An Interview with Psychologist Sarah Gaither
Dr. Gaither is an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. She is a social psychologist specializing in diversity and inclusion.
Nicole Izquierdo: Thanks for joining us today for this installment of the Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series. I'm Nicole Izquierdo, research intern at Seattle Anxiety Specialists, and I'd like to welcome with us Social Psychologist and Diversity and Inclusion Scholar, Dr. Sarah Gaither. Dr. Gaither is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, and she earned her PhD in Social Psychology from Tufts University, and is currently the Director of Duke's Identity and Diversity lab. She's an expert in social identities and inter-group contact, and her research focuses broadly on how a person's social identities and experiences across the lifespan motivate their social perceptions and behaviors in diverse settings.
So before we get started, do you want to add anything else? Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?
Sarah Gaither: Sure. Well, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. I think, you know, for me, it's really important for everyone to kind of know my framework of where I come from for why I study what I do.
So I'm Biracial, so I'm Biracial Black/White, but I look like a strange White person, and so it's kind of my lived experience, right, of having this invisible versus visible identities, that's really pushed me in wanting to understand how our group memberships can shift our behavior and identities in different ways. So for me, it's always been this lifelong question of growing up in a mixed-race household, constantly being questioned about why I don't match my dad, why my brother looks different than I do. Those kinds of identity-questioning experiences really what's fueled why I study what I do today.
So I think that's just an important thing for everyone to keep in mind as we discuss things today.
Nicole Izquierdo: Thank you. So I guess you kind of answered this a little, but besides social psychology, growing up, did you play around with any other career paths or like you always knew from day one social psych-
Sarah Gaither: I definitely did not think I'd ever be a Psychology professor. I was not even a Psychology major in undergrad; I was a Social Welfare major. So I thought I'd be a Social Worker. Turns out I'm not a strong enough person for that. After working on a case, it destroyed me, and I knew I really wanted to study people and behavior and understand, you know, why we make the decisions we do, why we interact with people in positive versus negative ways. So I've always just been a people person. I think for me, growing up kind of confused about my own mixed-race identity, my toys were all super multicultural and multiracial so I knew I was lots of things at the same time, but I didn't really have the words to explain those things.
So during my gap years after undergrad, that's when I realized doing literature reviews, as boring as that can sound to some of you listening to this right now, I discovered within the Psychology field, at least, there was very little published research with Biracial samples. So my group, my existence really just didn't exist within our current findings, and so that's what motivated me to want to apply to grad school. Try and give a voice to these populations and experiences while also using Biracial, bicultural experiences to help us understand more broadly how our identities kind of function, even if you aren't a member of one of those groups.
Nicole Izquierdo: So for the people listening who don't know what social psychology is or what diversity and inclusion research is, do you want to go into a little bit more detail about that and even the specific questions that you aim to answer?
Sarah Gaither: Yeah, yeah. So being a social psychologist, I think everyone in the world is a social psychologist, even if you have no training in it, basically because we all judge each other all the time. So social psychology is our social judgements of each other, our social judgements of ourselves. It's the psychology behind the decisions we make, the role that the context plays in shifting how we perceive things in our social world. So social psychology really shapes everything we do. It's also the lens that we process things that have already happened to us at the same time.
So in my work as a social psychologist, I look not only at the present day and sort of, "What are your current attitudes and how you feel about your own identities or other people or other groups?", but I also look developmentally, when you were little, when you were growing up. "What are the types of experiences you had with people from different diverse backgrounds?" that might actually predict whether you're more inclusive versus an exclusive person later on as an adult. So that's sort of how I see social psychology and why I think all of us are technically social psychologists deep down inside.
Nicole Izquierdo: Yeah. So I wanted to ask you about, I don't know if this is the right term, but like implicit bias, and basically you said that it affects people in the future when interacting with others. Are people doomed when it comes to their implicit bias? Is there a certain limit or, like what can be done? Like what are some interventions or early childhood teachings?
