Welcome back to the latest episode from the Lessons from the Playroom podcast. Thank you so much for joining me and my special guest. We are going to be having a very important and very relevant conversation for what’s going on in the world right now.
Liliana Balin is with me. I want to tell you a little bit about her. She’s a very special lady in my life.
She is one of my certified Synergetic play therapy supervisors. And she’s so much more than that, too. She has a master’s degree in counseling and marriage, family, and child therapy, as well as an MBA, which I did not know everyone until I read her bio that she has an MBA from the University of Phoenix in Colorado.
University of Phoenix in Colorado. Oh, how that’s? Very interesting. What’s really special about Liliana is that she has developed an interest and a niche in treating couples and children who have experienced trauma, abuse, and multicultural issues from an attachment lens.
It’s such an important lens. Liliana, she’s also all right, everyone, holds on to your hats as I read this long list. She’s also an AMFT approved supervisor.
She’s an EMDR approved consultant. She’s a registered play therapy supervisor. She’s an EFT supervisor in training. My goodness, girl. She is trained in therapy. She is trained in love and logic as the parenting curriculum.
You’ve also done extensive training at the Gottman Institute for Amazing and what is so wonderful about what you’re doing. Yes, you’ve got all these different trainings and whatnot, Liliana, but you bring the cultural lens into what you are doing, which is so much of what we are going to talk about today, and specifically immigrants and refugees and refugees. And so, Liliana, thank you for bringing your tremendous background into this conversation.
And more importantly, thank you for bringing you into this conversation and for bringing a voice that needs to be oh, thank you. You’re welcome. Thank you.
I feel so weird when people mention all the credentials because for me, it’s like, don’t. Thank you. So let me start by saying that I love when we have these conversations, you and I, because everything comes together, and for me, everything gets integrated.
And I want to make sure that I share not only from my experience, but everything that I have learned in my journey, because I cannot be the only one who has this information. I cannot be the only one who’s working with these clients. And what is it that I can do to share so the others don’t have to go through the barriers that I went through? Will you share a little bit with our listeners? What is your cultural background? So I grew up I was born in Mexico.
My mom, who’s a single mom, came to the United States when I was 16 years old. So it was me and my two siblings. I’m the oldest, of course.
That’s why the overachiever part. And what I have shared with others is that coming to this country as a teenager, it was so overwhelming, leaving everything that I knew behind, leaving my language, my family, my food, my music, everything that I knew was gone. So let me pause here, and I want you to think about any immigrant or any refugee that you’re working with.
When they leave behind everything that is familiar to them, and then they come in into a new place, what is their experience they’re welcome. What is it that they’re coming to? What is it that they know? What is it that they’re letting go? What is it that they’re grieving? Which is the language that I didn’t have as 16 years old. I didn’t know that I was grieving and that I was also struggling because I didn’t understand what I was feeling, what I was doing, and what I wanted to do.
One, because I didn’t know English, believe it or not, the only word that I keep practicing was I’m sorry, was coffee and donuts. Because there was a comedian in Mexico that was teaching us English, and she was like, Coffee and donuts, coffee and donuts. And I was like, I need to know coffee and donuts because that’s what I’m going to have as soon as I get there.
And I can laugh now. And then I keep thinking of like, wow. I was preparing myself to communicate something so basic as something so nurturing when I came to this country.
I also want to name, as you’re sharing your story and as we talk about the journey and the challenges of someone who isn’t an immigrant, we need to name there’s a war going on in the world right now and that there are individuals who are becoming immigrants who didn’t make the choice to become immigrants. And so I can only imagine that what you’re saying, there’s no preparation. No.
So my family who came from Mexico chose to get to this country for a better life, for the American dream. But there’s a lot of places right from Guatemala, Honduras now, like, there’s a lot of places that have been looking, they’re being displaced. They had no choice because of war or the cartel or just safety, period.
Yeah. And as I say that I don’t want to say that one is worse than another. It’s just another variable that we need to be sensitive and attuned to because people have different experiences in their experiences.
Yeah. So for us, therapists is becoming aware of what is their journey, what is the perceived challenges that they have and then how can we give language to organize what they’re going through and then have to give language to the emotion, to their needs and to their hopes. Absolutely.
So part of why I wanted you to come on here and you said that we’ve been having these conversations and you’ve been sharing with me that there’s been a lot of AHA that have been coming together for you. And a lot of insights, particularly around the experience of someone who is an immigrant and what’s going on in their nervous system and how they’re moving through the world perceiving different threats and what that means for their identity and their internal sense of safety. And external sense of safety.
