Bringing taonga into the light

School wasn’t always his thing, but when Brent (Tohi) Tohiariki returned to study as an adult, he took to it like a rakiraki ki te awa.

“I left school when I was 15 and no qualifications. Couldn’t wait to get out of there,” he says.

A succession of jobs followed.

“Freezing works, truck driving, working on farms, those kinds of jobs. Then in my late 20s, I was working at the freezing works and thought I wouldn’t mind getting into mental health, and particularly supporting Māori.”

It seems a big leap, from the freezing works to the therapy room, but Tohi says he was attracted to the field having grown up in a family with its own addiction and mental health issues.

“Having that mental health or trauma background is kind of what drew me into the work and basically, I just went into hard study mode. I almost felt like I had to catch up. So I ended up training as a counsellor and then I trained as a psychotherapist, and then I did a lot of postgraduate training around psychotherapy and motivating behavioural change, and then I went on and did a Masters in Māori and Indigenous leadership.”

He also committed himself to learning about his Te Arawa and Te Whānau-ā-Apanui whakapapa, having grown up knowing little of his father’s family.

“My dad died when I was 3, and so I was completely disconnected from my own,” he says.

“I felt that calling to connect with my father’s people, so I went back to Te Arawa, and I went back to Te Whānau-ā-Apanui and connected up with my whānau there and that had a real influence. It really changed me because it became a very empowering thing to do,” he says.

Throughout this period of his life, Tohi began to realise that much of his identity had been tied up in the belief that he was never good enough.

“And so I put a lot of energy into study because I thought if I have all these letters after my name, then I’m good enough. But what I realised is I have this insatiable curiosity and I just do it because I really enjoy it. For me, study is reward itself so I’ve continued to fill my kete and all these insights I get, they help me with my mahi,” he says.

That mahi is as the operations manager at the Te Ope Whakaora Bridge programme in Ōtautahi, working with predominantly whānau Māori to understand and heal from trauma. He also supervises new counsellors and therapists, with whom he stresses the importance of providing support in a culturally appropriate way.

“That feels quite important to me. How can we reframe this into a more cultural way of thinking and make it more relevant to Māori because a lot of trauma work that happens for Māori people is by people that aren’t Māori,” he says.

“I want to inculcate into them some of the fundamental things that are really important and for them to be transparent about what they know, and what they don’t know, in terms of te Ao Māori. I think that’s really important because it changes the whole dynamic. If you understand Te Ao Māori, there’s a whole lot of unspoken things that you don’t have to explain, and sometimes the difficult thing for Māori coming for counselling is you’ve got to educate the Pākehā counsellor first. It’s tiring.

“I know some people say by Māori for Māori, well there’s not enough to go around, and to be fair, sometimes those Māori ones, if they’re not quite in the right space, they’re not the right ones either.”

He’s a strong believer that counsellors with their own history of trauma and abuse bring significant understanding to the role.

“I really believe that you can only take a person as far as you’ve gone. You can have book learning and be technically proficient but if you haven’t gone through the fire yourself, then it’s very hard to hold and contain someone in their distress. A good counsellor is someone who can support someone in their journey home, hokinga mai, the return home. To help people arrive at their own door.”

He says the fruits of such an approach can be seen in his own whānau and will be reflected in the generations to come.

“My family system wasn’t the healthiest, it was quite toxic in many ways. I love my family but it wasn’t very healthy and so I came down here and had my own family, had my own children. They’re grown up now, but one of the things that I feel I’ve done right in my life is my children, and especially my grandchildren, are loved, and they’re safe and they have absolutely no experience of some of the difficult things that I’ve gone through as a child, so that chain has been broken. That’s the whakapapa bit about it, we need to be thinking 3, 4, 5 generations down the track.”

He takes an equally long-term view of his role at Te Ope Whakaora.

“I’ve been here for about 14 years now and it’s the longest I’ve ever stayed in the job. There’s something that keeps me coming back and I think maybe because the kaupapa is caring for people, transforming lives, and being a voice of social justice, and I can go with that. It’s a good kaupapa.”

It’s a kaupapa he’d like to see more Māori take up and says peer support programmes are a successful way of encouraging more Māori into the field, including those who have come through treatment already.

“With Māori having lived experience of addiction and then coming into treatment, they can then go to polytech or university and do a Level 4 Certificate in peer support or mental health and well-being and addiction – which is not too much for someone who hasn’t done a lot of studies – and they can land in a job and mental health or addictions and get paid very well. That creates a good economic base for them and their whānau and the sky’s the limit.”

It can be a stressful job, though, and Tohi says keeping everyone safe is paramount.

“For a lot of our people that come in here, they’ve had trauma experiences and what is missing? A feeling of safety, that someone’s actually got their back and can protect them and help them. So I think that’s a really important part of our mahi, and the other important part is the spirit of our place, the wairua. It’s got to be right.

“Especially when things get difficult, because it’s an emotional hot house. You’ve got 16 people living in here and they’re not doing great in their normal life, otherwise they wouldn’t be here. All their patterns of dysfunctional behaviour are going to manifest in a setting where they don’t have any substances anymore and they’re forced to live together.”

But having worked in the environment for so long, Tohi is often able to understand how best to support someone in treatment.

“One of the things I really enjoy is when caseworkers come to me with a particular case and for us to think about how we support this person, given how they’re showing up. I find it endlessly interesting. They bring you taonga, their treasures, and you bring those into the light and there’s a lot of energy and a lot of beauty in them that can be transmuted into something that’s beautiful,” he says.

“It’s a great privilege to support someone in their struggle towards wellbeing.”