Sarah Gaither: Yeah. So implicit bias, for those of you who might not know what that is, that's kind of these internal automatic associations, stereotypes that you might have about someone you don't know, right? So that gut reaction, that gut response that you have when you see someone new for the first time, those are usually our implicit responses to that individual or to that group. So, lots of people ask me all the time, "Is there a critical age point where we should intervene and make everyone magically inclusive?" There's not one age point, right, where we say, "This is when change happens." Early on, early childhood is one of those critical periods. We know exposure to people from different races, cultures, ethnicities, if you can travel to different regions of a country that you live in, those are really prime opportunities when you're a young child, because you're learning what words mean and what these associations mean to different groups.
So if you're only exposed to people who look like you the whole time growing up, the first time you see someone from another group who looks a little different, you're only going to have those stereotypes you've maybe learned from the media or other sources of influence. So, diversity contact is super, super important early on in childhood. Adolescence is another time that we know is ripe for interventions, mainly because that's when kids are switching school environments, and so changes in context are always ripe for opportunities in people trying to reassess themselves or reassess their biases. Same thing goes for entering college. This is a very important identity period in particular, because when you move off to a four-year institution, if that is the type college you may have gone to, that's usually the first time people are moving away from their home, their family, their friends, and they're forced to navigate these social worlds for the first time, without any help from anyone that they've known.
So college is one of those identity-ripe periods where people are often experiencing new things for the first time. Maybe they lived in a context where they could never acknowledge an identity or an aspect of themselves until they got away from that home environment or that home context. So those are kind of main age points that I focus on a lot in my work, mainly because I am very interested in those moments of change. So to answer your original question, no one's doomed. Everyone can change, but some people might take a little more effort to change than others. The same thing goes for negative contact you might have. So if you have lots of positive diversity contact, that's going to change your attitudes in a positive direction, but you could have negative contact, and that's going to work against those attitude changes. It can actually reinforce those negative attitudes you might already have. So, contact can work in both positive and negative ways.
Nicole Izquierdo: When you talk about college, I wanted to talk a little bit more about the kind of work you've done on Duke's campus. I'm familiar with your random roommate study, but I was hoping you can elaborate a little bit more on that as well.
Sarah Gaither: Yeah. So Duke, a couple years ago, changed their roommate policy for incoming freshmen. So, they used to allow a freshman to either be randomly assigned to a roommate or they could choose their own roommate, and Duke decided to change that policy a couple years ago where all incoming freshmen are now randomly assigned. They did this because they wanted to see if it actually changed how inclusive the freshmen class felt, and they asked me if I wanted to study it. I had some work from grad school I had published that showed if you were a White freshman living with anyone but another White freshman, so a Black, Latino, or an Asian individual, that experience living with someone from another racial background your freshman year, by the end of that freshman year when I brought you into the lab to meet a Black student you had never met before, that interaction went way better. Way more positive eye contact. You smiled more. The Black students also felt better in those interactions as well. So this wasn't just a gain for White students, but for students of color as well.
So Tufts and I did that project during grad school in Boston, and then Duke knew that I had done that, and so they asked me to follow this cohort here at Duke. Really, what we're seeing is similar types of effects and changing some of our White students' social behavior in these future settings who have been randomly assigned a roommate from another racial or cultural background, but we're seeing that I think is even more interesting in a way as we also recruited minority students in the sample at Duke, and regardless of what your racial or ethnic background may be, everyone's friend networks are becoming significantly more diverse by the end of that freshman year.
So by forcing you to live with someone who's different just for that first year of college, we're seeing this expansion of one's sense of self, as we call it. Your in-groups become bigger, your social networks become more inclusive, and it's actually making Duke not seem as exclusive. Still has some issues to work out for sure, but that's one of our main positive findings right now, which I'm really excited about.
