Susan Santiago-Turner, Ph.D., LMHC, LPC, BC-TMH, NCC

Welcome to my private practice, Meliora Psychotherapy and Supervision. My name is Susan Santiago-Turner. I am a fully licensed mental health counselor in Washington State. I graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology. I earned a Doctorate in Counselor Education and Supervision from the University of Rochester. I have the privilege of counseling cisgender women who identify as GenXers and who have worked hard to rise above the horror of incest. Please note that I see clients Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 6am to 10am.

I invite you to imagine the following:
Loretta spent her formative years living on the east coast during the 1970s through the late 1980s. Her father believed female children are responsible for any form of abuse they experience while male children should be allowed to do as they please with impunity. Loretta’s mother tried to shield her, but in the end she was not strong enough to protect Loretta from being emotionally and sexually abused. Nor did Loretta’s mother know how to address the eventual anger that would surface in Loretta as a result of her abuse. Despite this, Loretta’s mother found ways to nurture her ambition and paved a way for Loretta to thrive. Because of her mother’s will to protect her, Loretta choose to serve as her mother’s primary and long-distance caregiver. Loretta’s mother endured and finally succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease. Because Loretta served as her mother’s caregiver, she was expected to care for her father as well and she did, for a while. A few years later Loretta saw her father and her significantly older brother, who sexually abused her with impunity, for the last time. Loretta could no longer pretend that everything was fine or that this kind of family dynamic is ‘normal’ in front of her sister-in-law, extended family, healthcare providers, neighbors—frankly, anyone.
Today, after doing the hard work involved in psychotherapy, Loretta is at-peace knowing she could no longer serve as her father’s caregiver and made the right decision to relinquish this obligation to her brother. It was the right thing to do given how her father protected her brother over Loretta’s personal safety and mental health for decades.
Do aspects of Loretta’s story resonate with you? If it does, I can help you work through feelings of ambivalence and anger you might feel towards a parent who did not protect you from abuse but now expects you to care for them as they age. I have over 20-years of clinical proficiency and foundational knowledge working with intergenerational trauma. I practice from a strengths-based framework coupled with a blend of feminist, dialectical, and cognitive behavior therapies. Together, working with your existing strengths, you’ll see a clearer path to take as you face the ambivalence of caregiving for a parent who failed to protect you. This clarity will compel you to live your life the way you want—not how others want. This is hard work but necessary especially for women who were raised to believe they were at fault simply for being female in a misogynistic family.
Believe this: you have within a sacred wisdom; a wisdom that has likely been silenced by years of intergenerational family secrecy. Such secrecy only serves to protect predators. Let us work together and heal so we can create a safer world for ourselves and subsequent generations.