“Changed Forever:” The CSPP Mexico City Immersion Experience

By Armando Gonzalez, Spring 2010

Last year I was fortunate enough to be awarded the CSPP Mexico City Immersion scholarship. For me, the immersion presented an opportunity to expand my limits, experience the Mexican culture in a way I never dreamed possible, and make lasting friendships and bonds that I am certain will stand the test of time.

Each day of the program was filled with amazing activities, lectures, and experiences that I still find myself processing months later. In addition to taking requisite MFT courses, like Group Therapy, I also was awarded the luxury of being exposed to Dr. Jason Platt’s Liberation Psychology.

The course activities and readings packaged with Liberation Psychology had me thinking critically about the impact Western psychology has had on Latin American mental health and education. The class inspired dialogue with students, citizens, and colleagues about how a new psychology for the people, and by the people might look like. The exploration done within the context of the course has influenced a new passion and direction for my own future endeavors as a clinician. Aside from expanding my mental limits Liberation Psychology helped reconnect me with my initial motives for embarking on a career in mental health; helping people through social justice.

I recently returned from a ten-day visit back to the Mexico City campus of Alliant International University. This time around I attended a Couples Therapy course. While I was looking forward to the class content, I was truly looking for just about any reason to get back to Mexico. The country’s magic has done wonders for my spirit and soul. There is something about me that changes while I am in Mexico. I feel more spiritual, emotionally expressive, and alive than at any other time in my life. The country’s spiritual climate, in particular, has inspired my own journey of spiritual discovery that began while on the Immersion Program and has continued ever since.

Before immersing last summer, I heard feedback from past immersion veterans telling me that I would be “changed forever.” I remember thinking to myself that this could only be a cliché. How could five weeks living in Mexico City really impact my life to such a significant degree?

Yet, I sit here today borrowing that same cliché as my only means of summing up my experience. If you decide to embark on the Mexico City Immersion your life will truly be changed forever, and in ways that I could not possibly begin to explain.

Living in a home stay in the city, participating in indigenous healing rituals, learning about Mexican culture from former street orphans, eating street tacos in the late hours of the night, participating daily in enlightening dialogue with fellow students and local citizens will expand your social constructions and reshape your world view; and all while experiencing the beauty that is Mexico. Those are just a few of the reasons that I will truly be forever changed. I can only hope you will grant yourself the same opportunity to grow and expand your life in these unimaginable ways.