We want to make change happen for trainee Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) counsellors and psychotherapists.
We want there to be more qualified therapists of colour, registered and working in the UK. We want more trainees of colour recruited and we want their training journey to be improved.
We are counselling students with direct and regular contact with counselling and psychotherapy students of colour across the UK.
We have spoken to countless qualified counsellors and psychotherapists of colour. They all have the same story to tell: that they found, and we find, it hard to feel safe and held by our tutors, by our supervisors and by our institutions.
No official stats of course, but anecdotally - BME students are more likely to drop out, change training provider and will take longer to complete their training.
Our training requires that we undertake a level of self-exposure and self-scrutiny, so that we are confident enough and robust enough to conduct a similar process with our future clients. This work we have to do on ourselves will point us to our own traumas.
Let’s consider some of our racial traumas: Recognition trauma. This is the trauma that occurs when you are faced with having to deal with the fact of the systematic racism that you ignored and stepped around. When you face and remember the micro aggressions that you denied for all those years. When you remember all the Karens that chose to flex the disparities in your experiences that impacted your self-esteem, that impacted your view of your place in the world, that impacted your performance, that impacted your ability to ‘fit’ for that promotion, that impacted...I hope you understand that I could actually go on for a long time here.
So recognition trauma day is the day you face the fact of your life, without the blinkers of an equal society. But recognition trauma will revisit you on a fairly regular basis – little things that your sub-conscious will throw out.
And you will be impacted again and again. Like a clap on the head, when you’re sleeping, when you’re shopping, when you’re studying. Very much like PTSD.
Then for someone that looks like me, because that’s what it comes down to, you have to work out - who you are in the white space you inhabit. What it means to be black with your own ancestral combination. Whatever the combination – black still.
These are considerations that must be deliberated on in a manner that intersects with other identity spectrum bands such as sexuality, gender and religion. I think it is fair to say that whiteness is hyper normal and the considerations for white students are not so involved.
In all this, the student of colour has to manage their relationship with other students and their tutor and supervisors as well as their therapists.