Deborah Kim LMFT

02/19/2026

“Understanding the complex relationship between politics and emotional well-being may help you judge yourself less and steady yourself more.”

As political instability rises, so do anxiety, depression, and disengagement. New research shows how national turmoil is reshaping Americans’ mental health.

12/12/2025

Worth a listen as Han, Eng and Kim Brewster talk about the place of Asian Americans psychologicallly as typically being “unthought subjects” in the written canon of psychoanlytic writing and discourse and its link to the problems of the modern minority impostion. How might clinicians be careful not to collude with what may be unconsciously internalized by Asian American patients or anyone with marginalized identities and be sure to hold in mind the impact of the patient minimizing or making themselves invisible?

ttps://couchedpodcast.org/bringing-the-unthought-asian-american-subject-to-mind-cultivating-concern-and-care-in-the-socio-clinical-space/

Our guests guide us toward a more nuanced engagement with the many fights for freedom we face in our daily lives. Listeners will find creative perspectives on s*x, parenting, and climate activism, among others topics.

08/02/2025

Christine Sun Kim, an artist’s perspective on trauma.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMvCE76gevd/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

10/21/2023

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.
― Rumi

11/16/2022

“Much of the exhibition didn’t engage explicitly with identity; this allowed for a range of expression not usually granted to Asian American artists — something especially refreshing in this rare moment of visibility, when it often seems that the only way to be an Asian American artist is to make work that is legibly about Asian-ness. It is especially disheartening to see shows, organizations, and galleries run by Asian Americans that fall into this trap and implicitly or explicitly promote this idea. “

Stanford's Asian American Art Initiative allows for a range of expression not usually granted to Asian-American artists — something especially refreshing in this rare moment of visibility.

11/14/2022

Korea’s 21st century history is painful. This podcast episode offers a brief summary worth a hear. Some facts: more bombs dropped during the Korean War than any war before, the impact of Japanese colonization, the brutal coup and regime of Park Chung Hee…

‎Show Code Switch, Ep Throughline: How Korean culture went global - Nov 8, 2022

10/23/2022

“What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin

Happy Birthday Ursula K. Le Guin!

10/23/2022

Mia Mingus: “ I am offering it as something that has been useful for me and I hope is useful to others to describe all different kinds of access, not just in relation to disability. I think Access, as a framework, is powerful for so many of our lives…Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level. Sometimes it can happen with complete strangers, disabled or not, or sometimes it can be built over years. It could also be the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met. It is not dependent on someone having a political understanding of disability, ableism or access.”

There are many ways to describe intimacy. For example, there’s physical intimacy, emotional intimacy, intellectual, political, familial or s*xual intimacy. But, as a physically disabled woman, th…

09/21/2022

In her latest book Ornamentalism, Anne Anlin Cheng proposes a feminist theory for the Asian woman, “the yellow woman.” It’s an amazing study using the discourse of aesthetics, psychoanalysis, historical representation and Orientalism and more, that makes the case for the play of both object and subject in Asiatic femininity.

In an excerpt from an interview about it:

“I’m not interested in judging who is or isn’t beautiful. I’m interested in how beauty is a site of value and affirmation and how that gets inflicted differently when it comes to race and gender.”

In her latest book, Ornamentalism, multidisciplinary scholar and Princeton professor Anne Anlin Cheng focuses on the urgent, albeit often overlooked

05/22/2022

Some great reads suggested here:

Explore noteworthy adult novels, graphic novels, short stories, memoirs, and nonfiction written by Asian Pacific Islander Desi Americans.

05/02/2022

“Curiosity requires uncertainty, and uncertainty requires flexibility. If truth matters more than our beliefs, then we can choose to enter bridging conversations holding those beliefs more loosely, just for now, just to see what happens.”

Here are eight tips for having better conversations across our differences.

04/24/2022

This is a great post for creatives but also for everyone on a way of living.

Some of my favorite parts:
“ I started to adjust to my life in the States after I got a job, which allowed me to work with local community activists and leaders — American Indigenous tribal members. I learned about U.S. history from their perspective, which also helped me to understand my own displacement and diasporic position. So my advice would be to connect with your local community or history and critically examine your own location or dislocation within the country. This will inform what, how and why you want to write.”-Don Mee Choi, poet

“I believed in myself enough to walk away from Kiki, do what actually gave me joy and change my life. I took a big pay cut and disappointed a lot of people, but I did what I felt was the right thing. I didn’t allow myself to be trapped in a success. I kept moving.”- Justin Vivian Bond, performer

“In the past, I’d choose to write. I wouldn’t be with my son often enough, or if my friends were going out, then I’d stay home. If there was a party going on at home, I’d go to the other room to write. It’s very different now. I’ll drop my work to be with a friend. I’ll pick up the phone. Now I think, “I’ll live.” I know there’s less time left. You know that [1848] John Keats sonnet “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be,” about how he’s afraid he’s going to die before he finishes his writing? Well, it’s different when you’re older. I don’t want to die before I can show my love to my friends and family.” - Maxine Hong Kingston, writer

“I often feel caught between those two modes of being, but it helps to work in both design and architecture, to be able to switch from the small details of the former to the capital “A” of the latter. When I’m stuck in one, I get energy from the other. And sometimes a long walk is really all I need to get through something — that and an openness to ideas, not just from great art and good lectures and books but also from the larger culture, the one that reinforces how we’re all connected, for better or worse. The goal is always to find projects that offer a sense of freedom. Sometimes, you only get that in little bits — as an architect, you can’t always negotiate the terms of a commission — but I like that in each project I do, I can search for my idea of quality or find the context for a new definition of quality. “ - Patricia Urguiola, architect and industrial designer

In our 2022 Culture issue, out April 24, T followed a group of artists — musicians, chefs, designers, writers and others — throughout the course of a day, exploring the intimate moments of their lives that contribute, in ways small and large, to their creative process.