CLINICIAN & CLINICAL SUPERVISOR
Clinician
If you have been perusing some of the text on this website, you might still be puzzled by the fact that I am in fact, a sex therapist! I haven’t said much about sex at all—especially not the fun stuff! Personally, I happen to think that nothing else but FREEDOM, trauma-free sexual expression, body sovereignty, a celebration and affirmation of gender diversity/fluidity, as well as holistic and spiritual health and safety is the epitome of sexual arousal and is also quite medicinal. When I sit in my role as a sex therapist, I am required to be an interventionist responsible for sensing, observing, and acknowledging inter-generational pain, rage, mistrust, within our bodies, hearts, minds, and souls.
I specialize in the treatment of complex trauma with genocide survivors and other structurally marginalized groups. Over the course of my career as a therapist, clients have repeatedly expressed positive feedback towards practitioners who are willing to engage in critical frameworks for understanding relationship dynamics—including but not limited to one’s ability to facilitate candid discussions about sex, gender, sexual orientation, love, and intimacy. Queer People of Color often seek therapists who embody a comprehensive understanding of complex trauma—which may lie at the intersection of chemical use and other dependencies, regulation concerns and attachment disorders—and who can, at the same time, hold a safe space for them. For many of my clients, securing an hour once a week with someone who “just gets it” calms the vagus nerves and awakens the spirit.
As a practitioner, the sacredness of the therapeutic relationship ministers to me, mentors to me, inspires me, and, not least of which, emboldens me. In the container of our therapeutic relationship, genocide survivors wrestle with questions of sex, love, intimacy, body autonomy, pleasure, and desire. To keep it simple, and whenever you are ready, I am willing to have the conversations that many therapists are not taught to have with you!
Clinical Supervisor & Trainer
Practitioners who can openly and sensibly discuss issues of racism, oppression, structural violence, and historical trauma while at the same time provide genuine love and care to their clients are a unique, highly sought-after, and transformative group of healers. These are the core values that I bring into my clinical practice and into clinical supervision.
As therapists, we need to love our clients so much more than we currently do. That is to say, we need to love them boldly, bravely, unapologetically, and fiercely. We especially need to radically love the Black and Indigenous women who give their structurally disproportionate and limited finances, trust, stories, and bodies to our growing therapy practices. It is my strong belief that through explicit and deliberate acts of love, therapists have the capacity and opportunity to create unique and affirming sanctuaries of healing by and for women of color, particularly among us as Black women, in these following ways:
Love as Redress: By centering and loving Black women in our therapeutic spaces and address the intergenerational impact of slavery and genocide, we can begin to decolonize our practice and begin to examine power and privilege at the intersection of sex and race.
Love as Healing: Building a strong therapeutic alliance has long been correlated with positive treatment outcomes. Our therapeutic holding environments must include access to appropriate forms of touch, nurturing, sound, aesthetics, sustenance, and an invitation to ritual and collective intergenerational wisdom conducive to individual and communal healing.
Love as Emancipation: All major social justice movements in U.S. society have strongly embodied and promoted love as a foundational ethical stance. The therapeutic holding environment is a place where love could exist organically. While we must remain aware, thoughtful, and responsible regarding how we bring the concept of love into our professional lives, it nonetheless has the potential to be a tool for liberation.
In clinical supervision, I encourage the therapists working under my auspices to grow—to be more of who they are, to take calculated and necessary risks, and most of all to take deep and profound care of each individual, partnership, or family trusting them with their time, energy, resources, and stories.
It is my clinical duty to remind you of who you are, in situations, a society, and structures that profit from your amnesia.
3 See Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge and hooks, B. (2000). All about love: New visions. New York: William Morrow.