Black History Month: Honoring What You're Carrying
Black History Month is a time of celebration, reflection, and for many Black teens and young adults, a complicated mix of pride and pain.
The truth is racism isn't just a historical fact: it's a present-day reality that lands in the body. This can include hypervigilance, exhaustion, fatigue, microaggressions, generational trauma, and the pressure to perform or prove worth in a discriminatory society. The weight of navigating spaces that does not always feel safe. Generational trauma that doesn't announce itself but shapes how you move through the world. These aren't abstract concepts, but daily lived experiences, and they deserve to be treated as such in therapy. Too often, they're not.
Black clients frequently find themselves in therapy where they have to educate their therapist before they can even begin their own healing. Where their cultural reality is minimized or explained away. That is not therapy, but more labor that you do not need. Finding a therapist who is genuinely non-judgmental and doesn't require you to justify your experiences or soften your truth matters significantly. You should be able to speak as your whole self.
My work is rooted in anti-oppressive, justice-centered, trauma-informed care. That means understanding that trauma doesn't exist in a vacuum: it has context that is systemic and historical, and deeply personal for the patient. The approaches I use are chosen with that in mind.
EMDR helps the brain and nervous system reprocess trauma without requiring you to retell every painful detail repeatedly. It's particularly powerful for both specific experiences and the cumulative weight of racial trauma that builds over time and continues to exist around us.
DBT offers real and practical skills for managing emotions where skills we adapt to your actual life. Code-switching, microaggressions at school, impossible family expectations are the real things you are working with, not textbook scenarios.
CBT examines thought patterns together, with nuance. Some of what looks like a "negative thought" is actually a survival strategy and knowing the difference matters.
You shouldn't have to choose between your identity and your healing. They belong together and are one in the same.
You might be a Black teen, young adult, or parent carrying grief, anxiety, or survival responses that feel too heavy to name right now. You deserve support that honors your full reality, not just part of it. Black History Month is a reminder: not that Black lives, experiences, and resilience need a designated month to matter, but that they deserve to be named, seen, and celebrated out loud. The work of healing is hard enough without having to do it in spaces that don't truly see you. You deserve care that meets you in the fullness of who you are. You are your history, identity, pain, strength, and all of it.
To every Black teen, young adult, and parent navigating that path: you are not too much. Your experiences are not exaggerated. And your healing matters — not just this month, but always..