Finding Love in Difference with Justin Shubert
Episode 11
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Justin Shubert, PsyD, PhD
Justin Shubert is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Los Angeles, CA. He is the founder and director of Silver Lake Psychotherapy, a group practice on the eastside of Los Angeles and co-founder of the Committee for Diversities and Sociocultural Issues at the New Center for Psychoanalysis. He is the former chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Committee on Gender and Sexuality and the past Diversity Editor of The American Psychoanalyst.
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Love and belonging are some of the fundamental human needs necessary for survival. But as profound as they are, living with others, resonating with them, and “fitting in” is a delicate balancing act. Our sense of identity is deeply influenced by the acceptance, comfort, or rejection we experience from those around us, but certain aspects of ourselves will not align comfortably with others.
As psychoanalysts, we are mindful of acceptance and the foundation it provides clients to explore their thoughts, emotions, and vulnerabilities. We know that social norms of gender, sexuality, class and race are engrained deeply in our lives, and can keep us from living authentically, causing deep emotional wounds, eroding self-esteem, and hundering personal development. In the field of psychoanalysis, new voices are emerging to broaden the conversation surrounding these issues. Amongst them is Justin Shubert, a clinical psychoanalyst based in Silver Lake, Los Angeles.
In this episode of The Art of Listening, Justin shares his personal journey as a queer man navigating the field of psychoanalysis – first, as a patient, and then as a clinician. Together, we talk about queer theory, identity and power, and Justin shares his unique perspective on acceptance and belonging in a field that has historically grappled with conflicting opinions around subjects such as sexuality and gender. Justin also reflects on what led him to find a supportive community within the American Psychoanalytic Association's Committee on Gender and Sexuality, and discusses his ongoing efforts to create a space of acceptance, diversity, and inclusivity within his own practice.
Tune into our conversation to discover the power of acceptance and community in embracing differences.
Chapters
1 - Justin’s first contact with psychoanalysis: from experience, to intellect (03:55)
2 - Reflecting on foundational experiences of queerness (7:25)
3 - Understanding queer theory and identity (11:43)
4 - Challenges and “resistance” to queerness, gender and sexuality theory in psychoanalysis (14:05)
5 - Finding and building a queer-conscious community in psychoanalysis (20:06)
6 - Listening with a queer approach: how Justin listens to his patients (23:08)
Links
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Justin: [00:00:02] The mismatch that I felt as a queer person growing up and the things not so long ago we have done to queer people. It's pretty brutal. But queerness is not just trauma at all. It's also extremely alive and exciting life force in a way. I've kind of spent my professional life trying to understand the psychic effect that it has to be queer in the culture that we are a part of.
Eileen: [00:00:37] I'm Eileen Dunn, and this is the Art of listening, a podcast that delves into the incomparable power of human connection and the magic of good depth. Talk therapy. Joining us today is Justin Schubert. Belonging is something we define by affinity. It's a form of comfort for the relationships we have, the places we inhabit. It's a sense of trust in who we are and what surrounds us. But this word. I find it strange too. Belonging. It's not just being living. Finding identity. It's longing, a visceral need to reach out for community and acceptance. It reveals our profound desire to fit together. Belonging is a craving, something so central to the world we have built for ourselves. But as you know, ourselves have many folds. Nothing. No one has one dimensioned. And although we may wish it otherwise, parts of us cannot fit in. Or, as today's guest would word it.
Justin: [00:02:03] To be on the inside often requires giving something up. And yet, I doubt that most people fit into one category and identify with that. And that's it. And there's nothing else.
