Healing and Transforming Racial Trauma in the Counseling Field

This introspective space and embodiment experience will first cultivate a deeper level of insight regarding trauma triggers and healing needs before then identifying specific strategies and interventions intended to promote liberation and activism within our roles as clinicians and supervisees/supervisors. APA Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists (2003) emphasizes the expectation that Psychologists cultivate a deeper awareness of biases, attitudes, and beliefs. Developing cultural competencies has become a known expectation within the field of counseling psychology. However, many emerging clinicians and researchers remain uncertain as to how to APPLY growing knowledge about competencies within their clinical and supervisory practices.

Upon successful completion of this session, participants will be able to:
1. Define cultural responsibility specific to the roles of clinician, supervisee, and supervisor
2. Assess and reduce the costly impact of a trauma trigger
3. Initiate a culturally salient conversation

Participants will be engaged by: being invited to look within themselves regarding difficult questions, being welcomed in moments to move from their minds to their hearts; and receiving tools to support meaningful conversations around race.
It is important for counselors to realize their influence – how much unintentional harm they can do, as well as how much they can support and advocate for their clients. Talking through my lived experiences in therapy offers a powerful insight into some clients’ needs on this topic, and also contains some golden nuggets for counselors as they strive to facilitate the healing process.
Upon successful completion of this session, participants will be able to:
1. Reflect on the therapeutic presence counselors can offer: increased self awareness
2. Assess who counselors may be perceived to be in the eyes of the client
3. Choose to empathize rather than to intellectualize … recognize the importance of accepting and believing the person as they actually experienced it, not what the counselor imagines it to be

More and more of us are feeling urgently called to dismantle white supremacy and stop racism. But sometimes we can conflate our desire to be anti-racist with actually being anti-racist. So we skip over understanding and taking responsibility for the ways we’ve unconsciously internalized whiteness and unintentionally perpetuate it. For many white people, this can be because they’ve been conditioned to believe that they are either “good non-racist” people or “bad racist monsters.” So it can be a painful and destabilizing process to realize how much unconscious racism exists within them. For many people of color, this can be because of how they’ve contorted themselves in order to survive in the system. So it can be both painful to acknowledge the trauma of assimilation and scary to go against the system in order to be their full selves. That’s why it’s critical that we can turn towards our internalized whiteness and the emotionally charged feelings that it brings up – with trauma-informed practices and community support. So we can notice and name it, tend to and take responsibility for it, and choose another path forward – with care and consent.

Upon successful completion of this session, participants will be able to:
1. Understand why naming whiteness can increase a sense of safety for people of color
2. Identify key signs of normalized whiteness and dehumanization within themselves
3. Know what conditions are necessary to turn towards – and not away – from internalized whiteness in a way that helps it be released from their bodies
4. Co-create a different way of being together based on care and consent

Transformative healing of racial trauma includes re-positioning cultural identity as the first factor and not as an after-thought consideration. The inclusion of multicultural considerations at the end of a counseling theory, therapeutic approach, or diagnostic narrative is the inaccurate and inadequate manifestation of assimilation and colonization efforts. All people have had a unique multicultural intersectionality long before Kimberlé Crenshaw provided language for us in 1989. Of great concern, due to generational and complex trauma, individuals whose intersectionality comprises multiple marginalized identities need the most space, advocacy, and healing support. This presentation will introduce several client-narratives (oppressively known as “case studies”), for attendee encountering and propose ways of being, practices, and mind-sets that can be useful in approaching transformative healing work in our professional and personal interactions.

Upon successful completion of this session, participants will be able to:
1. Identify influences and impact of socio-cultural positionality for persons of diverse intersectionalities
2. Recognize implicit biases and microaggressions that create and perpetuate re-traumatization for ethnic-minority and LGBTQ+ identified persons
3. Explore intrapersonal growth work to engage after this presentation to continue this journey of transformative healing

This interactive presentation aims to educate mental health professionals about the ways in which multicultural mistakes (or mistakes that threaten elements of an individual’s intersectional identity) appear within the counseling relationship and to identify ways to help clients heal from these types of ruptures. Experiential online based activities will be used to help participants (1) explore their own intersecting identities and biases, and understand the importance of intersectionality when discussing multicultural mistakes; (2) identify common multicultural mistakes made in therapy and discuss how these mistakes perpetuate racial trauma; (3) explore how mental health professionals can discuss multicultural mistakes committed both inside and outside the therapeutic space with their clients; and (4) identify how counselors can repair relational ruptures after multicultural mistakes are committed in an effort to help their clients heal from racial trauma.