Nicole Izquierdo: So the positive effects are happening for both the White racial majority and the minority groups. Okay.
Sarah Gaither: Yeah, for both groups. So that's, you know, and that's rarely studied with students of color on different college campuses. It's tricky at Duke since we're still a predominantly White campus to kind of control for how much White contact versus minority contact students are getting, but the fact that everyone's friend networks are actually becoming more racially diverse, gender diverse, sexual orientation diverse, religiously diverse. The only one we're not moving, it seems, is politically diverse, but Duke's campus is also politically liberal, pretty biased in that direction so I think there's not quite enough room to move those friend aspects around, but all the other categories seem to be expanding.
Nicole Izquierdo: And we all know the pandemic kind of messed up all our life goals, research, et cetera. So how would you say it impacted your research both like practically, and also, did it change the kind of research questions that you want to ask moving forward?
Sarah Gaither: Yeah. COVID, you know, shifted a lot of things, and of course, millions of people around the world have died from COVID, and so that's really the real thing we should all be focusing on, on how COVID has impacted things. From a research standpoint, for me in particular, it ended all in-person research. So what I really love studying is the actual social behavior between people when they're talking to each other face-to-face, but when COVID hit, we couldn't run in-person studies, everyone was wearing masks. So if I'm wearing a mask, you can't see my face. You can't see my emotions. It makes coding whether these interactions are going positively or not pretty much impossible. So we had to stop all behavioral in-lab data collection.
We also do work with young kids and families. Since kids under five still are not able to be vaccinated we're actually still running kids online even today, even though COVID is becoming less of a problem, just to keep all families and parents safe. So, that's the main way it's affected us really, is not being able to do any in-person data collection.
The other way is even online data collections since we can collect some of our work through online surveys. Those prices have also skyrocketed because everyone got moved to online platforms. So following classic economics, right, supply and demand, they can charge what they want when all of us were forced to collect our data online. So, grants became more necessary during COVID, and just thinking creatively about how to adapt some of the questions that I'm interested in into an online Zoom format, right? How can we still relate this to real world outcomes through these weird little black boxes we all exist on for the last two years?
Nicole Izquierdo: Thank you. So now I want to move into a little bit more, most of our listeners are either interested in like therapy, mental health. So have you done or read up on any work about Biracial individuals in therapy, or anything related to like racial trauma and like Biracial people's role in the Black Lives Matter movement?
Sarah Gaither: Yeah. So lots of responses there. So the bulk of my work focuses on Biracial and bicultural experiences because of my own lived experiences. The most common stressor we have for both of these groups is something we call "identity denial" or "identity questioning." So if someone's ever asked you, "What are you?", "Are you sure your dad's your dad?", these kinds of very direct identity-threatening situations, over time, they serve as small little microaggressions that science has now shown really add up to being strong mental health stressors. It develops people in an inability to form a positive sense of self. It's negatively impacting their self-esteem. So a lot of the multiracial and multicultural literatures actually cite higher cases of different types of mental health outcomes, such as depression and anxiety for these groups, and the reason they cite this sometimes in clinical work is because they have twice amount of the exclusion in their lives, right? If you're part White and part Black, you now have White people and Black people both excluding you for different reasons, right? So it's twice the amount of social exclusion.
So Biracial people aren't experiencing more discrimination than other racial or ethnic minority groups importantly; we know monoracial minorities tend to experience more direct discrimination and prejudice, but from a social exclusion standpoint, which is what's directly linked to a lot of negative and mental health outcomes is higher for our Biracial and bicultural populations compared to other racial and ethnic groups.
So that's something our lab's been trying to measure, and we actually have the first paper where we measured cortisol responses for this specific identity denial experience that Biracial and bicultural individuals face. So you see your cortisol, which is a biomarker, inside of your body that elevates when you have a stressful experience. We find that this increases for both bicultural and Biracial people, and if you live your life at higher rates of cortisol all the time being elevated, it can lead to early death, weight problems, sleep problems, things of that sort as well.