And that feels like such an important conversation and I want to jump really deep into that today if we can go there. Yeah. So it was one of those moments, right, where we’re having a conversation, I’m learning from you and then I stop and I’m not sure how loud I was, but for me it was that moment where I was like, wait a minute, if this is what’s happening for the people that I’m working with.
So we were talking about the nervous system and in that precise moment you were talking about the parasympathetic sympathetic or the dorsal response and you were talking about how it’s the oldest response. And in that moment a light bulb went in and I’m like, wait a minute. Most of the immigrants or refugees that we’re working with, when they come to a new country, when they’re dealing with so many unknowns, they go automatically into feeling hopeless.
Sometimes you see no expression, sometimes you see a lot of expressions, sometimes you see numbing. They’ve been through a lot and they don’t know what to do. Right? And if you take that a step further, a lot of the times they feel the need to assimilate, to acculturate right away in order to function, in order to do what they need to do.
So when you said, this is the oldest response for me was like this is what I’m seeing in parents when they are immigrants and I just didn’t have the language to name it that way until that day. Right. You’re seeing parents who have been through so much, who have experienced and perceived trauma and challenge so great that their dorsal response is literally kicking in and they are shutting down and they’re numbing out because it’s just been too much.
It is. Right. That doesn’t mean that they’re not functioning.
It just means that they are so overwhelmed and they don’t know how they’re going to do the next step. Right? But this is what I’m seeing with them. The other part that I saw when we were talking was that, of course, and then their children, because they’re put in school or they’re born in this country, they’re having completely the opposite experience.
They’re in the sympathetic, like, do something. And a lot of them is because they have to translate for parents. They have to help parents with appointments.
They have to do the phone calls. They have to do so many things that they go into the other extreme. And now those kids are like, do something, do it yourself.
They’re going into this response, and parents do not know why kids are doing what they’re doing, why they’re screaming, why they’re complaining, why they are so hyper. And then children turn around and see their parents, and they don’t understand, why is my parent not acting? Why is my parent not responding? Why is my parent not doing this for themselves? So now we have two extreme responses. It’s almost like talking different languages, and I think that’s the way that I share that with you.
So if they’re speaking different languages and they’re not understanding, and they don’t have the capacity in that moment to be curious because they’re in a crisis response, then of course it makes sense that they cannot see each other, they cannot co regulate each other. They cannot regulate. And what they see is the view of self, the view of others, and the view of the world in a different way.
Yeah, definitely. Thank you for naming that dynamic, because that brings the dynamic so clear for us to be able to get curious about when we see it. All right, listeners, hang in there.
Today I want to talk about what exactly are some of the perceptions that are going on that even lead to that in the first place? So we’re talking about the parents perceiving a lot of challenges or the kids getting frustrated and that type of a thing. But in centered Play Therapy, we talk about the four threats, right as we’re moving through the world, the brain is looking for these things ultimately to help us determine whether or not there’s a sense of safety in our environment. I want to go through them.
This is one of the things that I was hearing you put together that was really inspiring to me, and I would love for everyone else to hear this too. I want to go through them, and I want you to speak about each one of them. From the perspective of an immigrant or a refugee.
So the very first thing as we’re moving through the world is we’re assessing for safety, for physical safety. Is there anything in my environment that is potentially going to impact my physical safety? How does that translate? Like, where am I going to be sleeping? Am I going to be safe? Can I sleep? Can I relax? So think about the refugees, if they’re going to another country, and it’s the same thing for immigrants, but think about if I’m going to another country, where am I sleeping and am I safe? Can I relax? Can I close my eyes or am I still in danger? What may be coming my way? Right, that’s the first thing that it comes. A lot of the immigrants that I work with and I work with the Latino community, so a lot of them, they came to the United States and then we can go to Ukraine.
But a lot of them, they were talking about not being able to relax because they didn’t know if they were going to be raped, they didn’t know if someone was going to kill them, if someone was going to steal for them. A lot of the children didn’t know that they were not safe, but they were like, reading the congruency of their parents, so they couldn’t relax. They were like constantly on edge.
So when we’re talking about safety, can you imagine everything that you know, that you love, that you’re able to relax, is taken away? How will your body feel in that moment? What will you do and not know if it’ll return or how it could return in a new form or just so take it to Ukraine? Right? We see in the news how houses, how communities are being destroyed. So even if it returns, what does that mean? How are we going to get funding to rebuild? Who’s going to help us? Am I going to be safe? Can I do it there? Can I rebuild my home there? Yeah, absolutely. And what we’re talking about leads right into the next one, which has to do with perceptions in the unknown.
