A Letter to Future Students of Indigenous Psychology

Confronting some misconceptions and encouraging openness

I am in the field of indigenous psychology because of my interest in the paranormal, or what we call kababalaghan. When I grew up, I wanted to seriously study it, so I went into psychology. I eventually learned that I was not the first to explore this locally—the founder of Ateneo de Manila University’s psychology department, Fr. Jaime Bulatao, studied psychic phenomena in Filipino culture. He used folk healing techniques in his clinical practice. This led me to Sikolohiyang Pilipino (SP), the psychology of the Filipino, by the Filipino. I am now a psychologist, and in my practice, I can’t ignore our cultural worldview, which often finds the self in a glorious and living ecology of community, nature, and spirit.

I have noticed, however, that SP is portrayed (especially on social media, among young psychology influencers) as pedantic and solemn. For some reason, anyone talking about it switches to speaking in deep Tagalog, which supposedly evokes an archaic form of authority similar to the dense homilies of sleepy religious services. Concepts are held gingerly like sacred objects, and important people (especially the dead ones) are rarely, if ever, questioned. This can already be daunting for anyone even mildly interested in an extremely relevant field.

The thing is that you don’t actually need to be makata (poetic) to study SP. The pioneering SP scholars drew concepts and ideas from the way we ordinarily speak—words like kapwa, bahala na, hiya, loob, etc. are assumed to have cultural and psychological importance simply because we use them so often. Yet they imply so much about our worldviews. When purists say that we should stick to “Filipino,” they usually mean Tagalog, which, although it is one of our major languages, is only one of the hundreds of languages across the archipelago. We use what is understood by the people we are talking to. As long as we are coming from an indigenous worldview, any language can be useful in appropriately representing culturally informed realities.

We have also created a clear, essentialist distinction between what is “western” and what is “Filipino,” and this is apparent in how the psychology curriculum of many good universities separates mainstream psychology (following foreign schools of thought such as behaviorism and psychoanalysis) from “Filipino” psychology. This way of academic stereotyping does help us distinguish our identity by identifying what we are not, but it also segregates ideas into “useful” and “impractical,” “academic” and “political.” I have come to realize that SP is simply our contribution to global knowledge about the human condition. It is academic in that it grounds theories and concepts in the reality of the ordinary Filipino, and it is political because this understanding can help us craft more relevant policies and interventions. We start with ourselves, but that does not mean that we remove ourselves from the world. In studying SP, you will also see how certain ideas which have “western” origins (such as feminism, intersectionality, and critical theory) can in fact fully align with our intentions for social justice and upholding human dignity. 

SP is a process of exploring and unlearning, and what I find most exciting about it is how it can reconnect you with your most authentic self. I eventually saw how kababalaghan is simply a symbolic manifestation of our deep connection with the world, what Bulatao called the “Filipino transpersonal worldview.” Welcome to the field! I am excited for you discover our many cultural treasures.

Para sa malaya at mapagpalayang sikolohiya! Towards a free and liberating psychology!

More Resources

• Watch and attend exclusive lectures

• Read my academic articles

---

This letter was a requirement in a Sikolohiyang Pilipino class I took under professor Jay Yacat, one of the very active advocates of the field.