Finding a Therapist Who Understands Mixed and Diasporic Identity in Toronto

Toronto expressive arts therapist Bee Pallomina discusses mixed and diasporic identity, cultural reclamation, and how expressive arts therapy can support people navigating questions of belonging and ancestry.

6/22/20269 min read

I recently sat down with a colleague to talk about mixed and diasporic identity — what it's like to grow up between cultures, what it means to reclaim what's been fragmented, and how expressive arts therapy might support people navigating these questions. This is an edited version of that conversation.

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What's your journey to understanding yourself as someone with mixed race identity?

I grew up in a mixed race household. My mom emigrated from the Philippines when she was in her twenties. She came here to work as a nurse with some of her classmates. My dad was born and raised in Canada — his family came from various places in Europe over the last few generations. Very different experiences: one family being here for a couple of generations and also being white, and another parent who came here as an adult who was racialized.

Growing up, that seemed really normal to me. I found it really weird that everyone's mom wasn't Filipino*! But eventually I saw that the intersection of gender, race, and privilege was very much alive in the house I grew up in.

How did that manifest?

My mom worked part-time, mostly evenings, overnight and weekends. My dad worked during the day. My mom also did the bulk of raising us — cooking, cleaning, getting us off to school. Her influence was very strong in our upbringing. And even though her family was in the Philippines and she was the only one who came here, her nurse friends were also kind of our extended family. My mom faced racism and a lot of pressure to assimilate.

And there was this ongoing feeling for me of not being enough of anything to really claim it. Was I Filipino enough? White enough? People often couldn't place where I was from. If someone asked and I said “Canada”, they'd say, "No, but where are your parents from?" It felt intrusive and complicated.

Did you have a sense of Filipino identity growing up?

We went to the Philippines for the first time when I was in grade two, and again in grade four. My family there welcomed us, and I felt a part of that. There were challenges too — my family lives in the provinces and communication was challenging. Outside of our family in the Philippines, people wouldn't identify me as Filipino, even when I was with my mom. So no matter where I went, I felt a little bit on the outside, like I didn't quite belong anywhere.

When did this become something you wanted to explore further as an adult?

It was always there — it didn't come out of nowhere. We'd go back to the Philippines every four or five years up until maybe my mid-thirties. I think it was after having a kid, wanting to share that culture with them, and feeling like my own connection wasn't as strong as I wanted it to be. That sent me on a real journey of reconnection.

That was about eleven years ago. I started doing some research and eventually I went to a retreat that the Center for Babaylan Studies in collaboration with Kapwa Collective ran north of Toronto in 2019. It was for folks in the diaspora who wanted to connect and reclaim culture through a decolonizing lens — recovering language, writing, ideas, and practices from pre-colonization, and bringing them into contemporary life.

Have you been able to integrate that journey into your practice as an artist and a therapist?

After that retreat, during the pandemic, I joined a circle for reconciliation and met my friends Jaisa and Marisse, who were also part of that Filipino community. We started meeting more regularly, first online and then in person, and eventually joined a group called Pagsuyo — a reading and community group working through Leny Mendoza Strobel's writing. It was a Center for Babaylan Studies project, organized by geography, with people from Toronto, London, New York, and other parts of the Northeast. It became a real source of support and connection, and it informed my practice — at first as an artist, since that was my main practice at the time.

I also received a couple of Canada Council grants to research decolonizing my movement practice. In the first, I worked with Jen Maramba, Aria Evans, and Jazz Fairy J. In a second project, I gathered five Filipino artist practitioners— Jen Maramba, Blessyl Buan, Andrea Mapili, Jaisa Sulit, and Robin LaCambra — and we worked together over two years. That project had a huge influence on my practice. It started just before I began my therapy training, so I went into that training with this foundation already in place — a deep interest and commitment to this being a value in my work.

I've been digging into this for a little over ten years now. That foundation has been really integral to my own healing.

How does it inform what you offer as a somatic practitioner and expressive arts therapist?

I think expressive arts therapy lends itself really well to reclamation practice. A lot of that work has roots in Indigenous practice and Eastern traditions of meditation and mindfulness, so there's a connection there already.

But therapy practices and mindfulness often get repackaged in a generic, secular, whitewashed way. When I offer practices, I want to offer them in a way that speaks authentically to the person receiving them, and to acknowledge the lineages that come before what we might name as the "pioneers" of therapy today.

Take mindfulness — it's everywhere now, in all kinds of modalities. It clearly has roots in Eastern practice. For someone from an Asian diaspora, it can be really meaningful to acknowledge that this practice is connected to their own ancestry. Knowing that connection exists can be validating — a way to reconnect rather than learn something entirely new. It can be a remembering.

More broadly, art is a huge part of culture. As an expressive arts therapist, we're making art — not necessarily traditional art, although that's welcome too if someone brings it in as an area of inquiry — but the act of making something can help uncover who you really are.

Is that especially true for folks who've never been in touch with their diasporic roots, or who feel conflicted about that part of their identity?

I think so. It's hard to say how it manifests in general, because each person is on their own individual journey. But like with anyone, it's a process of listening, understanding, reflecting back, asking what specifically they want to reconnect with and what that might look like — setting small goals, planting little seeds of intention, whether that's connection through relationships, language, food, or whatever else might reconnect them.

