Picture this.
After a lot of thinking and plenty of reservations, you finally make the appointment and show up.
You sit down. You take a breath.
And before you can even talk about the pain you came in carrying, you realize you are already explaining.
Why that comment at work was not “small.”
Why your body tenses in certain rooms.
Why your family dynamics are not dysfunction, but survival.
Why what you are feeling did not start with you.
If that sounds familiar, you are not alone.
For many BIPOC folks, therapy, something meant to be a place of refuge, becomes another space where we translate, soften, and edit ourselves just to be understood. Another place where we perform our pain in ways that fit frameworks that were never built with us in mind.
The mental health crisis in our communities is not only about access.
It is about fit.
It is about whether the care we receive can actually hold our experiences.
Naming where traditional therapy falls short is not about throwing therapy away. It is about telling the truth so we can move toward something more honest, more intentional, and more healing.
1. When Therapy Feels Culturally “Polite” but Disconnected
Maybe you have tried to describe the exhaustion of code-switching.
Or the constant scanning of rooms.
Or what it feels like to be the “only one” again and again.
Your therapist nods. They are kind. They care.
And still, something does not land.
Not because they are bad people, but because they do not live in your body.
Therapists often learn standardized treatment protocols that assume a baseline of safety, belonging, and access that many BIPOC individuals have never experienced. When your therapist suggests “setting boundaries” without understanding the cultural context of familial obligation, or recommends “assertiveness training” without acknowledging how assertive BIPOC individuals are perceived as threatening, the advice does not just fall flat. It creates distance.
Traditional therapy often treats culture like an add-on instead of the ground we stand on. Advice gets offered without naming the racial consequences of those actions. Without understanding that what reads as “healthy” for some can be dangerous for others.
Sometimes it is subtle:
- Your name is almost pronounced right
- Your cultural references do not quite register
- Family closeness is labeled “enmeshment”
- Spiritual or ancestral practices are gently dismissed
None of it is loud.
All of it accumulates.
And slowly, therapy starts to feel like another place where you are not seen.
What helps instead:
Therapy rooted in cultural responsiveness, not cultural checklists.
Responsiveness says: I do not know everything, but I am willing to learn. I might get it wrong, and I take responsibility for my actions as a therapist.
It treats your lived experience as expertise, not an obstacle.
It allows you to show up whole, without constant explanation or apology.
When your therapist can say, “I do not know what that is like, but I want to understand how it impacts you,” and truly mean it, healing becomes possible. This approach does not require you to educate or translate constantly.
2. When Eurocentric Models Ask You to Shrink Your Experience
Most recognized and taught therapy models were created by white, Western men observing people who looked like them, lived like them, and existed within systems built to protect them. Freud, Jung, Rogers, and other foundational figures in psychology developed theories based on specific populations in specific times and places. Yet these frameworks are taught and applied as universal truths about human psychology, as if the human mind operates identically across all cultures and experiences.
There are no universal truths.
This shows up in therapy as:
- Individualism over collective wellbeing
- Prioritizing independence over interdependence
- Talk therapy over somatic understanding
- Mind separated from spirit
- “Letting go” of wounds that are still being reopened
- Pathologizing culture, survival, and emotional expression
For many BIPOC clients, it feels like trying to heal with tools that do not fit their experiences.
Trauma is often treated as a single event instead of something ongoing and systemic. Racism becomes a “stressor” rather than a structure. Grief is rushed. Rage is managed. Resilience is praised while exhaustion is ignored.
And too often, cultural strengths get mislabeled as symptoms.
What helps instead:
Decolonial and culturally grounded therapy that expands the frame instead of forcing you into one.
This means drawing from Indigenous wisdom, African-centered psychology, liberation psychology, and other culturally grounded approaches that honor different ways of understanding the self, community, and healing.
It means honoring collectivism, ancestry, spirituality, and embodiment.
It means recognizing survival strategies as wisdom, not pathology.
It means understanding that healing does not require assimilation.
Moving Beyond Theory Into Lived Experience
The shift from Eurocentric to decolonial frameworks is not merely academic. It fundamentally changes what happens in the therapy room. When your therapist understands that your identity is not a variable to be controlled for in treatment, but rather the context through which all healing must flow, everything changes.
Your cultural practices become resources rather than obstacles.
Your community connections become assets rather than liabilities.
Your survival strategies are honored as adaptations to impossible circumstances rather than symptoms to be eliminated.