So, what I think is tricky from a therapy counseling angle is most of the research that exists has excluded multiracial and multicultural people from their demographics. They're difficult to categorize and to fit into boxes. So we don't know if you need a certain type of multicultural therapist to feel included in your sessions. We don't know what cues, right, and what to train people on since there's so much variability within the multiracial and multicultural demographic. It's hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all kind of training model on what to do in these therapy sessions.
I think what this all stems down to is just this notion of belonging, right? When anyone has an issue with belonging, they feel like they don't belong or they don't fit in, this is what leads to those negative mental health downstream consequences. That's what led to me writing my own piece on being involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, as someone who presents very White. Those are those particular contexts, right, where you question where you belong, what your space is, what your space is not, and to also question your privilege; if you're White-presenting, you clearly have privileges in our US society that other people do not, but knowing where you can still fight for those who are marginalized, fight for those who are having more difficulties in their life is still an internal stressor for many multicultural and multiracial people.
So I wrote that piece as a way to hopefully motivate others who maybe felt similarly as I did where we wanted to be involved, but weren't sure if that space was a space we were welcomed in or not, right. Making sure that we give the stage and the platforms to people whose voices have not been heard over time. So that's really what motivated that piece that I wrote earlier.
Nicole Izquierdo: Do you see anything with children of, let's say, your Black father and your White mother, where they experience, I wouldn't say it's like secondhand, but like you witness the racial minority parent experiencing discrimination. So even though the child doesn't firsthand because they're White-presenting, they see someone they love experiencing that. Have you done or heard about any research that analyzes that?
Sarah Gaither: Yeah. There's very little research in that direction—sorry. My dog is barking. There is clearly a delivery person outside. He's going to be very loud for a second, but he's a lovely dog, everyone. Yay for working at home. That's the other way COVID has impacted me.
To answer your question there, there isn't a ton of research looking at offspring of mixed-race parents and sort of, what are the instances of discrimination or prejudice they witness from their parents. That's a great thing that should be studied. I know from my own firsthand experiences, for me, that's what made me hyperaware of race relations growing up, right? Knowing that I was never targeted, but it was always my dad being targeted, right? He would be accosted when we were at the shopping mall. People saying, "Hey, are you kidnapping this little girl?" They would never come up to me; they would direct all of their accusations toward him. We had skinheads living down the street from us growing up and they would only throw rocks on his side of the car, but not my side of my car.
So there are these explicit exposures and that's how kids learn. Kids learn through these experiences, and I think that's what makes being multiracial a complicated thing to study developmentally. It depends on if you're in a two-parent versus a single-parent household, that also hasn't been studied a ton, which parent is doing the kind of racial or ethnic socialization. Also not studied a ton, but our lab is currently collecting some data on that, so stay tuned. So I think those inputs of how kids learn, particularly from multiracial and multicultural backgrounds when they're little, it's just not documented that well. Sociology has a couple papers on it, but there's hasn't been any large-scale psychology studies yet.
Nicole Izquierdo: Thank you. That just came up when talking about this.
So you mentioned that inclusion, sense of belonging have been linked to mental health outcomes. Can you just elaborate a little bit more on that? Like how much sense of belonging is enough to prevent those things from developing or is just like one instance of ostracism detrimental?
Sarah Gaither: Yeah, yeah. So needing to belong, it's this kind of core fundamental human desire to just want to fit in. You want to feel like you have a home. You want to feel like you have a family. You want to feel like people understand you and your experiences for who you are without any questions whatsoever, right? So this can be measured in lots of different ways in psychology research, but the way we know it affects mental health outcomes in particular is for people who really feel like they never belong anywhere, right, or if they're trying to get into certain groups, but then there's people that keep saying, "No, you're not enough of X to be in this group," or "No, you're not good enough to be in this group," it's those constant kind of combinations of wanting to be in a group but then having that identity denial experience of not being able to attain that group membership that ends up leading to these increased stress outcomes, increased anxiety outcomes, etc.
