Each individual holds multiple identities including but not limited to race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender, sexuality, and ability status. These identities have a profound effect on how a person makes sense of, moves within, and experiences the world, particularly as it relates to power, privilege, and access to resources. We are currently witnessing heightened local, national, and global unrest regarding the grave and tragic ways society has unapologetically failed to respect, demonstrate equality, and even recognize humanity towards certain identities – particularly black identities.

Since therapy is often considered a microcosm of society at large, clinicians have a responsibility to acknowledge, confront, and protest the ways in which we, like society, have also failed to fully see and embrace those in our care, those who we serve. Building on Beyond the Session: Navigating Power and Privilege in Psychotherapy Part 1, this session will explore and offer a framework for addressing dynamics of power and privilege in the therapeutic context with particular focus on ways to address race, white-supremacy, and anti-blackness in clinical work.

This session will offer clinicians the opportunity to:

• Discuss challenges in navigating power, privilege, and equity in therapeutic contexts
• Explore a framework for how to think about power, privilege, and equity in the therapeutic dyad
• Discuss how to apply that framework to reflect on and explore race, white-supremacy, and anti-blackness in clinical work

Please note:
you must have attended a Beyond the Session: Navigating Power and Privilege in Psychotherapy Part 1 session in order to attend this event.

As clinicians we have spent countless hours grounding ourselves in one, or multiple, models of therapy that allow us to facilitate change within our clients’ lives. The model one utilizes has a deep impact on the interventions used, and on how we interpret the interaction between client and therapist. The majority of models of psychotherapy have historically held a frame of distance between client and therapist, encouraging the therapist to refrain from engaging with vulnerability, or sharing their countertransference. Since the therapy space is often considered a microcosm of society at large, clinicians invested in practicing from an anti-racist perspective have a responsibility to interrogate how this distance might uphold ideals of power and privilege rooted in whiteness.

This session will offer clinicians an opportunity to:

• Develop an understanding of how their chosen model utilizes or ignores their own vulnerability and identity
• Consider how current theoretical perspectives uphold ideology white supremacy and promote whiteness
• Explore the risks and rewards of clinician vulnerability and transparency in the therapy space

When working with African American and racially diverse couples, is it sufficient to simply attend to the universality of emotion and attachment needs, as prescribed by Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)? How necessary is it to address race and racism when working with couples of color? How can one do it using the EFT framework?

Bukky Kolawole, PsyD and the Relationship HQ Team invite you to a conversation with Marjorie Nightingale, JD, LMFT and Christiana Awosan, PhD, LMFT the authors of Emotionally Focused Therapy: A Culturally Sensitive Approach for African American Heterosexual Couples. Join us for a critical discussion on a culturally sensitive application of EFT with African American and other racially diverse couples.