Dr. Melody Brown PhD
Dr. Melody Brown PhD is a supervisor at Whole Connections, and an integral part of the team. Melody shares her expertise in working with relational systems and is a leader in diversity trainings.
“We each bring our respective cultural contexts and identities to our relationships. These narratives influence how we engage in relationships be it intimate, familial, platonic or professional.”
How did you get into couples and family counseling?
Dr. Melody Brown : My path to the field of Marriage and Family Therapy/Counseling has been circuitous but purposeful. I wanted to be in the field of psychology, but didn’t want to work exclusively with folks with extraordinary inpatient level diagnosis. I ended up doing some research and started talking to someone in marriage and family therapy (which I had never heard of at that point) and they started recruiting pretty hard. So I got interested. When I went to the program, I learned that marriage and family therapy is really more the study of how you work with systems.
When I say systems, it could be an individual client- but that client comes from a system. And how do you work with someone on whatever it is they are trying to heal, progress in, or work through while considering them in the context they came from in this world? This work includes not just their upbringing- but their values, intersecting identities, and the state of world they are living in. This was particularly powerful for me when I think about it from the perspective of being an African American woman who doesn’t identify as straight.
There were things that were pivotal to making me who I am. I grew up in the South; I was raised in Louisiana in a very large, religious family. And then some major bumps came when I said, Okay, well, I’m not a straight.
So consider the context of growing up in that family; we were a church family, and we were also a family of choir singers who sang at various churches. When you think about the richness of context with people, that’s what systemic work is. I learned early on to pay attention to issues of injustice and oppression. Living on the margins as a Black woman in the queer community, I learned to appreciate my intersecting identities. I brought this approach to the field that I love, passing that appreciation on to students from all backgrounds.
How do you work as a couples and family therapist?
Dr. Melody Brown : Couples and family therapy is more of a study of a system. We consider in context not just upbringing, but values, intersecting identities, and the state of world. When you broaden that, beyond just one person in the room, you think about different people coming together and bringing their whole stories, their values, and their practices. And more often than not, couples don’t really talk about what it means to join two very different ways of being. The next thing you know, we’re ready to have a baby. In couples and family therapy, we talk about who we are, how we are impacted in world, and how we show up.
We each bring our respective cultural contexts and identities to our relationships. These narratives influence how we engage in relationships be it intimate, familial, platonic or professional.
Describe your work with Whole Connection
Dr. Melody Brown : I was brought on board with Whole Connection 4 or 5 years ago to do trainings with clinicians on talking about differences with clients. These trainings focus on different identities and owning your places of privilege as a clinician. If there are some subjugated identities, we talk about owning those as well.
For instance, if i am teaching or with a client (especially if they are a white client), I might say considering power differentials, “I am considered an expert in this room, and therefore hold power in that. When we walk outside the door, that power shifts because of the color of my skin and the color of yours.” It is crucial for us to be able to really talk about who we are and how those identities impact the way we show up in the world.
Growing up in south and being nurtured by lot of women, I have sort of that big mama feel. I often reference the movie Soul Food. I say, “Baby, I’m gonna love you. But I’m gonna love you, honestly.” I don’t do a lot of therapeutic jargon but I am going to speak to you lovingly, and straight on.
From there, WC wanted to talk about making staff and clinician base more representative of clients coming in, so I helped to introduce clinicians, and later suggested my own name to become a part of the WC team.
How has relational therapy been impacted over recent years?
Dr. Melody Brown : In 2020, and 2021, I saw more relational dynamics show up in therapy than ever before in my career. And it was because of the pandemic. If you think about parents now having to figure out what to do with their kids, because kids are not in school. Right? You know, and some of them could not stay home with them. Or Everybody was at home; everybody was working from home. Relationship dynamics that were somewhat saved or ignored because everybody was busy doing their own thing were all of a sudden exposed. “We’re all in same house now. All the time. And I realized how much I don’t like you.”
So, you know, problems became more evident, and folks became more motivated to work on them. And I it hasn’t been as urgent as of late. I think people are really enjoying the fact that maybe they can have some fun live life, get COVID and live through it. This wasn’t the reality for everybody before, and really still isn’t. My guess is, with the way things are going, we’re not necessarily getting a break from COVID. But the way the world keeps turning lately, stresses and strains, the shootings, the political pieces, all of those things, I think, are sort of background noise. We can pushing them back until it gets thrown in our forefront. And then we have to figure out what to do with it and how it’s impacting us in our relationships.
Why is Couples and Family Therapy Effective?
