Author: Michelle Lee

Thoughts on Vulnerability (in the wake of Charlottesville)

I once had a client who was a white supremacist.* The thing about being a therapist is, you quickly learn that everyone’s got a story. In this case, there was a history of domestic abuse, a parent with extreme racist ideologies, underlying severe depression and anxiety, and experiences of rejection by loved ones (which hurt him deeply, though he would only rarely admit it). He was also bright and thoughtful, extremely well read, and had a sardonic sense of humor that I genuinely enjoyed. He openly discussed his racist ideologies with me, and I was never shy about telling him how abhorrent his ideas were. He was always willing to debate these ideas, but whenever I called them out for what I thought they were—stories he told himself in order to feel strong, powerful, and invulnerable—he scoffed and quickly changed the subject. Once, in the aftermath of an incident in which his own risky behaviors nearly cost him his life, I told him honestly how concerned I had been for his safety. At this, he grew intensely uncomfortable, and more emotional than I had ever seen him. “I don’t want to know that!” he said to me, curling up into a ball in the chair with his head in his hands. It was as though the very idea that I—or anyone, for that matter—could care about him enough to be worried about him was just utterly intolerable to him. He…

Be Still My Soul

When I was 19 years old and a junior at BYU, I took a volunteer opportunity teaching a semester-long “life skills” class at the Utah State Prison. Maybe it’s not apparent from that one sentence how absurd it was for a sheltered Mormon girl from rural Canada to be teaching “life skills” to a bunch of inmates, but trust me, it was pretty absurd. The closest I had ever been to criminal behavior at that point in my life was sneaking out of my house without telling my parents once to go get a Subway sandwich.  I knew, however, that in order to get into a counseling graduate program one day, I had to bulk up my resume with some relevant volunteer experience so when I heard about the opportunity to teach at the prison, I applied to the program and was accepted. After a background check and an unnerving hour-long orientation—wherein I was asked to sign forms acknowledging that the government doesn’t negotiate with hostage-takers, so if that happened to me, I was on my own—I was given a packet of lesson materials and told to show up at the prison next Wednesday. When I arrived, I was shown by a prison guard to a classroom (with a piano, strangely enough—I’m assuming that was a Utah thing) that had a bunch of chairs set up in rows, and then left alone with my “students.” The class itself consisted of…

On Silence: A Midrash of Elijah

Most of us are familiar with the story of the prophet Elijah, who is particularly famous for his dramatic confrontation with the priests of Baal.  My favorite part of Elijah’s story comes after that, though, when he realizes that not much changed as a result of his demonstration of God’s power–the people are still worshiping idols, and the wife of the king has promised to assassinate him.  Elijah, despairing and suicidal, travels to Mt. Horeb (more famously known as Sinai, the same mountain on which the Lord appeared to Moses) and waits.  The voice of the Lord then comes to him and asks him a simple question:  “What are you doing here, Elijah?” It’s easy to sense some frustration and anger in Elijah’s answer.  “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”  Elijah is despondent, and wants to die. Elijah is told then that the Lord is about to pass by.  Elijah looks out from the mountain and sees a great wind, an earthquake, and a fire.  God, we are told, is not in any of those, but is in the “still, small voice” that follows. This phrase, “the still, small voice” is used a lot in our common LDS discourse, everywhere from conference…