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Sometimes it is unmistakable. At other times it is subtle, cumulative and difficult to name.

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Racial trauma can emerge through direct experiences of racism, discrimination and hostility, but also through repeated experiences of being watched, questioned, stereotyped, excluded, underestimated or required to explain yourself.

The individual event may appear small to somebody looking from the outside.

The accumulation may not be.

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When racism becomes internal

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One of my particular areas of interest is internalised racism and what can happen when messages encountered in the outside world gradually become incorporated into our relationship with ourselves.

We learn about ourselves through other people long before we have the language or power to challenge what we are being shown.

Ideas about beauty, intelligence, desirability, professionalism, respectability and worth can become entangled with race and colour. Over time, external prejudice can become an internal voice.

Sometimes that voice is obvious.

Sometimes it sounds remarkably like our own.

Therapy can offer somewhere to become curious about where those messages came from and whether they deserve to continue occupying the authority they have acquired.

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Mixed Heritage and the Third Voice

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My relationship with these questions is not solely academic or clinical.

As a mixed race woman, I know something of the complexity of belonging to more than one cultural world and of discovering that identity is not always experienced as neatly as other people might imagine.

Mixed heritage can contain richness, multiplicity and connection. It can also contain contradiction.

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There may be experiences of being considered too much of one thing in one environment and not enough of it somewhere else. Questions such as “What are you?” or “Where are you really from?” can appear superficially curious while carrying a deeper message about who is assumed naturally to belong.

I have come to think about something within my own experience as a third voice.

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It is not about standing halfway between two identities or finding the correct proportion of each. It is the possibility of developing a voice that belongs to neither category entirely because it belongs to you.

I bring this lived perspective into my work, but I do not assume that my experience allows me to know yours.

Your relationship with race, culture and identity remains uniquely your own.

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Race, Family and Belonging

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Some of our earliest experiences of race occur within families.

For people from mixed heritage backgrounds, transracial families, adoptive families or predominantly white environments, experiences of race can sometimes be complicated by love.

The people who love us may not always understand what the outside world communicates to us about our bodies, hair, skin, culture or identity.

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There can also be painful experiences of colourism, comparison, cultural disconnection or feeling different within one's own family.

Holding love for people who did not understand something important about our experience can create complicated emotional territory.

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Therapy does not require those relationships to be reduced to either good or bad.

There can be room for love and injury to exist in the same story.

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The Body Remembers Being Seen

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Racial experiences are not held only as thoughts.

They may influence how safe we feel entering particular spaces, how closely we monitor other people's reactions, whether we change our speech or appearance, how visible we allow ourselves to become, or how prepared we feel we must be before being taken seriously.

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For some people this can mean vigilance.

For others it may appear through anger, exhaustion, shame, anxiety, perfectionism or a persistent sense of having to prove one's legitimacy.

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Part of our work may involve becoming interested in these responses not as evidence that something is wrong with you, but as adaptations developed within particular relational and social environments.

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Race, Gender, Sexuality and Other Intersections​

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Race is rarely experienced in isolation.

Gender, sexuality, class, disability, age and culture can alter how race is lived and how we are encountered by others.

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The experience of being a Black woman is not simply the experience of racism added to the experience of sexism. Being mixed race is not simply having two racial identities placed beside one another. Being LGBTQ+ and belonging to a particular cultural or racial community can create further questions about visibility, acceptance, safety and belonging.

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These intersections matter because therapy can become too simplistic when it tries to separate parts of a person that are actually lived simultaneously.

You do not have to leave any part of yourself outside the room.

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My Relationship With This Work

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My interest in racial identity has also developed through my academic and creative work.

As an artist, I have explored internalised racism and racial identity through visual and material forms. My exhibited work, The Pink Stink, considered some of the ways racial meaning can become attached to bodies, objects, memories and everyday experiences.

 

My MA in Psychosocial Studies allowed me to take these questions further academically, exploring the relationship between our internal psychological worlds and the social, cultural and material worlds around us.

This continues to inform my psychotherapy practice and my developing interest in objects, creativity and more than human perspectives.