So, how much needing to belong people have, everyone varies on this. There's not a magical number. If you have too many friends and none of them are very close friends, you're going to have a lot harder time dealing with identity stressors and identity threat experiences. You really need a couple good core members within your social circle. These could be family members, these could be friends, these could be romantic partners, any of those things, but you really need more than one. I'd say somewhere between three and five good core people, and the question that I post to all of my classes, which Nicole here has actually heard me already say once is, you know, if your car broke down at 2 o’clock in the morning on a very dark highway in the middle of nowhere, do you have at least a couple people you could call who would come and pick you up, no questions asked? Right?
That's the level of belonging, that level of social bonds that people strive for, and if you don't have those social bonds to latch onto when you're feeling threatened by society, by a peer, by a colleague or an employee, that lack of a social bond connection is what causes us to have these drops within our self-esteem and leads to that increased depression and anxiety outcomes.
So that's really one of the number one reasons why we see people in therapy and counseling sessions because they feel like they just don't know where they fit in.
Nicole Izquierdo: Something else we learned about in your class, which I guess is another avenue I say that negative mental health outcomes could result from is compartmentalization and conflicting identities. So you still belong, but you're not able to, let's say, express that other conflicting identity within that group. Can you like give an example or why compartmentalization is so detrimental versus being able to integrate all your identities?
Sarah Gaither: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, a big area of research is called identity integration within this kind of identity circle, and so if you have lots of your identities, the more integrated they are, the more in harmony that they are, the more they get along together, usually the less negative mental health consequences you're going to face because you can navigate very flexibly between your different identities, but if you view your identities very separately or they're in conflict, or one's in secret, you can't claim that identity based on a given context you may be in, that ends up leading to more stress, right? And it's because you're constantly fighting this battle of who it is you really are with this kind of secret invisible identity perhaps versus who it is you think you should be, right?
So a way we frame this a lot in psychology is looking at these conflicts between your actual self versus your ideal versus your ought self, right? This ideal self of who you would ideally be in an ideal space. The ought is who you think you should be, right, maybe based on social pressures, family pressures, but the conflict that you have between your actual self and either of these ideals or ought selves, that's where we see this increase in mental health negative downstream consequences for individuals.
So, I always try and tell people, you know, if they're feeling down, they really should work on why it is this one identity or this one experience seems to be so separate from the rest of them because our identities are multifaceted. They are intertwined with each other, but sometimes one can get very detached, but figuring out a way to get that more encompassed with your other identities is the best way to try and lift yourself back up in those moments.
Nicole Izquierdo: Thank you. So now we're going to switch back the spotlight onto you. So, you recently became a mother to twins. So has becoming a mother impacted the way you view the world and impacted the way you are as a researcher?
Sarah Gaither: I think for me, I had twins last summer, so they're almost a year old. I've almost made it a year now with twins, which is a whole thing on its own. I think, A: being pregnant is a new identity, right, that people don't really talk about within the identity structure, and it's a temporary identity, right? You're not pregnant forever, but being a pregnant person is definitely an identity experience that I don't think is quite understood. And then you're not pregnant anymore randomly and these beings have come out of you. It's a totally weird transition, right? You go one day from being this, you know, wobbly person who can barely walk, and now you have this person, or in my case, two people who are completely dependent on you in every way, shape, and form.
So I think for me over the past year, what I've become hyperaware of is, A: how incredibly gendered our world is. I have boy/girl twins. We're trying not to gender them as much as possible, but it is everywhere and it's how people interact with them. It's even the language that people use with them, the toys that they choose to give them if they have choices of toys across a room. I think that's been a big kind of eye-opening experience for me, but for my own identity experiences, I think I didn't know how multifaceted I really was until I became a mom. I think being a mom makes everything else kind of click together. Now I know my experiences of cooking and liking food can now make them the food that they need. I know that my experience and the love for travel and exposure to diversity, the things I strive for in my own research are all the opportunities I look for to take my kids to, right, to make sure that they're getting that exposure at different cultural events here in Durham or whatever the case may be.
