Psychology Through the Looking Glass

Addressing the complex question of self through cross-cultural psychology

By Regan Bervar

Written for The Klipsun Magazine

On the third floor of the Academic Instructional Center at Western, Professor Joseph Trimble resides in his office. The door is ajar letting in fragments of hallway conversation. He sits in his chair surrounded by rows of books on either side.

Trimble stands. He is tall with wise eyes, white hair and a gentle voice made for storytelling. His hand goes directly to a book on the shelf, as though it had been there many times before. Most of the books are titled in regard to psychology and American Indian studies.

“Have you ever read ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?’” he asks. Trimble holds “Through the Looking-Glass” by Lewis Carroll in his hands and turns it over.

“She follows this stupid rabbit down a hole and she’s lost. She doesn’t know where she is, and she starts to shrink. She can’t get out of this room, and she gets really, really tall,” he says.

Trimble puts the book back on the shelf and resumes his story. “She says ‘curiouser and curiouser.’ Grammatically that’s incorrect, but remember that line? I love that line.”

Wonderland, made famous by Carroll, is a world of tantalizing possibilities and the beguiled unknown. “Curiouser and curiouser” speculates a world of untold imagination where normal rules don’t apply. With each step further into this realm, Alice forgets about the world and its precedence outside the rabbit hole. Instead, she seeks to find her own identity and meaning, driven by her curiosity relative to this extraordinary place.

“I have interest in so many fascinating things, and I think it stems from my insatiable curiosity,” Trimble says. “That’s what keeps me going is just curiosity.”

Trimble is a psychology professor at Western. After studying psychology extensively at the University of Oklahoma, University of New Hampshire, Waynesburg College and Harvard University, Trimble came to Bellingham to continue his learning through teaching.

During his time in college, Trimble found himself challenging his professors’ teachings on psychology. He wondered how the same principles could apply universally without regard to ethnic background, especially when there is so much diversity to be celebrated in the world.

“I thought to myself that [diversity] was all over the place, and psychology doesn’t even use the word ethnicity or culture in its textbooks,” Trimble says. “I started asking, whose psychology is this?”

Cross-cultural psychology is the study of how cultural differences influence human behavior. This leads to differences in how people think, feel and act. There was no field for this type of research when Trimble began his career in the 1960s, but with an ambitious appetite for believing in the impossible, he pressed on. Western lured him in as the only place with an established center for cross-cultural psychology. He created a network with people around the country who shared the same logic.

“There was a struggle; we had to deal with a lot of resistance,” Trimble says. “We were challenging conventional theory and wisdom.”

Fueled by his curiosity and the inner workings of the mind, Trimble became fascinated with British literature. He was interested why so many famed books and reputable knowledge came out of the small country of Britain. He decided to take an independent study in the topic during his sophomore year at the University of Oklahoma. After the first meeting with his professor, he was taken aback by the books she chose for him to read — “Through the Looking-Glass,” “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Jane Eyre.” He didn’t know why his professor had chosen these texts, but he was determined to look for the hidden meaning in the words.

“I realized these authors, male or female, knew more about the personality of individuals than we profess in the field of psychology as I understood it at the time,” Trimble says. “And I still contend that’s true to this day. How they develop characters […] is astonishing.”

A dilemma Alice faces throughout the novel is discovering who she is relative to this new world called Wonderland. She forgets her knowledge of what she learned in school and of where she comes from, leaving her confused and lost in her multiple identities. She often fights with herself in the book and other times gives herself courage by pretending to be someone else.

“She sees this caterpillar sitting on a rock. Do you remember what he said to her?” Trimble asks. “The caterpillar asks her, ‘Who are you?’ And she says to him, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know who I am right now.’”

This, Trimble says, was a profound moment in the book that spoke to his college-aged self. Identity matters because it is involved in the selection of friends, partners, future aspirations and the reactions of others in one’s social environment. It empowers us to make the distinction between “self” and “other” which allows us to create our own self image.

“We all have a need to know who we are, and that guides us in terms of how we relate to people,” Trimble says. “It serves as an anchor of where you get your values, beliefs and behaviors on a deeper level.”

Trimble says a sense of identity is vital because it’s the connectedness and commonalities that people share with each other. It changes and modifies to the experiences and interactions of life that make us a different person today than we were yesterday.

At the University of Oklahoma, Trimble went on to do his doctoral dissertation research with American Indians. Although Oklahoma was in the middle of what they called “Indian Country,” his adviser told him he would be the first to study this. Like Alice, he was propelled forward by a hungry gnaw of curiosity.

Working among many indigenous groups of American Indians, Trimble coined the term “ethnic gloss” which refers to an overgeneralized way of labeling cultural groups. Labeling American Indians all under the same category would be unproductive when it comes to studying their cultures because it ignores the deep cultural framework and unique values that vary among tribes.

Trimble has done research on counseling methods among different cultures, particularly American Indians. He has found traditional counseling methods fail to make an impact on these indigenous communities when it comes to facing issues of drug abuse and suicide intervention. By merging counseling techniques with local values and theories, counseling had a greater impact on reducing the rates of drug use and suicide.

Culture and diversity matter, especially when it comes to treating mental health through meaningful relationships and trust, according to Trimble.

“I’ve learned from experience that people won’t quite divulge everything, and I firmly believe that it has to do with the relationship you establish,” he says. “You have to avoid glossing over someone’s culture and overgeneralizing it. You have to get down to what matters to a person.”

Trimble has learned through his work that reality is relative to those experiencing it. The closest we can get to understanding someone else’s reality is through trust and being genuine with one another. When we combine these ideas with empathy, we can begin to discover our own identity. Like Alice navigating through Wonderland.

“Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different,” Carroll wrote in “Through the Looking-Glass.” “But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”