So, listeners, if you’ve been following this podcast for a while, you’ve heard me talk about how it’s not that unknown itself that’s scary, but it is what we put into the unknown and the associations we put into the unknown and the meaning we make of the unknown. And as I’m hearing you talk about the experience of an immigrant, that’s a primary thing that’s attempting to be navigated is the unknown. And then say more what’s the brain doing? Or what happens with all of these unknown variables? It’s not like one unknown.
It’s everything that you know. Everything that you know is gone. Right? So when I think about the news and the refugees from Ukraine, I keep thinking of like, wow, what is it that they know? Where are they going? Are they going to be together? What is the process? What is it that I need to know? What about finances? How am I going to do this? All these unknowns are coming their way.
Will I have food? Will I have water? Would I have basic needs? Met? Right? They don’t know if I can’t go back. Where will I choose to live? If I choose to live here, it’s a different just how do I officially make the move? Yes, I mean, that’s know when we’re talking about the United States, right? Think about any refugee or any immigrant is how am I going to get a permit to go to work? Where do I go? Who do I call? That is the first step, right? How do I maintain legal status here? That is a whole entity that they need to navigate that they will not know otherwise. How do I rent a space when they ask for reference? How do I get those? I’m a refugee, I’m an immigrant.
What if I don’t speak the language? Right? Where do I take my kids for food, for necessaries, for school? How does the school works? Because in my country it’s this way. How do I navigate this one? What is it that I need to know? And who’s going to share that with me? Because you don’t know what I don’t know. I don’t know what I don’t know in this crisis.
So who’s going to guide me in this moment? As you’re talking about this, I’m noticing I’m wanting to take a deep breath, also noticing some sadness, just even thinking about this experience for someone that feels really tender in me, just going to breathe into that. I love that you’re tuning into that because as I’m talking right, like right away, my stomach, I can feel the butterflies, which is what I tend to experience when I have these people, like these immigrants in my office, these people who want answers, who want to know, can you make sense of this for me? And as therapists, in so many ways, in those moments, we’re being asked to be, in a sense, like a case manager and a therapist at the same time. And what if we don’t know the practical answers? And then we sit in the unknown with our clients holding and feeling and our own guarantee, our own rescuer, our own fix it, our own make it better.
Part is going to be right there, wanting to jump in, save. And yet we might not be able to do anything other than to be and to listen and to support and to acknowledge. So my invitation to you is, if you’re hearing this podcast, this is where you pause and notice what is coming up for you, right? And then after you take a couple of breaths or you move, you can come back and then press play.
Because you’re absolutely right. We feel the need to advocate, to fix, to rescue. And if we do? What is it that we’re taking away from them? What is it that they need to learn in this process? If I go and fix and they don’t know how to advocate for themselves, if I didn’t empower them to do so, how they’re going to deal with the next challenge? What if I’m not available for them? And as we’ve said, it’s not like it’s one challenge.
It’s one after another after another after another after another. We haven’t even talked yet about the experience of attempting to assimilate into another culture, which I know we will talk about because there’s a whole identity piece with that. So I want to make sure that we come to that because that goes beyond where am I going to find a house or an apartment to live in? That’s a whole other experience I just find in the apartment, right? Like I just went back to finding the apartment and then how am I going to furniture? My siblings blocked that memory.
That when my mom got the first apartment, we didn’t have furniture. We had a mattress. That’s all we had.
We didn’t have blankets, we had towels. We have whatever we could and that’s what we use. I remember that because I was the oldest and I felt like it was my duty, like every other Latino that you may know, how am I going to protect my siblings from this experience? So a lot of times when I ask my siblings, these questions are like, I don’t remember and that makes sense to me.
Thank you for sharing that. The third threat of the brain has to do with incongruence. We’re looking in the environment for things that don’t make sense, things that don’t add up for different incongruencies.
And that can look like literally you expect something to happen and then something doesn’t happen or someone says something and does something else or emotional incongruence. People don’t make sense unless you start there. People don’t make sense.
The culture doesn’t make sense, the food doesn’t make sense, the music doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense. Yeah.