So, I think I am much more thoughtful now than I was before and where I go and what I do with my time, and making sure that each thing my kids are exposed to is hopefully going to lead to this positive identity change that I measure in my own research. So, it's kind of made me a double researcher in a way where I don't want my kids to not practice what I preach, right, is sort of my approach with them.
I think the other thing that it's made me really think about is how much we don't know how people are going to change, right? Identity is malleable across everyone's lives, and you asked earlier, right, "Is bias malleable?" Well, your identities are malleable too, right? So the experiences my kids are having right now is definitely going to shape some of their attitudes, some of their preferences, but that can also change drastically later on, right? There could be things that I'm doing, limiting certain things that they don't have a chance to experience, right, and trying to make sure that I'm open enough with letting them identify how they want to identify, right? Because identity is definitely malleable over the lifespan too.
So I think those are the things that keep me awake at night because they're actually pretty good sleepers. So I think about those things a lot.
Nicole Izquierdo: And what advice would you give to parents of Biracial children, being one yourself, and like researching Biracial children?
Sarah Gaither: I think it's, you know, exactly what I just said: let your kids, and even if your kids aren't Biracial, let your kids identify how they want to identify. What we know from so much research and psychology, sociology, education, health research is that when people feel their identity is forced on them in any way, taking away their autonomy, taking away their freedom to really identify for who they are, that's what leads to these negative mental health consequences. So, as much as you want to put your culture, your race, your background, your upbringing, your favorite foods, whatever it may be on your kid, if they don't like that favorite food, try to be nice about it, right? Because when things feel forced, that's when we know this identity conflict starts sort of arising between a parent and a child, and it can affect their overall identity development.
So let them be kids. Let them explore, let them learn, and realize that you too are going to make mistakes, right, in how you talk about things with them and you can learn from each other. So that would be my advice, I think, for anyone out there.
Nicole Izquierdo: Is there a limit to what can be considered an identity?
Sarah Gaither: Yeah. That's a good question. I'd say no. I'd say people can frame an identity in lots of different ways. Some people, being a runner really is a core component of who they are, right? If they lost their ability to run, they would lose their sense of self. I hate running, right? So for me, that would never be an identity, but for some people that's a very strong identity and that might be stronger than their gender identity or their racial or ethnic identity. I think when we think about identities broadly, we tend to think of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation. We don't always think about these other aspects: being a foodie, being a mom, being pregnant, right? There are lots of identities out there. What I think is important is knowing which identities are more important to you and why, right?
So that's what makes things shift your behavior and shift your judgment, is certain identities are going to cause you to change what it is you buy at the store, who it is you want to date, or what kind of graduate school program you might be considering, and not all of your identities are going to play as strong of roles in shaping those decisions down the road. So I think identities can be anything, but some of them are going to have more power over you than others.
Nicole Izquierdo: And finally, another personal question, but where do you see yourself in the next five years, and how would you like your career to grow while at Duke?
Sarah Gaither: Yeah. Well, hopefully I'll be tenured within the next five years. You listening, Duke? I hope that happens. I'll be submitting for tenure this summer. So we'll see what happens in the next year. So hopefully I'll be tenured. So I think for me, my biggest outstanding questions are really trying to figure out, what happens if you have negatively stereotyped identities? How does that function within a lot of these kind of multiple identities, flexible thinking kind of outcome spaces? I'd really love to understand more about that. I'd also really love to understand more developmentally with little kids when they really claim something as an identity. It's very hard to measure, but when does that young kid realize, "Hey, this is actually who I am," right? What are the different age points where race versus gender versus being a runner or whatever the case may be, when does that become important to kids, and what are the contexts or the pathways that lead to that strong, positive identification?