I see you doing a lot of what I'd call ancestral work. Is that something you work on with clients?

Absolutely, if it's of interest to them. Ritual and ceremony aren't so far from expressive arts. The word "altar" can feel loaded for some people, but for others it's a process of reclamation — ancestral, artistic, and spiritual work all at once.

What can expressive arts offer in this domain that talk therapy might not reach as easily?

It's not that talk therapy can't reach it, but — not to be cliché — a picture is worth a thousand words. Expressive arts is grounded in phenomenology: we use the senses. Scent, taste, texture, vision, sound — all of that is available to us. Talking is great, but you need a lot of words to make those things come alive. Even just talking about this right now, I'm thinking of the texture of a banig, the fibres of a barong, the scent of burning plant medicine, rice cooking. All of that is accessible — not just in session, but between sessions too. I think that's something unique to this work.

There's also something about the intermodal nature of expressive arts that's aligned with this. Eurocentric and colonial thinking around art has tended to separate it from everyday life and purify it into distinct sense forms — visual art, music, dance. And yet if you look at cultural practices in almost any tradition, they're multimodal. They layer scent, food, movement, music, poetic speech, and song on top of each other. Expressive arts can tap into that.

In a lot of mainstream spaces — workplaces, institutions — cultural specificity and the texture of your ancestry just aren't welcome, except maybe in a tokenistic way. People feel like they have to leave their cultural selves at the door. So in a way, expressive arts therapy could be a place to reclaim what hasn't been welcomed elsewhere.

Absolutely.

Can you say something about working with BIPOC folks specifically?

Within a Eurocentric lens, there's often this idea that your attitude and your actions are what determine what you receive in life. I don't think that's true for everyone. Some people move through the world without much friction. Others encounter a lot of friction. That can be hard to understand if you haven't experienced it, or have no proximity to it.

When I went into my training, it was very important to me to work with a BIPOC therapist and supervisor — both happened to be mixed as well, which is its own story. In those relationships there was a kind of basic, unspoken understanding that felt really important. Being understood before I even opened my mouth. Not having to explain certain things. Knowing they had that experience of the world too.

They get it.

Can you talk about your work in reconciliation and decolonization, and with Indigenous mentors and groups?

In reclaiming Filipino identity — especially through the community I found via the Center for Babaylan Studies — a big part of the journey was not just who we are, but where we are, and how we are in relation to where we are and who has been here before us.

So yes, connection and learning alongside and from Indigenous practitioners — including training with Maya Chacaby in cultural competency and trauma-informed practice, and studying with Dodem Kanonhsa, which shares teachings of Indigenous knowledge keepers and teachers, mostly online. That was a resource Aria Evans shared with me during our research project together.

It's about reckoning with how we live here, in a good way, in good relationship with Indigenous communities. That feels really important. My clinical supervisor also has Indigenous roots in Mexico, and I see that embedded in her philosophy and the way she works — that's been very important to me too.

Coming back to mixed identity specifically — it feels like a real niche of yours.

I think of all these amazing mixed people — artists, thinkers, makers — and I think, they're so cool. And then I also think of how mixed people can feel really left out, like they don't know where they belong.

There's also the history of it — it being illegal to be in a mixed relationship, less than fifty years ago in certain places. That's not very old. That's not distant history.

I also feel like it's just not talked about very much. As a mixed person, I've found some resources — a few podcasts, a group based in the States called Mixed in America — but it's not really named or explored that much. Being mixed is a particular experience. Even raised in a household connected to multiple cultures, you might have three or four of them. How deep can you get into any of them? It can start to feel very surface. Or your identities can feel like they're pulling against each other — especially when there's political or historical tension between those cultures.

What about Toronto specifically as a place to explore these questions?

There's both, right? Toronto has neighborhoods that are very culturally specific — Little India, Chinatown — which is wonderful. You can get great Filipino food, go to Little Manila, feel a connection. But maybe also feel a kind of non-belonging there too.

That kind of neighborhood multiculturalism can sometimes be a bit exclusive of people with mixed identities. Where do you belong if you're from more than one place? The nice thing about Toronto is that no matter what neighborhood you go to, you're generally welcome, whether or not you're from that particular culture. The culture is accessible. But will you feel truly included? That's a different question.

A big part of my own reclamation journey has been the development of real relationships and community within the Filipino diaspora. Not just symbolic connection with ancestry, but actual people. That's been huge.

Is that something you can help clients with practically too?

Yes — the work of Mia Mingus and pod mapping is something I return to often. Thinking about where your connections are, which ones you want to strengthen, what's missing, where you might find what you're looking for. That's a journey that takes years. It's not "go out tomorrow and find your new best friend." It's a longer process, and it helps to have someone to work through it with — not just as an accountability partner, but someone capable of doing the deeper work too. Asking: what does this mean to you? What do you really identify with? What are you actually looking for?

That's work I find genuinely meaningful. And it's part of why I do this.

* Note on the term Filipino: there has been a lot of discussion amongst community about the use of the terms Filipino vs Filipinx. I won’t get into it here; I welcome folks to use the term that best suits them.

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If you're curious about whether this kind of work might be a good fit for you, I'd love to talk. I offer a free 20-minute consultation.