then segueway into stories about the torture camps they endured after the Vietnam war.  When asked, they revealed to me they kept these stories hidden for 30 + years.   While they waited to see the doctors, I set up a room with food and chairs arranged in a circle.    People would spontaneously swap information and share stories.  The waiting room turned into group therapy.    These groups helped people feel useful, feel connected, and not so helpless.  They started helping each other. For some of them, this was their third refugee experience.  They moved from the North to the South in Viet Nam, then the exodus from Viet Nam to US, and then now, from different areas in the South to Houston.  It was the same thing each time, losing everything.

I wish there were more people in Houston from a counseling background.  There was only one other social worker.  I wish there were teams of us there to listen to people.  With our training, you can work with people on the spot, you don’t need six months of therapy for people to tell their story.  You can access their body, access their breath.  Everything is immediate.  Without somatic training, there is less chance to empower someone in the moment. 

Where do you see yourself in the future?

I’m really interested in working cross-culturally.  I would like to do some work in Africa, South America and just compare my experiences and see what is the commonality. What is the bond?  The reason I went into Somatic Psychology is that we all have bodies and this is the common ground that we need for doing therapy in other places.  That is some sort of study.  Right now, what I’m really doing is studying as much as possible about Somatic psychology.  You can spend a lifetime learning.  I want to study more before I go out again.