Those are things I'd love to still be studying going forward. I think the other thing I'd love to do is to also take this out into the real world. I think we do all these nerdy psychology studies in these controlled lab settings. That's why this roommate study was really interesting for me to do because it's real-world behavior, right? It's students living in the dorms with their roommates. So trying to extend some of this work into more naturalistic settings, I think, is absolutely key for us to truly understand the power that our identities have over our choices.
Nicole Izquierdo: Do you see your work translating into the relationship between a therapist and their patient?
Sarah Gaither: Yeah. I think identity always matters, right? I think there's lots of work out there; people are trying to measure identity matching, right? If that's something that helps within therapy sessions or not, or identity signaling, identity cues.
Another project we've been doing here on Duke's campus is called DukeLine, which is a peer texting program. So undergrads are helping other undergrads. I'm just a faculty member helping to fund it and run it, but I play no role in the peer coaching that happens, but what we've been trying to do within this peer coaching texting framework is to not necessarily tell you which anonymous peer coach you have if you happen to text in for help. You don't necessarily know what their individual identities are, but we have bios of all of our coaches we're putting on our website that show all the different identities that are represented within our coaching team, and our coaching team works really close together. We have a searchable database of the 600-700 most common stressors for Duke students that are actually curated by people from all of these different identity backgrounds, right, to make sure that when a student has a question, if you don't belong to that group or you haven't had that experience, we have people who have had those experiences, right, that we can pull from.
So I do think, from an identity matching angle, that type of connection is absolutely key. It's impossible, I think, to always match people based on certain identity qualities for therapy sessions, but it's not impossible to give people cultural tools and cultural knowledge, right, to make sure that the advice they're giving them, the help that they're giving them is culturally sensitive, and that's where I think we need to be improving.
Nicole Izquierdo: Yeah, I wrote a, I forgot what class it was for, but I wrote an assignment about this, and yeah, like the same thing: there are so many barriers for those minority identity groups to even enter the field and become therapists. So obviously matching by those identities is like impossible. So the first step should be to equip these White majority, or not even White: any other majority group, whether it's religious or sexual orientation, with like these cultural tools to implement them, so-
Sarah Gaither: Yeah. Not all identities are visible when someone walks into a therapy session also, right? Like no one would know walking into a therapy session with me that I have a Black parent, right? So I think these assumptions that we sometimes make as clinicians also should be checked, right? We should have, you know, thorough kind of demographic explorations with patients to make sure that we know their multifaceted selves are all of themselves that they bring to each session, right? It might be one identity that's being targeted in that moment, but I argue all the different identities, again, whether they're in harmony or not, are all contributing to the stressors that someone's facing and how they're processing them in that moment. So if you're only targeting one identity, you're probably not going to be that successful in healing the whole self, because it's all intertwined.
Nicole Izquierdo: Thank you. So yeah, we'll just be wrapping up now. I guess the last thing is, is there anything you'd like to share or any advice you'd like to give to our listeners to close us off?
Sarah Gaither: I think just be bold and brave and experience new things, right? This is the number one thing that when people ask me, "Well, what can I do for my kid?", or "What can I do for myself?" Go out and explore the world. We live in such a segregated society. We talk to people who think like we do all the time. Go make a new friend in a new group, go to a new cultural event. Go to a part of the state or the region you live in you've never gone to before and just feel it out. We know that even just temporarily vacationing somewhere different, right, can force you to think about the world in a different way, and these perspective-taking experiences I think are so key, not only for how you learn about your whole world and society, but how you learn about yourself.
So just, you know, get out there and do some new things, and even just taking a walk around your neighborhood if you don't even do that is a good start.
Nicole Izquierdo: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Gaither. We really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us.
Sarah Gaither: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I had a great time.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.