Upon successful completion of this session, participants will be able to…
1. Increase understanding of intersectionality, multicultural mistakes and racial trauma
2. Identify different types of multicultural mistakes made in counseling/interpersonal relationships
3. Learn how to appropriately address and heal from relationship ruptures caused by multicultural mistakes

Our world is changing and the pace of these changes appear to be hastened by pandemics including: COVID19, hatred/separation, racism, and other forms of oppression (e.g. sexism, classism, heterosexism, etc.). We, ‘helpers’ (including non-traditional healers, counselors, therapists, and psychologists), appear to be adequately equipped to nurture wellness for individuals, institutions, and the society; however, we do not always maximize our abilities to help. Instead, we (sometimes) participate in violence and oppression within the very environments intended for learning and care for others.
This presentation will offer audience members tools: (1) to analyze oppression, (2) examples of individual and institutional oppression within the helping profession, (3) and ‘next steps’ to address oppression at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and institutional contexts.

Upon successful completion of this session, participants will be able to…
1. Develop increased awareness and understanding of conceptual frameworks (to better understand the complexity of oppression within the individual and institutional contexts)
2. Identify 2-3 examples of individual and/or institutional oppression and related impact on humyns within and outside of the ‘helping’ professions
3. Empower the self-inquiry process towards individual and institutional transformation processes (i.e. liberation)

Embracing an anti-racist way of being in the world requires us to open our hearts and minds. The works of Ruth King, founder of the Mindful of Race Institute, LLC, and also an author, educator and meditation teacher and Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones (1986) will be featured in this session. In her book, Mindful of Race (2018), King unpacks racism as a disease that directly affects the heart. She emphasizes the significance of kindness as a powerful skill for healing and meditation as a venue for diagnosing habits of harm and working toward increasing awareness of ourselves and our cultural conditioning (developed from our socialization processes) to achieve gratitude and compassion as human beings. According to King, it is important to understand interconnectivity and kindness in the moment. Society works like an organism, like a body, where bones are interconnected, interdependent, just like us as individuals are interconnected and interdependent. King explains that kindness is a powerful weapon of mass healing. Through meditation and creativity, we can develop a kinder heart. This session will engage participants in a mindful meditation practice and a creative writing exercise to explore the embodiment of anti-racism, compassion, and self-compassion.

Upon successful completion of this session, participants will be able to…
1. Participants will be able to use writing practice as a way to surrender their chattering mind.
2. Participants will be able to list the six hindrances to racial harmony (King, 2018).
3. Participants will be able to identify and integrate writing and mindfulness meditation resources as part of the personal and professional practices.

Transformative racial trauma healing requires that marginalized persons have space, support, advocacy, and most importantly, welcomed accountability from majority cultures to show up as their full, intersectional selves, without shrinking or fragmenting themselves solely for the comfort of others. Complex and generational trauma necessitates that counselors work to move clients on the margins to the center by building cultural humility before attempting to build cultural competence. As a Black, queer-identified woman, living with a lifelong physical disability, I have experienced the trauma of racism, homophobia, sexism, and ableism in multiple contexts. I will share personal and professional experiences about my healing and transformational journey. My lived experiences in therapy and as a therapist offer powerful insight into clients’ needs and provide strategies for counselors to help facilitate the healing process in our professional and personal interactions.

Upon successful completion of this session, participants will be able to…
1. Recognize the influences and impact of social locations on persons whose identities intersect
2. Identify and challenge the intellectualization and minimization of harm to persons with minoritized identities, particularly those at the intersection of race, disability, and other socio-cultural identities
3. Cultivate ideas for developing a personal growth plan to continue the journey of transformative healing following this presentation