About Alan

Hi, I’m Alan

I’m Alan Kaishin Crawford—a counsellor, counselling lecturer, community facilitator, spiritual practitioner, musician and founder of Ubuntu, based in Liverpool.

I am a mixed-race man of African-Caribbean (Barbadian) and Irish heritage from a working-class family. My life and work sit at the crossroads of therapy, education, spirituality, culture, identity, social justice and community healing.

Although these different strands of my work have their own purposes and boundaries, they are held together by a shared commitment:

To create spaces of presence, curiosity, love and liberation—spaces that help people understand themselves more deeply, heal what has been wounded, reclaim their power and live with greater dignity, authenticity and connection.

Understand. Heal. Grow. Through relationship, belonging and community.

[BUTTON: Explore My Work]

[BUTTON: Get in Touch]

The person behind the work

I am a real, genuine and down-to-earth human being.

I know that professional biographies can sometimes make practitioners sound as though they have floated serenely through life, accumulated some qualifications and emerged with all the answers.

That is not my story.

I have lived through depression, anxiety, addiction, shame and periods of profound existential questioning. I have struggled with my body, food and self-worth. I have experienced financial difficulties, divorce, loss and the painful work of rebuilding a life when something I had depended upon came to an end.

I also know what it is to grow up feeling different: to move between racial, cultural and spiritual worlds while wondering where I truly belonged and whether every part of me would be welcome.

Understanding my own ADHD and neurodivergence has given me another language through which to make sense of myself. It has deepened my compassion for people whose ways of thinking, feeling and experiencing the world do not fit neatly into what others expect.

Therapy, spiritual practice, recovery, community and honest relationship have each helped me find my way through different chapters of my life.

I do not share this because I imagine that my experiences are the same as yours. They are not. Nor do I believe that suffering automatically makes somebody wise or qualified to support others.

I share it because I want you to know that I am not approaching you from a distant, untouched position.

I know what it is to feel lost.

I know what it is to need help.

I know what it is to begin again.

I do not offer all the answers. I offer presence, experience, honesty and a willingness to meet what is real with tenderness and compassion.

Why I do this work

My own experience of therapy changed the direction of my life.

It helped me meet parts of myself that I had judged, hidden or tried to escape. It enabled me to understand how my history had shaped me without reducing my identity to my wounds.

Most importantly, it gave me the experience of being met by another human being with care, respect and genuine curiosity and respect.

That experience remains at the heart of how I work.

I believe that something powerful becomes possible when we no longer feel that we must perform, defend or abandon ourselves in order to remain in relationship.

Healing does not always mean eliminating every struggle or becoming a permanently improved version of ourselves.

It may mean developing a kinder and more truthful relationship with who we already are.

It may mean recovering choices that once felt unavailable.

It may mean grieving what cannot be changed, releasing shame that never belonged to us or discovering that we do not have to carry everything alone.

We heal through being deeply met—not managed, corrected or treated as a problem to solve.

How I meet people

People who work with me often describe me as calm, grounded, warm, compassionate and deeply present.

I aim to offer the kind of relationship in which you can feel heard, understood and taken seriously without being judged, analysed from a distance or told how you ought to live.

My approach is humanistic, relational, person-centred and experiential. It is also informed by existential, somatic, trauma-aware and decolonial perspectives.

In plain language, this means that I am interested in your whole experience:

What you think and feel.
What your body may be communicating.
What has happened in your relationships.
The ways you have learned to protect yourself.
What gives your life meaning.
Your culture, identity and communities.
The social conditions within which your life is unfolding.
The parts of yourself that may not yet have found words.

Working with me feels like a natural, engaged conversation.

I am not a silent, distant or endlessly nodding therapist. I will listen carefully, ask questions, share what I am noticing and, when it may serve you, offer an honest challenge.

But I will not take over your process.

I do not believe that being a professional gives me greater authority over your inner life than you possess. My role is to help create the conditions in which you can hear yourself more clearly and encounter your own experience with greater freedom, compassion and choice.