3. When Lack of Representation Turns Therapy Into Labor
There is a particular exhaustion that comes with being the only one. The only person of color in your graduate program, the only Black person in your department, the only Latinx family in your neighborhood. This exhaustion follows BIPOC individuals into therapy offices where, more often than not, they encounter therapists who do not share their racialized experiences.
Shared identity is not the only path to effective therapy, but the lack of representation in the mental health field creates profound barriers, often making us feel like therapy was not made for us.
When your therapist does not share your racialized experience, the therapeutic work often gets derailed by education:
- You find yourself explaining systemic racism when you came to process grief
- You are describing what microaggressions feel like when you needed to explore anxiety
- You are justifying why that interaction felt racist when you wanted to discuss relationship patterns
It goes from therapy to teaching. And it is labor you are paying for.
Beyond the educational burden, there is the constant calculation of what can be said safely. Will this therapist understand, or will they become defensive? Will they hear my anger about racism, or will they pathologize it? Can I express the full range of my experience, or do I need to modulate it to protect their comfort?
These questions create a space of performance rather than truth that contradicts the very purpose of therapy. You cannot heal in spaces where you cannot be fully authentic.
The lack of representation also means missing the subtle understanding that comes from shared experience, the immediate recognition, the unspoken knowledge, the cultural shorthand that does not require translation. It means potentially missing how racism shapes mental health symptoms, how historical trauma shows up in present-day struggles, how systemic barriers complicate individual healing.
What helps instead:
Therapy with providers who share your racialized experience, or who have done deep, ongoing work to understand how racism and oppression shape mental health.
This is not about surface-level diversity training or checking a cultural competency box. It is about therapists who can hold space for rage about racism without becoming defensive. Who understand why that “small” interaction triggered such a strong response. Who recognize racism-based trauma without needing it explained. Who can name systems of oppression in the therapy room rather than locating all problems within the individual.
Representation matters not because BIPOC therapists are automatically culturally competent with all BIPOC clients. Cultural responsiveness is still essential across communities. Representation matters because it reduces the burden of translation and creates possibility for deeper understanding.
When you do not have to explain your existence, you can actually do the therapeutic work. When you do not have to explain your existence, you can finally tend to your wounds.
4. When Intergenerational Trauma Is Ignored or Denied
Traditional therapy tends to focus on individual history: your childhood, your family of origin, your personal experiences. This focus is important, but it often misses the larger historical and collective trauma that shapes BIPOC mental health.
Slavery, colonization, genocide, displacement, forced assimilation, and ongoing systemic violence are not just historical events. They are ongoing realities with psychological consequences that ripple across generations.
When therapy dismisses or minimizes intergenerational trauma, it asks BIPOC clients to pretend their distress emerged in a vacuum. It suggests that anxiety, depression, hypervigilance, or relational struggles are purely individual pathologies rather than adaptive responses to collective and historical trauma.
This erasure is particularly harmful because it locates the problem entirely within the individual while ignoring the systems that created the conditions for that suffering. It is why the field talks about race-based trauma instead of racism-based trauma. One of them makes part of our identity the issue. The other names the context that creates it.
Imagine describing patterns of hypervigilance that you recognize in yourself, your mother, and your grandmother, survival strategies developed across generations in response to real danger. Traditional therapy might label this as generalized anxiety disorder and suggest individual interventions like cognitive restructuring or exposure therapy.
But this approach misses the deeper truth. These patterns emerged as adaptations to systemic threats. They are not simply irrational thoughts to be challenged. They are wisdom passed down through generations about how to survive in a dangerous world. How to dress, talk, interact, and communicate as to not be a target.
The dismissal of intergenerational trauma also shows up in how traditional therapy addresses family dynamics. When therapists pathologize protective patterns in BIPOC families without understanding their historical context, they miss crucial information. The parent who seems “overprotective” may be responding to real ongoing dangers. The family’s emphasis on success and achievement may reflect a survival strategy in systems designed to exclude them. The distrust of institutions may be entirely rational given historical betrayals.
What helps instead:
Trauma-responsive care that honors collective memory, ancestral resilience, and historical truth.
This means understanding that your symptoms are not only about what happened to you individually, but also about what happened to your community across time. It means honoring the wisdom embedded in survival strategies while also creating space to process the cost of constant vigilance.
