I’ve been in therapy
off and on since 2010. Graduate school was kicking my ass and I was in the painstaking process of figuring out if I was a college gay or a rest-of-my-life-gay.
After spending one too many free days in bed, I didn’t even feel like driving home to Radcliff or visiting friends from home. By this point, I was living off-campus in an apartment with two roommates I cared about deeply and had a strong circle of supportive friends that partied so much any millennial would vomit even thinking about it now – “Happy 21st Birthday, homie! Try this shizit. It’s 100 proof Southern Comfort. It should get you fucked up.”
I was lucky enough to be a full-time student with access to a counseling center and campus health, so the process of recalibrating myself was simple and only required a few phone calls.
I met with a therapist, a man from a country I cannot remember, for about three sessions. I quickly stopped going, but I’m not really sure why. Maybe it was his gender or maybe I just wasn’t ready, but I called it quits. I tried again a few months later and ended up getting paired with a Black woman who I saw for the three months until graduation. I was linked up with an affiliated therapist that I stayed with for the next four or so years, until she moved away and the most recent one for about another four, until it ended this summer in a flaming ball of “But I’m A White Ally” hellfire.
Through the years, I’ve had a lot come from my $25-$40 co-pay (because my therapy was covered as a routine, maintenance healthcare visit and didn’t count towards my deductible). I became confident enough to break up with my first girlfriend that I didn’t even like that much and spend more time with my queer friends at my new job. I figured out that my father and I argue so much because we are damn-near the same human being. I learned that despite how a string of six-week long relationships ended, I was a good person deserving of love and affection.
My friends and family could tell me how amazing I was and how much I deserved the best in this life, but I needed a professional to tell me in a way I could understand that when I put myself down and thought that everything I wanted to accomplish was impossible, I was wrong. That I was experiencing thought distortions that were making my life miserable.
When this journey started, I was a Master’s of Social Work student navigating a system that I would soon be a part of. Since 2011, I’ve been a professional social worker, specializing in youth with severe mental illness and homeless young adults. Now, I’m a clinical therapist working with all ages at a progressive private practice in The Highlands. Though I am not the only queer therapist, I am the only Black person.
THERAPY FOR BLACK/LATINX/ASIAN & PACIFIC ISLANDER GIRLS/ENBYS/
TRANSMEN
We take most insurance and private pay and I have zero control over how much sessions with me cost and how it’s handled when one of my patients can’t afford to see me anymore. This is the worst part of what I do now and what I’ve always done. Watching folks fall through the cracks of a bridge it took all of their might to take their first steps onto. The mental healthcare power structure is an inverted triangle and at the very bottom are the people who barely make enough money to survive, but too much to qualify for any help that the system swears up and down is there for those who need it. What we forget when we encourage people to “get help” is that competent care is hard to find and even the most basic of services are never cheap.
Black and brown people are struggling to get mental health care. Queer people are struggling to get mental health care. Impoverished people are struggling to get mental health care.
And the folks at this intersection are trying to cross Dixie Highway at rush hour. In the rain. On a Lime scooter. Wearing Red Bottoms. And let’s throw in a dog in a wheelchair, for good measure (shoutout to the handicapped dogs—love you, Keller). Not to play Oppression Olympics, but this Black, queer life is hard. Or trans, Latinx life. Or impoverished, Deaf life. It’s all a constant state of frustration and defending your humanity to the various types of assholes that America can produce on a regular basis. Unsurprisingly enough, not every professional practicing psychotherapy knows what to do with this. Their one semester of cultural diversity taught by a (probably) white doctoral student gives them the false sense of confidence that they can be the saving grace of people everywhere, if only they could just get through to them and show that we’re All The Same On The Inside.
The last year has been the worst many of us have ever experienced in our long or short lives. We experienced traumas and micro traumas that have worn our souls down. People dropping like flies from an illness that “is just like the flu,” a lockdown that was supposed to last two weeks, police aggression that we watched in a loop on Mark Zuckerburg’s internet, and coup attempts that will likely never be part of the history books. If you’re here in the “Compassionate City,” you got the extra joy of watching LMPD flex their muscles like a Little Rascals hoodlum and businesses and co-workers take off a mask you didn’t even know they were wearing. We sat in worn blue chairs in our living room staring numbly at the 5:30 news with tears streaming down our face before crumbling completely in the arms of our partners; or perhaps that was just me.
We watched Breonna’s humanity drug through the mud, then hung from a tree.
Photo by Aneta Pawlik on Unsplash
My therapist from 2016-2020, we’ll call her “Jessica,” was a middle-aged white woman with auburn hair who graduated from the same Masters program I had come from probably a decade before me. She wore long, flowy skirts and cowgirl-esque boots, a kind of Horse Girl all grown up.
Until that point, I’d never had an issue in all the years we had been working together and as far as I knew, she was pro-queer and pro-Black.
On June 10th, 2020, I met with her for the first time since shit hit the fan in Louisville. I was sitting on my back deck during my session because my partner was home and our house is small, so it was really the only place to grab some privacy for 55 minutes.