I may walk alongside you, but the life we are exploring remains yours.

[BUTTON: Explore Therapy]

[BUTTON: Read About My Therapeutic Approach]

Identity, culture and belonging

My mixed African-Caribbean and Irish heritage has profoundly shaped who I am and how I understand the world.

There is richness in carrying more than one inheritance. There can also be uncertainty: the feeling of existing between communities, being read differently in different spaces or wondering whether you are ever quite enough of one thing to belong.

My relationship with Barbados, my African ancestry, my Irish heritage and the Black community in Liverpool has grown and deepened throughout my adult life. This has included reconnecting with family history, culture, ancestral traditions and parts of myself that were not always fully reflected or understood while I was growing up.

These experiences inform my particular commitment to working with Black and mixed-heritage people around racial trauma, identity, belonging, cultural disconnection, racialised shame and the emotional, relational and embodied effects of racism.

I also understand that identity is never only about race.

Class, gender, sexuality, disability, neurodivergence, faith, family, place and personal history all influence how we encounter ourselves and how the world encounters us.

A decolonial approach means that I do not treat distress as though it develops entirely inside an isolated individual. We are shaped by relationships, institutions, histories and systems of power.

It also means refusing to understand people only through oppression.

We are more than what has wounded us.

Our lives also contain imagination, culture, humour, spirituality, sensuality, resistance, creativity, tenderness and joy.

Healing should not simply help us endure the world. It should help us become more fully alive within it.

[BUTTON: Explore Racial Trauma, Identity & Belonging]

Counselling, teaching and professional experience

Before moving into private counselling practice and education, I spent more than fifteen years supporting individuals and groups across criminal justice, addiction, mental-health and community settings.

I originally trained and worked as a Probation Officer before qualifying as a Psycho-therapeutic Counsellor. Those years brought me into relationship with people living through addiction, trauma, offending, poverty, exclusion, mental distress and complex life circumstances.

They taught me to look beyond labels.

Behaviour that appears irrational or destructive often makes greater sense when we understand what somebody has survived, what they are trying to protect and which choices have—or have not—been available to them.

I am now a Counselling Lecturer at Blackburne House, having previously taught at Wirral Met and the City of Liverpool College.

Teaching has become an important expression of my therapeutic values. I want future counsellors to understand therapy as more than the mechanical application of techniques.

I teach a deeply human, relational approach in which empathy, acceptance, genuineness and the quality of the therapeutic encounter form the foundation of the work.

Alongside counselling education, I provide training, workshops and facilitated spaces exploring racial trauma, identity, wellbeing, collective care and culturally responsive practice.

This has included facilitating reflective and wellbeing spaces for staff of colour at National Museums Liverpool, including people working within the emotionally demanding context of the International Slavery Museum. I have also delivered racial-awareness training for Afro-Brazilian dance and drumming group, Katumba and delivered sessions for Capoeira for All and BLAST (Black Led Social Traders), co-facilitated racial-trauma training for the Anthony Walker Foundation and the Radical Resilience programme with wellbeing consultant and coach Saeed Olayiwola of S.O Health.

My professional practice is insured and supported through regular clinical supervision, continuing professional development and ongoing personal reflection.

[BUTTON: Explore Teaching, Training & Facilitation]

Ubuntu and community healing

I am the founder of Ubuntu, a Liverpool-based grassroots community for Black, Brown, mixed-heritage and other people of colour.

Ubuntu grew from my conviction that healing cannot be understood only as private work conducted between two people in a therapy room.

We are relational beings.

We need places where we can rest, speak honestly, reconnect with culture and spirituality, share food, make music, laugh, grieve and experience the dignity of being part of something larger than ourselves.

Ubuntu creates healing circles, community wellbeing days, retreats, social gatherings, ceremonies and cultural events rooted in the principle:

I am because we are.

Ubuntu is a micro-community continually created through the presence, care and contribution of everyone who takes part.

My wider community life has included serving for four years on the board of the African Caribbean Community Centre and participating in Liverpool Black Men’s Group. These experiences have taught me as much about the complexity of community as they have about its beauty.