It means connecting personal struggles to larger patterns of systemic harm without removing individual agency or pathologizing appropriate responses to oppression.
Healing from intergenerational trauma requires acknowledgment, naming what happened and continues to happen. It requires connection to ancestral strength and resilience, not just ancestral pain. It requires practices that honor cultural wisdom traditions that have sustained communities through impossible circumstances.
When therapy can hold both the trauma and the resilience, both the individual and the collective, both the past and the present, deeper healing becomes possible.
5. When “I Don’t See Color” Means “I Can’t See You”
Perhaps the biggest failure of therapy is the colorblind approach, the insistence that “we are all human” and that some therapists “do not see color” in the therapy room.
This approach is often presented as progressive or inclusive, but it functions as erasure. When your therapist claims not to see your race, they are claiming not to see a fundamental aspect of your identity and lived experience. They are refusing to acknowledge the reality that race shapes every aspect of life in a racialized society.
In graduate school I had a professor who would often say, “If the only tool in your toolbelt is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.” An individualized approach to healing is not only recommended, it is needed. When I teach my students, I let them know that not knowing the context and identities of their clients is not knowing their clients at all.
Colorblindness in therapy means your experiences of racism are minimized or reframed as individual conflicts rather than systemic oppression. It means your therapist might suggest you are being “too sensitive” about racial microaggressions or that you should “try not to focus on race so much.” It means the very real impact of living in a white supremacist society gets pathologized as your individual problem rather than a collective reality requiring collective acknowledgment and response.
This approach causes harm because it denies your reality. When you describe a clearly racist interaction and your therapist suggests alternative explanations that erase racism from the equation, they are gaslighting you. When they encourage you to “give people the benefit of the doubt” in situations where your safety or dignity is at stake, they are prioritizing white comfort over your wellbeing. When they frame your anger about injustice as something to be managed rather than a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances, they are pathologizing your experience.
Colorblind approaches also prevent therapists from recognizing how racism shapes the therapeutic relationship itself. Power dynamics, assumptions, microaggressions, and racial bias do not disappear just because both people are in a therapy office. When therapists refuse to acknowledge race, they cannot recognize or repair racial harm that occurs in the therapy relationship. This leaves BIPOC clients managing their therapist’s fragility instead of receiving care.
What actually works:
Race-conscious therapy that explicitly acknowledges the impact of racism and white supremacy on mental health and the therapeutic relationship.
This means therapists who can name racism when it is present rather than dancing around it. Who can discuss their own racial identity and biases openly. Who understand that seeing your race is not problematic. Refusing to see it is.
Race-conscious therapy creates space to process racialized trauma without minimization. It validates your experiences rather than questioning them. It connects individual struggles to systemic patterns without removing your agency. It honors your rage, grief, exhaustion, and resilience as appropriate responses to living in a society structured by racial hierarchy.
When your therapist can see you fully, real therapeutic alliance becomes possible.
Toward Therapy That Honors All of You
You deserve care that does not ask you to shrink.
That does not require constant explanation.
That sees your culture as medicine, not a complication.
Trauma and culturally responsive, decolonial therapy is not theoretical. It is a reality, offered by practitioners who understand that effective mental health care for BIPOC communities requires fundamentally different approaches than those traditionally taught. These practices recognize that healing does not require assimilation to white norms or abandonment of cultural wisdom.
Instead, they honor the strength, resilience, and cultural resources that have sustained BIPOC communities through generations.
It looks like:
- Naming systems, not blaming individuals
- Incorporating cultural practices, spiritual traditions, and ancestral wisdom into treatment rather than dismissing them
- Therapists doing their own liberation work
- Treatment that honors collectivism, interdependence, and cultural values
- Spaces where BIPOC individuals can bring their full selves without apology, translation, or fear
This kind of care changes everything. When you no longer have to manage your therapist’s fragility or education, you can actually focus on your healing.
Your Next Step Toward Culturally Responsive Care
If you have been feeling unseen, unheard, or misunderstood in traditional therapy, your instincts are correct. The dissonance you are experiencing is not a failure on your part. It is a signal that the approach is not meeting your needs.
You do not have to settle for therapy that requires you to shrink, translate, or minimize your experiences. You do not have to continue paying to educate your therapist about your community’s experiences.
The cost of staying in therapy that does not serve you is high, not just financially, but emotionally and spiritually.
You deserve better.
Your healing deserves spaces that honor your full identity.