So nothing, right? Like nothing makes sense and you’re expecting me to function when everything is so foreign to me, right? So the incongruency think about the people. Every time that I turn on the news and I’m seeing people and I see how journalists are interviewing, right, and I see people crying and holding children and trying to figure out where to go next, everything is so incongruent. It’s not what we know.
And then people are trying to smile and tell me that everything is going to be okay. We see in the news how the refugees are going to this tents and they give them something warm, right? Like everything is going to be okay. I don’t know that.
You don’t know that. And you want to make me feel better. And I still have questions.
I don’t know what’s next, where am I going next? With immigrants, it’s exactly the same thing. They come to and I’m going to talk about the Latinos who come to the United States. They come to this country and they don’t know the language.
Everything is different. There’s different norms, there are different policies, there’s different expectations, right? I remember in Latin America or in Mexico, in my case, it was one room and we all slept there and it was fine. And that was the norm.
Coming into the United States, we have social services saying like, no, that’s not the norm. Each one has to have their own room. I was like, Great, how are we going to pay for that? So a lot of incongruency because of policies.
Let’s talk about the emotional incongruency. What if you don’t look like the culture that you have just moved into, just the incongruencies in the language? What about dealing with other individuals biases, others opinions of who they think you are and the looks on faces or the looks on faces when you try to speak language and the words don’t come out quite right or not at all. Can we talk a little bit about that level of incongruency? Yeah, it’s scary for the refugee and for the immigrants, right? Because we come in and we want to talk like you do, but we don’t know how because it’s different.
And then when we have bias and we’re not even aware that we have bias and we want to smile and we want to share, like, everyone is welcome, but then when I show up, not everyone is welcome, right? In my case, because of colorism, I am lighter and therefore people are more welcoming because I’m lighter. But as soon as I speak, because I have an accent, the first question that I get is where are you from? Where are you really, really from? My children talk about, and especially the youngest one talks about how because he’s darker, he gets a different treatment. And I’m very aware that he gets a different treatment.
My husband is the same. My husband is darker than me. So he talks about when we go out, the difference that they get because of their color, of their skin, they automatically assume something.
And it’s so funny because yesterday we went out and we’re walking into a building and someone sent my husband and talked to him in Spanish right away, but they did not do that with me. And then when I speak Spanish, they were just like took them a minute, and I was like and I’m aware of my accent, but the incongruence on this piece is huge because I remember I met this person from Venezuela, and she said I didn’t know I had an accent until people let me know that I had an accent. And when she said that, it was so liberating for me because I was like, girl, same.
I didn’t know I have an accent. I didn’t know that I talked different until people felt the need to tell me that I did, which that questions, right? Then it takes it into, am I accepted? Do I belong? What do I do? And then that carries over into the fourth threat, which are the shoulds and the unmet expectations. So the internal messaging that well, the external messaging that we integrate and then becomes internal messaging around who we should be, how we should be, what we should look like, what we should be doing, what we shouldn’t be doing.
So continue the conversation with that thread of the brain in mind. So when you come from another country, we have to be aware as therapists, of what is the focus of that country. Is the focus of the country on the I or on the we? So I come from a country that is a we, and I came into a country that is an I.
So they should started piling up. I should speak the language. I should be able to translate.
I should get an education, should go beyond an education. I should be able to translate. I should be able to help.
They should just keep wrapping up. Right? And then when I go home and when I say when I go home, it’s when I’m home with my mom. It’s all the shoots that come in in place, too, because I should be speaking Spanish at home all the time, and I should keep up with gender roles and I should keep up with all the cultural influences that my mom grew up with.
And it doesn’t matter how old I am. My mom has this internal dialogue of how things should be, which is what I see with immigrants, right? And all those should my kids should, because that is familiar for them and then their kids and talking again about the extreme that they are is but we live here. Like, what are you talking about? When parents going to in my experience or when I was young or in my country and think it’s like, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Right? So for me, lots of shoots. I should be prepared. I should be visible only when there’s space for me.
I should not make noise. I should be thankful when there’s a seat at the table. Right? When someone questioned me, I should always answer, here in the United States, I learned right away that I have to look people in their eyes.
And that is so uncomfortable because I grew up in a country where that was very disrespectful. So I had to give them permission to see you in your eyes. That is so intimate.
So there’s a lot of things that came into play that I wasn’t aware until someone helped me give language into my experience. So part of my journey is, now I know this. How can I help? So the others become aware as therapists, it’s not that our clients are resistant.
It’s not that our clients do not want better for them or for their families. It’s that they’re dealing with a lot. There’s a lot of threats or there’s a lot of cris responses.