After virtual salutations and pleasantries, I began telling Jessica about the emotions and mini traumas I had been experiencing for the several weeks. When she found out that I had gone out marching and attended rallies several times, she asked me if my participation was beneficial for me and suggested I stop. She agreed that police brutality was obviously a problem, but what had changed her opinion of the police was doing a ride-along with an officer friend and seeing just how hard he worked to “keep his community safe.” She thought her good cop story was going to provide me with some sort of comfort for the trauma I was witnessing. She proceeded to tell me that she was enraged when she saw coverage of an unarmed Black man being abused by the police and called her officer friend to give him a good tongue-lashing, but he gave her some perspective that soothed her soul, so to speak.
She concluded that despite having lived in this Black body for 33 years, the state-sponsored abuse I was viewing was simply a misunderstanding. That it’s Not About Race. In the short span of time I had to express my feelings of sorrow and rage, she wanted to tell me how she reconciled her feelings about the police in an effective and reasonable manner. She really thought she was doing some shit.
At this point, I think I had completely shut down. I let this white woman have all these feelings while I just stared off and watched my dog roll around in the dirt. I guess I snapped out of it when she asked me if I thought racism would end in our lifetime. I said absolutely not. The perplexed look she gave me is one that I will not forget any time soon and the words that followed pushed me over the edge, “I’m concerned about your hopelessness.” They seem innocent enough to the untrained ear, but every mental health professional knows exactly what “hopelessness” means. It’s on every assessment and every depression scale. This woman had implied that because I recognized the reality of systemic racism in America, I was having thoughts of committing suicide.
I ended our session and told her I would get her payment to her ASAP, but she told me not to worry about it. I thought this would be the end of it and I needed to go be angry somewhere, but five days later (and three days after the killing of Rayshard Brooks) I received an email from Jessica. I’ll spare you the details, but it included an apology for being naive and included, “I really had such high hopes that systemic change was happening from the top and that finally the world was listening.” After days of deliberation, I replied with a reasonable message about feeling invalidated and her inappropriate centering of herself during our session. I wasn’t willing to exhaust my emotional labor explaining to her why her behavior was racist, but I’m an optimist. I gave her the name and contact info of three anti-racist white friends that were willing to talk to her, Anglo to Anglo.
There were a few emails back and forth in which Jessica continued to tell me about burnout, making mistakes, and the patient being the expert on their own lives. All things we’ve both been taught at the trainings we have to take to maintain our license to practice.
When I told her that her words were not good enough and I expected actual action in exchange for the grace she was seeking, her final email came. I’ve never even read it. I didn’t need the trauma then and it’s moot now. Those that I’ve allowed to read it have let me know that it’s just as full of self-importance, deflection, and violence as one would expect, along with something about the number of protests she’s been to and money she’s donated.
The Hellfire
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
DUST YOURSELF OFF AND TRY AGAIN
I say all of this not to discourage anyone from seeking the help they need. Quite the opposite, actually. One entitled white woman doesn’t spoil the whole bunch. There are so many wonderful therapists in this city that work their asses off everyday to serve as many people as they can manage. They put in the work. They walk the talk. They’re just not easy to find. The number of queer and Black and brown therapists is growing, and with the recent explosion of telehealth services, we are no longer limited to the distance we can travel in the time we can spare.
Mental health professionals come from all walks of life and experiences. All cities and counties and neighborhoods. All of us come in with biases of some sort and even with all continuing education in the world, some of them will still remain. We’re real people just like you and sometimes we don’t get it right, but oftentimes we do. After years of classes (Research Methodology can go to hell), trainings, practicums, and supervision sessions, a therapist embarks on the world ready to help you figure out the shit you can’t figure out yourself.
That sadness that you’ve had for the last two years that you can’t seem to shake or that explosive anger that comes out of nowhere is caused by something deep down that we can hopefully reach. If it turns out that we can’t, then ask for a referral to someone else. And if we pull some shenanigans like Jessica, the contact info for our licensing board is but a Google away.
Folks need to know that good help is hard to find, therapy isn’t just “for white people,” and participating isn’t a sign of weakness. No matter who you are or what population you’re a member of, this world can be a hellish place. Finding a professional that can guide you through addressing the things that challenge you may be the easiest thing in the world for you, but let's not pretend that it may not be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. Capitalism and the government don’t make us easy to find or afford a therapist. If the rate is too high or your insurance isn’t accepted, ask about sliding scale or super bill options. If it’s accessible to you, contact your insurance company for a list of covered providers. Either way, you can throw one of these resources in that search bar up there:
Therapy for Black Girls
National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network
PsychologyToday
Therapists for Protester Wellness
As for me, I found a new mental health provider in November. We clicked pretty quickly and he ‘gets’ me. The things he doesn’t get, he asks or finds out about. That’s truly all I (and the rest of us) can really ask for. Someone to show us the tools to help us through the day-to-day and understand that we are the experts in our own lives. He doesn’t tell me what to believe or how I should feel about a particular situation. He just acknowledges that as a Black, queer woman, I’m going to experience everything differently than he could as a white trans man. However, one thing does hold true.
It doesn’t matter if we’ve been fighting by ourselves for too long or just experienced something life-changing, we all could use someone to help us make sense of it all.
Ariel Brooks is a social worker attempting to change the world™ in Louisville, KY. She was last published in the North Hardin High School Trojan newspaper after winning a writing contest about Seasonal Affective Disorder. She used the FYE gift card she was awarded to purchase Good Charlotte’s debut album.