Eileen: [00:02:15] Meet Justin Schubert. Justin to finds his identity with precision and confidence. His labels speak on his behalf. White, Jewish, queer, cisgender reminders of the communities he belongs to and of his journey, a winding path that took him from the heart of the norm to its very edge. It all started with a personal draw toward a therapeutic relationship. Justin went from experience to intellect, from therapy to therapist. In this episode, he will pass on his deep commitment to the work of the psychoanalytic field. Together, we'll discuss gender, sexuality, and queerness. What it is, what it isn't, and how it interacts with identity and power. As you listen, I invite you to consider this. What do you know about belonging and standing out? Can you stand it? Bear it, accept it. Do you ever think or remember that part of others doesn't fit either? To answer these questions, I now let Justin grace us with his gentle and wise presence. He is a clinical psychologist, a psychoanalyst. His research interests focus on diversity, gender, and sexuality in psychoanalysis. He is the founder of Silver Lake Psychotherapy, a group practice on the east side of Los Angeles. Let's jump into this. Okay. Can you share more about your background and identity?
Justin: [00:04:00] I'm a psychoanalyst. I'm a psychologist, I'm a psychotherapist. My work with patients and the clinical work and sitting with people is my priority. But I do other things in my career also. I grew up in New York. My mom's Jewish. My dad is Buddhist, grew up in an upper middle class setting. I, uh, consider myself a gay cisgender man. Certainly lots of white privilege. So there are many ways in which I could fit in and have fit in. And that's a big part of my story as much as my queerness, you know? And probably those things gave me a comfort and an access to being in psychoanalysis.
Eileen: [00:04:43] Also, I'm thinking about an appreciating your acknowledging from the get go of our conversation, your privilege, but also from the get go of our conversation, your vulnerability and then entering psychoanalysis. And I wonder if you could say more about your experience as a real person entering this field, coming into your identity as analyst.
Justin: [00:05:07] Yeah. I mean, some people become interested in our field intellectually first, you know, and they read and then they find an analyst and try it out and it's meaningful other way around for me. I was in therapy in my 20s, and I didn't actually know very much about what psychoanalysis was. I was not looking for an analyst. I was just looking for a psychodynamic therapist, because a part of me realized that something was going on that I needed to figure out. I knew that much. I didn't know what it was, but something wasn't really working. I think it had to do with my being gay, but it was lots of other stuff too, and I knew that I wanted the kind of therapy that would go back and help me figure out the family stuff and the stuff from earlier on. I did somehow find my way to my analyst, and I started to come more frequently and four times a week and laying on the couch and slowly I developed a relationship with my analyst. It seemed clear to me that she had some kind of body of knowledge and confidence about what causes what, or development or a way of being that she was drawing from. And I wanted to know what that was because I sensed myself growing. So that's where my intellect kicked in. And then I started taking lots of classes as I was starting to become a clinician myself in my late 20s. One of the things I was so excited about learning about was the gender and sexuality stuff. And there's so much actually that really, really is so much exciting analytic writing and stuff going on in the last couple decades on these issues. So that was exciting to me. But yeah, I mean, I came to this field, this particular field of psychoanalysis. Through it working on me first. My analysis lasted ten years and I still have a relationship with her. She's a very special person and a talented clinician, and I became more comfortable in my skin as a gay man and just as a person in the world. It truly changed my life.
Eileen: [00:07:24] You know, I sense that very natural hunger that you have had intellectually. And personally on gender and sexuality. It feels to me like a pursuit that you've been on, you know, as we all aim to do it on your own journey. And obviously it took you into psychotherapy originally, ultimately finding an analyst and an analytic experience.
Justin: [00:07:56] Yeah, it has been a real pursuit for me, and I don't know exactly what spurs it, but probably something to do with that experience of the the mismatch that I felt as a queer person growing up and how ostracized I felt and the mark that left. But the thing about queerness is that it's also it's not just trauma at all, at all, at all. It's also extremely alive and exciting life force also. So my hunger, my, my to learn more about it, I think in many ways comes from that part just as much as it comes from the part where I try to figure out what what went wrong here. Why is this so painful? Also, socially.