There’s a lot from the nervous system. Right. There’s a lot of threats that if we’re not curious, we’re going to miss.
And I think how sometimes as therapists, then we inadvertently put more shoulds. Oh, my God. Yes.
Put more shoulds on our clients. Not intending to, but we do. And if a client is already under a lot of stress and already struggling with their own internal sense of who am I, where am I, how easily that could really challenging inside of our clients.
Yeah. One of the things, Liliana, that you were talking about, and I know you said at the beginning, and you just brought it up to just the difference in the generations. And I think that’s important to really acknowledge that there really is a difference and there really is a I don’t know if you would you use the word disruption like a disruption in terms of connection in certain places? Would you describe it like that? Oh, yeah.
And that’s exactly how I used it with clients. Right. Which is tell me.
First of all, I’m always curious. Tell me about your grandma. Tell me about your like, tell me.
And I always go with grandma because grandmas are the ones in Mexico who nurture and do things. And I should be careful not to gender specify, but that is usually the case. Right.
But if we take this to Immigrating, to another country, either because you’re an immigrant, because you’re a refugee, there’s a disruption that happens there. So we’re not attending to elderlies. We’re not listening to those traditions, those expectations, those norms.
So then when kids come into new countries, in this case in the United States, there is a disruption if you talk to me or if you talk to my sister, who’s the youngest one, we have different perspectives in regards to that. And part of it is because she was a child, I mean, she went to school here. And so therefore there is a difference in regards to how we see things, what we remember and the shoots or everything that comes into play.
So there is and that’s how I put it for my clients got disrupted. Right. How can we name it? How can we share this? What is the richness of sharing this piece? How can we make it explicit to normalize it for them? So, Liliana, when you are experiencing that dynamic with your clients, what do you do with your clients to support an understanding or to support a coming together or reattachment when there’s been that level of a disruption or when there’s been this level of trauma that’s happened, how do you hold the family? I just love the image that you did.
Yeah, I’m like holding how do you hold them? Because that’s. The feeling that comes up in me. How do you hold them? By making space, by being curious, by having sessions with all of them, by normalizing, by validating what they had to do, by normalizing them, by humanizing them as much as I can.
And then once I understand the attachment need, the universal attachment need that they have, then how we’re going to bring it into the room and how we’re going to share that within the family, how we’re going to normalize each one experience and each one perceptions and needs, and then how we’re going to make it explicit in the room. So beautiful. I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m appreciating that you’re having this conversation with all of us in this podcast.
Because all of us that are listening, I think we can take what you’re sharing with us and use it to help us become a bit more sensitive and a bit more aware and a bit more curious. So that we feel a little more resourced in being able to normalize, in being able to speak to the possibilities of what the experience might have been or that. So I’m just feeling really grateful for this discussion, Karen.
I am so grateful that we cross paths, that I’m learning so much from you to give me the language to do what I do with my clients. I mentioned that I want to come back to identity because this was another thing I heard you talk about that was just for me, another, wow. I know you’re talking about I gave you some language and it helped you make sense of things.
But you’re giving me language, helping me make sense of things, which I think is so beautiful because it’s the nature of what we’re talking about. You help me understand the identity, the identity crisis, in a much deeper way. So will you help us understand this crisis that an immigrant or a refugee is faced with regarding their sense of self, who they are, are they aware of who they are in the context of the new culture, all of that? Yeah.
So I think I use the term like global perspective, right? And what we’re talking there as therapists is the view of self, the view of others, and the view of the world. A lot of times I went through this journey not understanding how everyone didn’t see the world the same way that I did. It didn’t make sense to me until it hit me like, wait a minute.
But also, I’m not seeing the world the way that they see it now. It’s making more sense. Right.
But I had to be curious. I had to go do my own work. So as an immigrant, your identity and it doesn’t matter the age, in my case, I was a teenager.
So add to the hormonal, add to the just add it. Everything got so confused at that time. But when we’re talking about immigrants, and we are talking about view of self is, depending on your circumstances, that you chose to come to this, to whatever country.
Were you forced because you’re the child and the adult makes decisions for you? Were you forced to leave because of crime, because of war, because of whatever reason? And then if you were forced, like, what is your identity? How do you see yourself in that moment? Are you coming or are you going to a country that is welcoming or will have a different perspective because of colorism, because of how the privileges of language, right? Like, can you communicate the privilege of education? Can you just go and get a job that is going to be able to fulfill those needs? And then so all of that will affect how you see you in that moment. It also affects how you see yourself, the view of others, how others see you. Am I worthy to be in this space? Are you welcoming me? Are you accepting me in this moment? Or are you rejecting me because of the language or because of education or because of those privileges? So I just noticed your face.
