Therapy for Black and Women of Color Therapists

Have you ever, as a Black woman or woman of color therapist, felt that it is difficult to find a therapist of your own?
Have you ever thought to yourself , I need someone who can do the kind of deep work I do—without me having to explain, translate, or justify my experience?
Have you ever wished for a space where you could be fully met in both your power and your vulnerability?

If so, you may be seeking a therapist who can meet you with depth and steadiness who prioritizes clinical and lived experience. Someone who understands that your clinical skill, clarity, and excellence coexist with exhaustion, grief, and the weight of what you carry. You are likely not looking for skills-only work, surface-level affirmation, or spaces that flatten your experience. You may be looking for a therapeutic relationship where complexity, embodiment, power, and lived racialized and gendered experiences are held together with care. You may be drawn to therapists who work relationally and psychodynamically, who understand internalized oppression as embodied and relational—not just conceptual. You may value a clinician who can sit with grief, shame, anger, ambivalence, and power without rushing toward reassurance or repair, and who integrates somatic awareness with thoughtful meaning-making. It may matter deeply to you that your strength, clarity, and professional authority are not misread as defenses or threats. You may be seeking a therapist who can hold you without requiring you to lead, perform competence, educate, or manage the space. You may be looking for a therapist who can think with you, track what unfolds between you, and help you slow down enough to be fully seen and fully met. If you are a Black woman therapist or clinician who is committed to doing your own inner work in service of your clients, and you find yourself unsure where you can be held with the same care—you are not alone, and you are not asking for too much.

Why Therapy for Black and Women of Color Therapists Requires Something Different

Therapy for Black women and women of color therapists requires more than cultural awareness or shared identity. It requires a clinician who understands how power, race, gender, and professional role shape not only your life, but the therapeutic relationship itself. As a therapist at the intersections, we are often positioned as both container and conscience—expected to hold others with care while managing projections, racialized, gendered expectations, and unspoken dynamics of competence, strength, and responsibility. In many therapeutic spaces, this can lead to subtle role reversals: being over-relied upon, emotionally managing the room, or having your clarity misread as distance and your strength misread as defense.

Your therapy cannot ask you to leave this context at the door.

• This work requires a therapist who can track all of this without defensiveness, minimize neither harm nor impact, and remain steady in the presence of power, grief, anger, and ambivalence.

• It requires a therapist who understands internalized oppression not as an abstract concept, but as something carried in the body, the nervous system, and the relational field.

• For Black and women of color therapists, healing is not only intrapsychic—it is relational, embodied, and contextual. It involves making space for rest, desire, and vulnerability without having to earn it through competence or caretaking. It involves being met without being managed, explained, or admired.

• This kind of therapy moves at a different pace. It honors complexity and allows you to be held in your fullness—not despite your power, but alongside it.

Across the mental health field, spaces that integrate racialized lived experience with sustained relational and reflective clinical work remain limited. Many training pathways and professional structures treat lived experience and social location as context rather than as integral to clinical process. As a result, Black women clinicians are often left to carry the work of integration on their own, even as we are asked to help our clients do this very work. My approach is grounded in relational, psychodynamically informed practice that brings theory into conversation with lived experience. This is not about discarding clinical models, but about using them in ways that are responsive, embodied, and attentive to power, race, and intersubjective dynamics. Drawing on bell hooks’ reminder that theory becomes healing when we ask it to be, this work centers presence, meaning-making, and repair as core clinical processes.

Through individual therapy, individual and group case consultation and therapeutic process groups, I offer spaces where Black women clinicians can slow down, reflect, and engage their own material with depth, without having to translate, perform competence, or remain composed. We attend to affect, relational patterns, countertransference, grief, and desire with care and precision, recognizing that our capacity to accompany clients is shaped by the spaces where we ourselves are able to be met.

This work is not about mastery.
It is about being met fully, both in your humanity and your clinical work.

APPOINTMENT INFORMATION

Latashasmithlcsw@gmail.com

(203)745-0229