Eileen: [00:08:44] You know what I found myself thinking about is that none of us picks some of the fundamental elements of who we are and how we're thrown into the world. The question becomes, who do we encounter and how do we navigate? What do we do? So I appreciate that you were the object of, of troubles of, of of oppression. Yeah. And social regulation and discrimination to use those really important words. Would you be comfortable, you know, sharing some more about the truth of that?
Justin: [00:09:17] Sure. I mean, I certainly remember kids making fun of me for being gay way in school, way before I even knew what that was. And then the intense fear and shame that it might be true without really even knowing, even knowing what it was. And then the hiding, the intense hiding from my family, from my community, which lasted a very long time because I was born in 1980, you know, in the 80s and the 90s there, just where I grew up, there just was not an acceptable way to be an out queer or gay or queer person. Maybe there was one person in my high school who was out. I don't even know if that's true, actually, at that time. But if you were to come out, of course you would be very ostracized. And part of my disposition, I guess, was also I was very afraid of being ostracized. And in a way, I really admire people who are able to bear that and say, this is who I am and screw you. And and okay, I'm ostracized. I don't want to be a part of your club. Anyway, that wasn't me growing up. I was kind of more scared than that.
Eileen: [00:10:42] Here I am reminded that we pick up the pieces of our character, one after the other. Tastes, instincts, and desires in the heights of personal triumph or the painful depths of adversity and fear. For Justin, queerness was found in estrangement. His sexuality separated him from the rest. It caused a war showing something so natural, yet not safe to be something he would need to defend and fight for something deserving of peace. We don't get to choose who we are or what we feel deep in our skin, but we can choose how we engage with ourselves. And so, with time and help, Justin found his territory to express, connect and reconcile. He turned to theory to understand further what queerness could mean not only for him, but for others too. You know something? It would help me if you could say more of what it was like growing up queer. Educate me further in the way that you think about queer theory.
Justin: [00:11:55] Well, it's a strange thing. I think queer is an identity. Right? So my awareness that I fit into some kind of queer identity happened slowly over the course of ten or more years, I'd say. It didn't just happen with me understanding that I was attracted to men. But then there's the kind of slow reckoning that I couldn't be attracted to women, that I was a gay man. And actually, only later did I start to adopt the word queer for myself, which I like because it's much more open to me. It's not just about a man being attracted to men, but it involves an openness in gender and sexuality and other things, really. But the notion of queering something, opening it up and doing something different to it, yeah, it's something that happened first in an academic way. I mean, what's amazing to me is that queer theory blew open notions of binary sexuality and gender that had been just so common, and take it for granted. And then what seemed to follow was society seemed to allow people to behave in that way. More so now we have, of course, all these names for different kinds of genders and sexualities, and it actually has opened up in practice. But queer theory kind of started it all and then started to trickle into psychoanalytic theory in the late 80s and 90s, early aughts.
Eileen: [00:13:21] So it is it's about opening and expanding. I want to stretch my arms out.
Justin: [00:13:26] Yes, having there be space for more, having things that had been banished now be switched around, and then the pleasure of that.
Eileen: [00:13:36] It's a big word banish.
Justin: [00:13:38] Yeah. And one that fits the things not so long ago we have done to queer people. It's pretty brutal. And when I say we, I mean our society, American society, psychoanalytic culture, you know, in a way, I've kind of spent my professional life trying to understand the psychic effect that it has to be queer in the culture that we are a part of right now.
Eileen: [00:14:05] You're moving me back to the thought about power and judgment and who has it to make it. You know, if our field of psychoanalysis stands for a kind of a power of judging, you know what's crazy and what's normal to put it in really gross. Yeah. You know, simplistic terms, but but the power to judge mental and emotional truth or well-being is huge, right?