There was just that felt sense again of like, do I deserve to be here? Do I deserve to exist in this new environment? Do I even deserve to exist? Yeah. Which is not the language that our clients have. Right.
That is the felt sense. Yeah. That’s so deep, Liliana.
That is worthiness at a core level, like right. To be on the planet kind of level. So, yes, he noticed my face because I felt the depth of that when you said that.
So when people say you are worthy, I’m like, great, that is amazing. That is an amazing poster. But that’s not how I’m feeling it right now.
And it’s not how the world is seeing me right now. I have to prove myself in order to be worthy of one of the things too, that I know that does happen is because there is the biological drive for safety and there is the biological drive for making sure that I’m fundamentally okay. There’s also a risk of losing identity in an attempt to fit in.
Now I’m going to become the thing that I think you want me to be, or I’m going to become the thing that I think the society wants me to be because I actually need to for my own survival, which is another major identity crisis. Yes. So what I brought that day with you was assimilation and acculturation, right? I have to assimilate to survive.
So what you see in families is usually one parent assimilates right away. Usually the other one will fight it because of grief. Not because they don’t want to, but because of grief and the view of self.
This is my identity, right? And then children go through that as well. Who am I? The word that I used to use a lot is how do I coexist in two worlds? And that is very incongruent when I feel that I cannot be me because I have to speak this way, because I have to dress this way in order to fit in. Children tend to go through this, and they don’t have the language.
So my siblings and myself, when we went to school, we have teacher, amazing teachers with good intentions that told us, don’t speak like this. Listen to English all the time, TV, radio, read. Because they wanted us to succeed in that part.
They’re asking us not to be us. Right? They’re trying to change us in order to fit in. So most of the children that come in into the therapy, in my experience, they’re struggling with this part, which is, how do I do this? How do I be what my parents want? And then how do I be what the school or society is asking me to be? And what if, at my core, I don’t identify with either one of them? There’s a whole other layer on top of that.
Girl, do not get me started, because that was me, right? So then I didn’t fit in in my mom’s perception of how the world or gender roles and then also this is not also speaking to me. These aspects are important to me, right? So it took age, experience, and reading a lot, attending so many trainings in order for me to have language of who am I, what do I want, what is important to me, what are my values, and what I want to take in from both worlds? And what if I get to be me in both? Oh, my gosh. Say that again.
That just gave me goosebumps. So what if I get to be me in both worlds, right? So for the last couple of years, I’ve been me in both worlds. I get to be Liliana in both worlds.
What a gosh. Liliana, I can’t think of a more beautiful intention to hold as a therapist for our clients, how do I, you ultimately, in discovering you in all of this change and uncertainty and chaos and scariness and incongruence and shoulds and all of that? Yeah. Right.
Which is my gift. Which is my gift is to hold space for them, to learn from them. And then my gift is also, how can I share this so the others become aware.
Liliana, thank you for putting your voice out there and for educating us and helping us understand just a little bit more so we can be a little bit more aware and a little bit more curious. This has been an invaluable conversation, as I shared at the beginning when we booked this, a war had not started yet. And so the timing of this conversation, it could not have come at a more important time globally.
And we also know that what’s happening in the Ukraine happens around the world. It’s not just the so thank you, Liliana, being in my life for continuing to be a teacher to me and I cannot wait for more conversations with you as we both continue to make sense of what we know and our experiences. Thank you for inviting me.
Thanks, Liliana. If any of our listeners want to get in touch with you or want you to come and do some trainings or provide some more education on this, where can they find you?
Yeah, they can go to my website, which is Lilianabalon.com, and they’re going to find my phone number, my email, so they can reach out.
That’s great. So if you would love more information on what Liliana is talking about, if you want her to come and do some trainings, please reach out to her. She’s a wealth of knowledge and happy to do it.
Thank you, listeners. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Let’s all pause and just take a breath.
If you are an immigrant, you are a refugee. I invite you to feel the hug that I know is coming from both Liliana and I right now. If you are someone that works with immigrants and refugees, I invite you to feel the hug that’s coming from Liliana and myself right now.
Take care of yourselves, everyone. You’re the most important toy in the playroom.
