Therapy for the Therapist
For Black women and women of color therapists
Therapy for the Therapist
"Theory in and of itself is not necessarily healing or liberatory. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end." bell hooks
Have you ever wished for a space where you could be fully met in both your power and your vulnerability?
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?
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 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; someone who can think with you, track what unfolds 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 women 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.
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.
Questions therapists often ask
How is this different from consultation?
Therapy is a space for you and your own life. Consultation centers your clinical work and the clients you are holding. If you are looking for case discussion, the Clinical Consultation page describes that work.
What if we know people in common?
This comes up often when therapists see therapists. We talk openly about any overlapping professional connections at the start and decide together how to protect the privacy of our work.
Do I need to be in crisis to begin?
No. Many therapists come to therapy because they want a place where they can be known more fully, outside the role of being the one who holds everyone else.
Is there a group option for therapists?
Yes. DO YOUR WORK and the Self-Reflection Consultation Group both begin in January 2027.