Name the Harm. Don't Exile the Beauty

So many cultures have endured centuries of erasure—colonization, forced assimilation, genocide, displacement, the suppression of language, ritual, and memory. The pain of that loss is real, and its echoes live in bodies today. I honor the grief and the fierce protectiveness that rises in response. I understand why so many scholars and activists fight passionately to defend what survived, and to insist that marginalized wisdom be taken seriously. Naming those wounds is essential.

But something in me has reached its limit with the current cultural sorting pattern that keeps showing up—this habit of carving humanity into tidy little conceptual boxes and calling it “decolonizing.” I don’t believe that’s what real healing looks like.

I’m tired of the abstractions that reduce people into labels: “white psychology” versus “Indigenous psychology,” “individualistic” versus “collectivist,” as if entire civilizations can be flattened into opposing mental containers.

It’s not just inaccurate.
It erases the living complexity inside the human being.

Because these frameworks often end up treating concepts as if they are more real than people. They flatten the inner life into categories. They treat the psyche as if it accommodates sociological boxes instead of unfolding through lived experience.

The deeper truth is this:
Culture is not paralyzed.
It travels.
It transforms.
It blends, absorbs, and creates new surprises.

This is not a flaw.
It is the miracle of human culture.

Look at jazz: born from West African rhythms in memory, European instruments, Caribbean influence, and Black American brilliance. Jazz is a living testament to cultural convergence—not pure lineage, but beauty born through contact.

Look at gospel and the blues: African sonic structures braided with Protestant hymns under the brutality of segregation. And yet, a sound emerged that carried the weight of sorrow and a hope that was defiant.

Look at Frida Kahlo: profoundly rooted in Indigenous Mexican identity, yet influenced by European modernists and surrealists. She was not “colonized” by those influences. She transformed them. She created something uniquely Mexican, globally recognizable, and unmistakably hers.

Look at Elvis drawing from Little Richard and Black gospel stylings—and Little Richard himself noting that Elvis brought Black-influenced music into white public consciousness. The harm was not the influence—it was segregation, exclusion, and unjust profit structures. Influence is not exploitation. Exploitation is exploitation.

Even Dialectical Behavior Therapy arose from Marsha Linehan’s encounter with Buddhist practices. DBT is not “Buddhism stolen for Western consumption.” It’s a bridge—an honoring of wisdom too valuable to remain isolated within any one tradition.

History shows us again and again: cultural influence is how the human spirit breathes.

My own family reflects this weaving. Mexican in heritage. Born in Southern California. Raised in a predominantly white, suburban setting. English-speaking at home. Americanized without realizing it. The bilingual heritage carried more strongly in older generations. These layers do not exist in isolation.

They coexist in me. I am not a fixed hue. The motion of various cultural dyes continue to swirl around inside my lived experience and I’m humbled and honored to carry these moving colors in my body.

Here’s what I’m fiercely protecting: I do not want them forced into tidy sociological containers.

The more I sit with clients, the more convinced I am that no culture has a monopoly on the self—and no culture denies the self. Every tradition knows community. Every tradition knows interiority. These are human universals.

Everywhere, people think.
Everywhere, people feel.
Everywhere, people sense something forming within them.

This is why Eugene Gendlin’s work matters so deeply to me. A Jewish refugee from Nazi Europe, Gendlin was not inventing “Western psychology.” He was naming the implicit, the felt sense, the bodily knowing beneath language.

And that reality does not belong to any civilization.

It belongs to the human bodily felt experience.

Which is why I need to say this clearly:
being moved by another culture is not theft.
Inspiration is not appropriation.
What moves us is not harm—it is relationship.

Cultures have always shaped each other through grief, admiration, necessity, imitation, wonder, and shared vulnerability. That is not erasure—it is emergence.

There is a vast difference between exchange and extraction.
Between inspiration and domination.
Between honoring and profiting unjustly.

Naming historical injustice is necessary.

But we must not exile the beauty.

If we are going to talk about psychology, then let’s talk about the psyche—the felt, fluid, living life inside a person. Not just the categories theorists try to place around them.

Because the psyche refuses containment. Mine surely does and I needed to say it here.

The person always exceeds the abstraction.

And culture, at its truest, is the ongoing miracle of human becoming through relationship.