Justin: [00:14:35] I mean, look, when we talk about regulating forces and who gets to determine what's normal and what's pathological, in some ways it is us or people close to us. It certainly was us. It was the psychoanalysts. I mean, there's Freud has some mixed messages, but some of it is very queer. Some of it isn't. But something happened after Freud. I think there was a conservatism that came to the states after World War two, when certain analysts came to the states and ego psychology became very big. And and something happened where psychoanalysis then tried real hard to fit into mainstream American medical culture and did. And it worked, and in that process became quite conservative and rigid, especially in terms of sexuality and gender. And despite the fact that psychoanalysts have always seen themselves as experts in the realm of thinking about sexuality, they were just perpetuating the damaging banishing of queer people, of queer practice.
Eileen: [00:15:43] Resistance. The way you and I think about it is more of an active refusal, as opposed to a simple ignorance. It's more of a no, go away, stay away. I don't believe it. I don't get it. I don't want it. Yeah. When you stand back and you think about life in this profession, in this country, over the last 40 years, the resistance to understanding, appreciating, learning about the queer piece, how do you interpret the resistance to that?
Justin: [00:16:15] Yeah, it's a great question, actually, because I think there is so much resistance. It's actually takes quite a large toll or it did on me when you're doing. This kind of educational work or even activist work within the field of psychoanalysis. But I think this is probably true in general. There is so much resistance, aggression, projection, denial, all of it that comes at you. And I've tried to really think about what that is. I think a lot of it is people are frightened to see the queer parts of themselves. People who do not identify as queer get very anxious about acknowledging queer parts of themself, whether that's gender or sexuality or, and push back very hard against that. That it's very safe to be in. Uh, normative binary category. And it's very dangerous to be outside of those categories. And I think most people, because we learned growing up that. Gender is biology. The gender is biological sex. So if you're born with a penis, you're a man and a vagina, you're a woman. That most people haven't really thought very deeply about their gender. So if you haven't thought very deeply about your gender and and you're living in a society where gender is extremely rigid and binary and set, and the punishments in society for crossing gender are really severe, I mean, death in some cases. But, you know, if you are male bodied and you are addressed to the supermarket, that could be quite dangerous depending on where you are in the country.
Justin: [00:18:17] So you're living in a society where gender is highly regulated and you haven't really explored your own gender, then there's probably a fragility in some way, as my guess, I think. And so you're then confronted with a gender expansive person. Who's transgressing gender roles. I think there's something emotionally threatening about it. Like, wait a second. You can't do that. And if you're doing that, what am I? It's, uh. You can't transgress our gender norms like that. You know, it's that discomfort at most. It's, uh oh, if you're doing that, what's going on with my gender? And so I think the way a lot of people respond to that discomfort that comes up the way cisgender people in quotes respond to gender non-conforming people, and the discomfort that arises is often to undermine the the other person's gender, to kind of try to get rid of that uncomfortable transgression. That's not real. It's just a phase. It's the result of some kind of terrible pathology. All the same things. By the way, people used to say about gay people, you know, and to be on the inside often requires giving something up, right? Like in order to fit in and conform, you're giving something up. Because we're complicated creatures. I identify as cisgender. I'm. And yet, is it that simple? It doesn't feel that simple to me. I doubt gender is so simple to most people that they are just fit into one category and identify with that, and that's it. And there's nothing else.
Eileen: [00:20:11] When we encounter queerness in ourselves or others, something is shattered. An illusion, a perception of the world that has failed to capture its truth. It's a strange experience, one that moves us quiet or loud and elicits our passions from denial, refusal, ignoring, an effort to control, to welcoming the new. Pursuing it and even defending it to the death. Justin faced queerness like a mirror, a reflection of himself, something he would need to commit to with his career. He honored this promise and found that the world within our profession often imitates the world without. I wonder if you could say more about, you know, your experience of finding. A larger community that you felt belonging in and what that did that the one on one. Mm.hmm couldn't or didn't.