Community is not automatically safe, simple or harmonious. It asks us to practise boundaries, accountability, repair, mutuality and care without sacrificing ourselves or one another.

We were never meant to carry everything alone.

[BUTTON: Discover Ubuntu]

Spirituality and the search for meaning

Spiritual practice has been part of my life for more than twenty years.

I was raised Catholic and later spent many years exploring Buddhism, meditation, energy healing and different expressions of mystical and ancestral spirituality.

I have practised Soto Zen since 2012, studying under as part of the Stonewater Zen Sangha. When I received the Buddhist precepts in 2013, I was given the name Kaishin, meaning Ocean Heart.

That name continues to remind me of the heart’s capacity to become spacious enough to hold grief and joy, stillness and fire, individuality and interconnection.

I am also a Reiki Master and maintain a spiritually plural life shaped by Zen, Catholic and Christian mysticism, Reiki, ancestral devotion and African-diasporic spirituality.

My relationship with Haitian Vodou is that of a non-initiated Vodouisant and lay practitioner, humbly honouring my ancestors and serving the Lwa under the guidance of Mambo Chita Tann as a member of her house or Sosyete, Fos Fe Yo We.

I sometimes describe my spiritual understanding as:

Many names, one ground.

This does not mean that I believe every religion or tradition is identical. Each has its own history, language, community and integrity.

It means that I have encountered the sacred through more than one doorway.

Spirituality is never imposed within my counselling work. Some clients want to explore faith, spiritual practice, religious harm or existential questions; others do not. Both are completely welcome.

Explicitly spiritual services, Reiki, ritual work and sacred preparations are offered separately through Legba’s Gate so that the nature and boundaries of the relationship remain clear.

[BUTTON: Enter Legba’s Gate]

Music, family and ordinary life

I am also a father, partner, friend and musician.

Music has been one of the enduring threads running through my life. I play guitar, perform with bands and feel a particular connection with blues, reggae, rock, neo-soul, soca, hip hop, jazz and the African diasporic roots from which so much of the music I love has grown.

When I am not working, I enjoy spending time with my son, my partner Charlotte and Apollo, our Rottweiler.

You may also find me walking through Princes Park or Sefton Park, lifting weights at the gym, browsing a local market, sitting in an independent café, cooking Caribbean food, going to a gig or becoming absorbed in another book about therapy, spirituality, philosophy or Black history.

I feel restored by forests, hills and the sea. Liverpool is home, while Barbados holds a particularly important place in my heart through family, ancestry and culture. I also adore the natural landscapes of the Highland of Scotland and North Wales.

The different doorways into my work

There are four connected but distinct ways to explore my work:

Therapy

Confidential one-to-one counselling grounded in humanistic, relational, experiential, trauma-aware and decolonial practice.

[BUTTON: Explore Therapy]

Teaching, Training & Facilitation

Counselling education, professional training, racial-trauma work, reflective spaces and facilitated programmes for communities and organisations.

[BUTTON: Explore Teaching, Training & Facilitation]

Ubuntu

Community healing, culture, connection and collective care for Black, Brown, mixed-heritage and other people of colour.

[BUTTON: Discover Ubuntu]

Legba’s Gate

The explicitly spiritual and ritual dimension of my work, including spiritual accompaniment, Reiki, healing circles and sacred preparations.

[BUTTON: Enter Legba’s Gate]

Come as you are

You do not need to have everything worked out before contacting me.

You may be looking for therapy, professional training, community, spiritual support or simply trying to understand which doorway is right for you.

Tell me a little about what has brought you here.

If I believe I can help, I will explain what working together might involve. If another person or service would be more appropriate, I will be honest about that too.

Whatever form my work takes, the intention remains the same:

To meet you with respect.

To make room for complexity.

To recognise the social, cultural, relational and spiritual dimensions of being human.

And to support the possibility of a life lived with greater freedom, connection, meaning and vitality.

You do not need to become somebody else before your life can begin.