Dr. Melody Brown : If I have someone who comes in individually to work on their relationship, I’m gonna get one side of the story, I only get one picture, one perspective. When a couple or a family comes in, the room becomes really full. Because it’s not just the two or three people, or whoever is in there, but it’s also their hurts, their pains, their traumas. So, while one person might say, “ you never consider me when….” What they don’t know, is that perhaps what’s happening is this other person’s stuff is being touched on and triggered. And they don’t have the capacity to do what you call considering. Right? And But the way the world keeps turning lately, stresses and strains, the shootings, the political pieces, all of those things, I think, are sort of background noise. We can pushing them back until it gets thrown in our forefront. And then we have to figure out what to do with it and how it’s impacting us in our relationships.
What questions do you like to ask?
Dr. Melody Brown : I always love to ask my clients:
What was your model for loving? Who taught you to love? Who taught you to fight? Who taught you to make up?
A lot of times, relationships are so painful when we’re young that we don’t have great examples. And so people are doing their best to figure out how to love without the best examples and that’s bumping up against other people’s stories. So that is the thing that I think people would be surprised to know about; As we learn to navigate life, we make space for both stories.
Who or what are your inspirations?
Dr. Melody Brown : That’s a really good question. When I think about inspiration, I think about purpose. At this point in my career, I don’t know how much I believe people need help, because it kind of disregards people’s resilience and strength. It makes me more important than I really am.
So I don’t think of it as helping people. It’s like, how do I serve you? How do I remind your spirit of what it’s forgotten?
More often than not, we have inside us what we need. Even in relationships, you may have come from a situation or circumstance in life where just treatment of you was horrible. And yet, you find yourself able to get into a relationship seeking love. So how do you do that in the healthiest way possible for you? And so my inspiration is to be purposeful in this life. And since I am nearing the end of my clinical career, what can I pass on to the next generation of therapists?
In that way, the next generation inspires me. People’s resilience always inspires me. Even for a client who tells me they want to kill themselves, more often than not, there’s something holding them to this world that they just haven’t been able to wrap their hope around. And that’s inspirational. It’s humbling to be in the presence of someone who is just fighting to still be here. You get paid twice.
Have you had any recent A-Ha moments?
Dr. Melody Brown : So my, my biggest aha moment recently came when I was talking to a supervisee of mine about a client that she was working with. I thought about a lot of the ways that we get into situations that don’t feel good to us and we hit a pocket of shame. Here’s an example. Imagine I am driving along. I’m not from Colorado, so Colorado driving frustrates me. Imagine someone kind of cuts me off, and it kind of sends me to that place of “what the hell, you’re getting in my way. Why would you take my power to just get where I’m trying to go right now?” It takes me off center a little bit.
When I think about being taken off center, the thing that can take us off center most easily is shame. And shame happens when something comes up and we get triggered by some vulnerable situation. It starts bringing up that feeling that we are not good enough or not worthy, which is so easy to happen in relationships, right? I’ve always thought that this shame was that on the other side of love but I wasn’t quite sure of the connection.
The supervisee I was talking to was saying that fear is the opposite of love, not hate. And that to me made that love piece at the bottom click. Up here is the trigger- the vulnerability, the fear, and the shame. And the fear is all about “what if I’m really not worthy?”
That was my biggest aha moment lately.
It’s not just the I love you, or I love my partner. It’s a different kind of love. It’s something that’s a bit more sustaining, quiet, and peaceful. Fear threatens that love, and takes us off center, so we look for proof that we are unworthy.
Who could benefit from Couples and Family Therapy?
Dr. Melody Brown : I see a lot of folks who are dealing with depression. A lot of folks who are dealing with transitional issues, either moving into the state or determining whether or not to move out of the state a lot of folks are struggling with financial stability. And for some, it’s so much worse than it had has been, I think about Boulder and how the community has been impacted by the fire and the shootings here in Boulder. And, I don’t know how much people know that there are resources for them.
We are inundated with a lot; there are shootings and injustices to marginalize people. There is confusion about what we should pay attention to politically, locally, and worldwide. Parents fear sending kids to school. People are dealing with their own circumstances and situations. With that much noise and distraction it’s hard to be connected to self and those you love.
Your child may not need therapy, but how are you doing as a parent? You’re a teacher or you’re a school administrator- Has your job gotten beyond what it usually has been? The folks that are caring for the folks, how are their relationships going?
Counseling doesn’t have to be place of problems. It could simply be about “how do I reconnect to myself and the people I love?”
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