Justin: [00:21:21] Actually, you know, I've been very lucky to find multiple communities. The one that comes to mind is the Committee on Gender and Sexuality at Apsa, at the American Psychoanalytic Association. I think I presented a case at a conference in Chicago that this Committee on Gender and Sexuality, which we call Cogs, was putting on. I was at the end of my analytic training, and afterwards there was like a social event, and I remember just feeling like I had met my people, that here were people who were interested in the same thing, all the things I just listed a little earlier that interest in psychoanalysis had been in psychoanalysis, including had had very meaningful experience with psychoanalysis, but also felt not quite gotten by their analysts or certain people around their queerness, and who were interested in the social justice aspects of trying to even things out for queer people. And I became a part of that group which which I'm still a part of. And ultimately I became chair of that committee for 4 or 5, four years or something just recently stepped down. But, uh, it's exciting to have people to work with. We put on trainings, we release statements, we do some political work, and it's a very bright, accomplished, interesting group of people. But it's also very meaningful to all these people who had been ostracized in their personal lives and in within the field, banding together and understanding each other's experience. And that makes for a very powerful group.
Eileen: [00:23:05] So given your experience, then how do you find yourself living and working, listening for that anxiety? How do you treat the people that you're working with?
Justin: [00:23:16] I think that there is something about the activity of being receptive that I, I use to listen, that I try to access a kind of of, of maybe vulnerable but receptive state where I can really hear, try to listen to what is going on underneath, what the person is saying, what we traffic in the unconscious in this field, right. What is going on beneath consciousness that's causing them to say this or feel this or behave this way? The social conditioning around gender and sexuality is so loud. I mean, it's kind of crazy how much freaking regulation there is. You're supposed to be exactly this thing in a very small box. I don't think. Are they anyone fits into those boxes completely ever, you know. So ideally, psychoanalysis is a place where people can start to listen to themselves because we listen to them with an openness with, with a little less regulation and pressure to be this or that and a little more freedom to just be all the multiple things they are. We are. That's what I think my analyst did with me. I think that's where I learned that. And it's hard to listen that way, you know, because of course we have all of our own regulatory voices in our heads. That's the training, I hope. But yeah, I think psychoanalysis truly teaches us to listen in a deep way. And if you can be listened to like that, I think often just that experience can be quite transformative.
Eileen: [00:25:28] Listening sets us free. Speaking with Justin, as I have with all our guests, I notice it once more cutting through the noise beyond what we think we ought to be or how we ought to feel. Listening quiets fear. Yes, it reaches through it too, and makes room for transformation. This is how Justin came into his own learning from his analyst. He gained a layered understanding of who he was, nature, nurture and everything in between. He also identified a need within the field to form or reform our ideologies around gender and sexuality. So he took to it, and what was an academic pursuit morphed into activism and a philosophy of practice. Queerness, says Justin, is the act of not belonging together. When we exist fully with our shared humanity and our difference, we can reach collective understanding. Queerness is the part of us that doesn't abide by the norm, and it is within us all. On instinct. We may want to resist this truth when we feel threatened. The room for complexity collapses in our minds and hearts, but we are the better when we make space to open ourselves again to new worlds of thought and being from so many angles. Justin shows us what the work of depth therapy aims to assist, not judgment of people's nature, gender, sexuality, but the intentional opportunity to define who we are and find love, acceptance and community indifference.
Eileen: [00:27:21] As practitioners, we don't hold the standard for what is healthy or true. We don't know better. What we have is the power to listen, to make room for meaning that frees and strengthens and directs from within. Only you have the power to discover, to decide what is true. I thank Justin for his balanced and thoughtful voice, and for reminding us today that it's not about living right or wrong, being in or being out. It's about feeling alive and true. It's about sharing our acts of being and longing. Justin. He makes it feel easy for me. This has been the art of listening again. My name is Eileen Dunn. Please join us for our next episode as we continue to dive into the space between speaker and listener. You can follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave a review in a five star rating. It helps us to grow so that we can keep bringing you new conversations. And we'll see you the next time.
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