Tal om vold
Who are we?
We are a group of committed people who work to prevent violence and spread knowledge and talk about violence in society.
What are we doing?
We make e.g. group course for adults who have been exposed to violence, course for people who work with violence.
Become a volunteer!
Come and become a volunteer with us, and help people who have been exposed to violence. You can write to: kontakt@talomvold.dk
PSYCHOLOGIST SADE JOHNSON
SADE'S BLUE BOOK
Sade is a cornerstone of CFV's Tal om Vold effort and as leader she has qualified and led the effort in new directions
Since 2021, she has provided support to victims of violence and specializes in therapeutic and activist communities.
She has developed several support group courses, including for adults who have been exposed to violence in childhood and courses for professionals and activists who work with violence.
Sade has facilitated support for many people and created a course that supports Black and Brown people who experience racial violence.
Sade has many years of management experience in the organization and has started to supervise psychology students and train Tal om Vold's future support group facilitators.
Sade has also held a live support group at Østerbro's Theater Revolver
You can contact Sade at sade@talomvold.dk She is currently on maternity leave.
INTERVIEW WITH SADE
You are very interested in the research that forms the basis for knowledge presentations in the support groups. What is your biggest research focus at the moment?
"Community. There is a lot of potential in communities. Also a therapeutic potential that lies in the use between it activist and political community. It is something very special. You don't find that anywhere else, that you can both work into yourself, into a psyche, into your family history, into your trauma history and work out into the social structures and social conditions and be part of potentially creating change. It's a pretty wild method. There is something in the peer format, this about having the freedom to put yourself forward, your own stories and your personality and the difficult, also for me as a psychologist, it does something to the power relationship, which is often quite skewed in a therapeutic practice.”
What do you think is the biggest misconception people make about people who have been abused
“One of the biggest misconceptions people make about people who have been victims of violence is to blame them. There is an assumption that they themselves invited the violence or were instrumental in it. There are also stereotypical ideas about the person exposed to violence, which rarely correspond to reality.”
Sade points out that they are not the ones who turn to the support groups.
What have you learned through the many conversations and courses you have facilitated?
"The thing that fills the most in our approach to survivors of violence is: blaming discourses - that people have an assumption that you yourself have invited in or been instrumental in and let it happen. There is also something in this with the fact that you could 'just' go or 'just' stand up against it and then of course the stereotypical images of who the victim of violence is, and it is very rarely those who sit in a group. The idea that the abused woman is resource-poor, maybe she wears a headscarf, doesn't know the language, maybe is unemployed and so on, and it is in no way the person who turns to her."
Why did you choose to write a thesis on how radicalization is created in discourses, bodies and emotions?
I have written a thesis on the therapeutic processes or what happens in the physical meeting when you want to talk about violence. Racism and racial violence. It was, among other things, because I did an internship at CFV a year ago. Here I would like to set up a support group that deals with racism as a form of violence. And there I heard from many of my participants that they went to therapy and talked about everything else, i.e. talked about anxiety symptoms or difficult relationships with their mothers, school refusal or well-being problems at work, but they could not talk about their experiences with racism with their white therapist because the touch anxiety was so intense that they could feel themselves being gaslighted a little when they tried. And there was such an extreme awkwardness about it with the therapist, but also with themselves, so they also knew very well that it would happen.
And what I could also see in that group, it was that because of these political currents, with the Black Lives Matter movement, it became clear to them what was at stake. It had been such an indefinable feeling of being alienated and isolated and feeling wrong and maybe thinking one's hair was ugly or things like that. It will be a bit technical if I have to go into it now, but we have a tradition in the West for therapists to have something called the therapeutic distance, which is a professional distance that you maintain towards the client, and a idea that you can be a blank slate, and the client's material and problems they can just give to the therapist and then the therapist gives it back to them in a new way, so that they can feel better. Peer to peer does that because you enter the room with your story.
Something else that also occurred to me when I was doing an internship at CMA was also the fact that I suddenly found out that violence is an interwoven dimension of all possible structural mechanisms and power relations. Which can have different expressions, where one of them is the racial, then there is the gendered dimension, then there is the economic capitalist dimension and so on, and it speaks to this intersectional perspective that we always talk about academically, but here ( in the CMA groups) I saw it unfold. It's quite liberating to find out that racism is violence.”
What structures or connections are there between your thesis and your work in CFV?
"I think that after writing this thesis, I actually think that I have become more, I have gained more confidence in this matter of being authentic in the body. In other words, to be present in a room with my whole being, with my whole person, with all my experiences and to use both my emotional expression, but also the positions I stand in as a therapist actively. And the process of subjectivation – how we understand ourselves – which I also think is hugely important in relation to the work in the support groups, because there are also some things about which words I offer them. What words do I present to them, what understandings do I present as possible for them to step into as survivors and as victims of violence. You also have power. But also the power to create some defining spaces - "here, you can define yourself by this and that"
Why did you decide to work at CFV?
"My experiences from my internship period meant that I had something to lean on, and I knew what the organization stood for and what respect, care and love I would be received with. Especially this love thing is important to me, that it is present in my working life, that I feel valued and that there is sincere love present in an organisation. It is quite special for CFV. Here I also get a lot of freedom – creatively and methodically. I get to be my whole person, not just a psychologist who checks some boxes in a manual and diagnoses. It has been good for my career to work in a place where I am allowed to take my place, both with my professionalism and with my person, so that I can begin to feel who I am as a psychologist.”
What do you hope your work leaves behind of significance?
“I see the support group as a door that opens in people's lives, and then they can choose whether they want to walk through it. It can be a new dimension, a new understanding, which opens us up to a potential community. And opens to a journey towards freeing oneself from violence. But the support group cannot stand alone. It is very clear to me that it cannot. So I hope that those who apply to the support group, that somehow they get a little hope and that they also get a little strength. And then perhaps I hope most of all that they feel less alone, that they step out of the isolation that shame creates, that when the emotions overwhelm them in the future, the feeling that 'I should have' and 'it was my fault too ' and 'I can't talk about this, people won't listen, people won't understand', that they then remember the feeling of being listened to and the feeling of being heard.