Trajectory of Awareness
The model
The Trajectory of Awareness (ToA) Model
A model I developed to describe the changing relationship between a person and what she has internalized, a relationship that moves, unevenly and often with returns, from internalized intersectional trauma and oppression operating as an unnoticed part of how one thinks, feels, and relates, toward a growing capacity to name it, examine it as something that was taken in, and respond to it with greater choice.
How internalized intersectional trauma and oppression work
Messages about one's intersectional identity are heard or witnessed, believed, and acted on. Because this unfolds largely outside conscious attention, internalized intersectional trauma and oppression continue to organize self-perception and relationships until something interrupts it.
The trigger is central to the model. It is the point at which something operating automatically becomes available for conscious examination, whether through a question that challenges a long-held belief, an encounter that stirs the clinician's own material, new ideas about oneself and one's group, or someone putting language to what had been felt but not named.
Because what Black women internalize is intersectional, the trajectory always concerns more than awareness of racism. It involves messages in which race is bound up with gender, class, skin color, hair and body, strength, and emotional expression, and a person may have moved further in relation to some of these messages than to others.
"Internalized racial oppression for Black women is not only about race, but about race, gender and class. It is the unavoidable, enduring and unconscious process of taking in and acting out negative messages about aspects of the intersectional sense of self."Smith (2020), dissertation
"It's stuff that we've been fed, it's stuff that we've consumed ourselves, and then when we turn around and regurgitate that same information, we start believing it. You hear it enough, you do start to believe it."Participant 14
The model
Two questions, two phases, four positions
Internalized messages remain fused with the social context in which they were learned. Distress may be present without being connected to racial experience, and beliefs can sound like personal preference or practical choices.
Clinical direction Hold curiosity without an agenda, build safety before naming racial dynamics, and track patterns in self-description, relationships, and self-worth.
A trigger brings some of this into awareness, and having language for the experience makes it concrete. Recognition is often unsteady: clear in one area and missing in another.
Clinical direction Name what is emerging without pathologizing it, explore what opened the window, and help the person tolerate not yet knowing.
The capacity to reflect begins to develop, often alongside shame, guilt, anger, and sadness. People begin to observe internalized beliefs instead of acting from them.
Clinical direction Do not minimize the grief. Distinguish healthy anger from self-blame, attend to self-harm, disordered eating, and substance use, and trace where beliefs came from.
What was internalized begins to be differentiated from the self. This is continued work with no fixed point of completion, and healing is relational: connection to self, others, and community.
Clinical direction Support concrete unlearning, explore what the person wants to claim or reclaim, and hold grief alongside growth.
The clinician's place in the model
The model places the clinician at the center of a relational process. Clinicians, supervisors, and trainers can ask where a client stands in relation to what has been internalized, where the clinician stands in relation to their own history of internalization, and what is being activated between them.
How the model came to be
Early in my practice, sitting with Black women clients, I noticed the assumptions I brought into the room and countertransference I did not yet have language for, and I was in a pivotal moment of my own racial identity development. The questions my clients were sitting with were not so different from mine. The question I was living became the question I studied, and what came back from that study is this model, which holds the client and the clinician in the same analysis.
The research
Where the model comes from
The Trajectory of Awareness emerged from my dissertation, a grounded theory study of how Black women psychotherapists understand internalized racial oppression in themselves and in their work with Black women clients. I interviewed 22 Black women clinicians with at least five years of post-licensure practice. Each interview ran 90 minutes to two hours and included their responses to a composite clinical vignette drawn from my own practice.
The analysis moved from line-by-line open coding to axial and selective coding, with constant comparison and peer review throughout. It produced 121 open codes, 15 themes, and five core categories, which came together as two conceptualizations: how internalized intersectional oppression is taken in, and how awareness of it develops. Because participants spoke about both their clients and themselves, the model serves two purposes, understanding the client and understanding the clinician.
Smith, L. (2020). The awareness and understanding of internalized racial oppression by African American women clinicians and the influence on psychotherapy with African American women clients: A relational liberatory approach. Doctoral dissertation, Smith College School for Social Work.
Smith, L. L. (2022). Speaking the unspoken: Understanding internalized racial oppression from the perspective of Black women psychotherapists. Smith College Studies in Social Work. Read the article
Smith, L., & Mak, C. (2022). The trajectory of awareness: A tool to dismantle anti-Black racism in social work education. Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 42(2–3), 120–141. Read the article
Smith, L., & Mak, C. (2023). Two sides of the same coin: Adopting a decolonial stance in teaching clinical social work students to intervene on anti-Black racism. Smith College Studies in Social Work. Read the article
Smith, L., & Wofford, N. (2025). Replications of racialized, gender and class-based trauma: Intersectional enactments within Black women client–therapist–consultee–consultant relationships. Psychoanalytic Social Work. Read the article
Next phase · Now in progress
Trajectory of Awareness Simulation Study
The next phase of this research is now in progress. The study looks at how Black women psychotherapists learn the model and apply it in their ongoing clinical work with Black women clients.
Participants complete an online training on the model, take part in an in-person clinical simulation in downtown Chicago in December 2026, and join a virtual interview and focus group in March 2027. The study is funded through an internal grant from Loyola University Chicago.
Study details and how to participateWork with the model
Take the overview with you, reflect on your own trajectory with the free worksheet, or bring a Trajectory of Awareness training to your team.