Culturally responsive therapy in Liverpool and online
Racism does not only happen in public debates, institutions or isolated incidents.
It can enter the body, shape the nervous system, affect relationships and belonging, and influence how safe we feel to express who we are.
You may have learned to remain watchful in predominantly white spaces, question your own perceptions, make yourself less threatening or more acceptable, work twice as hard to be recognised, or move between different versions of yourself depending upon where you are and who you are with.
You may carry anger, grief, shame or exhaustion that has never been properly witnessed.
You may also be trying to understand who you are beneath the expectations, stereotypes and projections placed upon you.
I offer warm, relational and trauma-informed therapy for adults in Liverpool and online across the UK, with particular experience supporting Black and mixed-heritage people around racial trauma, identity and belonging.
You should not have to leave culturally, racially or spiritually important parts of yourself outside the therapy room.
You do not have to prove that racism affected you
One of the most damaging aspects of racism is the pressure to doubt what you have experienced.
You may find yourself wondering:
Was it really racism? Am I overreacting? Did I misunderstand? Should I have said something? Why am I still affected by it?
Others may minimise what happened, offer a more comfortable explanation or expect you to provide evidence before your emotional response is considered legitimate.
Over time, this can disturb your ability to trust your own perceptions.
In therapy with me, you will not need to prove that racism exists or defend why an experience affected you. We can take your experience seriously while remaining curious about all its complexity.
I will not assume that sharing aspects of your racial or cultural background means that I automatically understand your life. Blackness, mixed heritage and racialisation are not single experiences. Skin tone, culture, class, gender, sexuality, disability, faith, neurodivergence, family history and many other realities shape how each of us encounters the world.
I will listen for the particular meaning of your experience rather than imposing a ready-made explanation upon it.
What is racial trauma?
Racial trauma describes the emotional, psychological, relational and embodied impact of racism and racialised harm.
It may arise through a clearly identifiable event, but it can also develop through repeated exposure to smaller injuries: the comments, assumptions, exclusions, suspicions, humiliations and unequal standards that accumulate over time.
It may involve:
- Racist abuse, harassment, violence or threats.
- Discrimination within education, employment, healthcare or other institutions.
- Being stereotyped, fetishised, criminalised or treated as intellectually inferior.
- Being closely watched, followed, questioned or presumed not to belong.
- Microaggressions and seemingly small encounters that repeatedly communicate that you are different, unsafe or less valued.
- Having racism denied or minimised when you try to speak about it.
- Pressure to remain composed, professional or reassuring while being harmed.
- Witnessing racism directed towards family members, colleagues or members of your community.
- Repeated exposure to racist news, imagery or public debate.
- Intergenerational histories of colonialism, enslavement, migration, displacement and racialised survival.
- Working in environments where traumatic racial histories are continually present.
- The loneliness of being one of very few people of colour in a workplace, classroom or community.
- Conflict, silence or disconnection within families around race, culture and identity.
Not every painful racial experience produces trauma, and not every person responds in the same way. But when the body and mind repeatedly encounter racialised threat, humiliation or exclusion, the effects can be profound.
Racial trauma is not evidence that you are weak or overly sensitive. It is an understandable human response to experiences that threaten dignity, safety, identity and belonging.
How racial trauma can live within you
The effects of racism are not always dramatic or immediately recognisable.
You may appear confident, capable and successful while privately carrying considerable strain.
Racial trauma may show itself through:
- Anxiety, hypervigilance or continually scanning for danger.
- Replaying conversations and questioning what was meant.
- Anger that feels overwhelming, forbidden or difficult to express safely.
- Numbness, shutdown, exhaustion or emotional detachment.
- Difficulty sleeping or switching off after a racialised encounter.
- Physical tension, headaches, digestive difficulties or other bodily stress responses.
- Shame about your appearance, hair, skin tone, voice, name, culture or family.
- Perfectionism and the belief that you must be exceptional to be treated fairly.
- Code-switching and continually monitoring how you speak, move or present yourself.
- Making yourself smaller, quieter, less angry or less visibly different.
- Fear of confirming a stereotype.
- Distrust of institutions, authority figures or predominantly white spaces.
- Isolation from colleagues, friends or communities who do not understand.
- Feeling pressure to educate others while also protecting yourself.
- Guilt about succeeding, resting or distancing yourself from harmful environments.
- Difficulties with intimacy, vulnerability or feeling fully known.
- Disconnection from culture, ancestry, spirituality or community.
- A painful uncertainty about where you belong.
These responses often began as intelligent attempts to protect you.
Remaining watchful may have helped you recognise danger. Code-switching may have helped you navigate spaces where being fully yourself carried a cost. Perfectionism may have developed because mistakes were not judged equally. Silence may have protected your livelihood, education or relationships.
Therapy does not begin by shaming these strategies. It begins by understanding why they became necessary—and asking whether you can now have greater safety, choice and freedom.
The exhaustion of continually adapting
Racism often requires those affected by it to perform additional emotional and psychological labour.
You may have to calculate whether it is safe to challenge something, decide whether an incident is worth the consequences of reporting, manage other people’s defensiveness or find language gentle enough that the person who harmed you does not feel accused.
You may be expected to turn a painful encounter into a teaching opportunity.
You may feel responsible for representing an entire race or community, while knowing that any mistake could be judged more harshly.
You may move between different cultural worlds and constantly assess which parts of yourself are welcome.
This continual adjustment can create a profound weariness.
Therapy can offer a space where you do not have to reassure anybody, translate every aspect of your experience or make your pain comfortable for somebody else.
You are allowed to be tired.
You are allowed to be angry.
You are allowed to be uncertain about what you need.
You are allowed to want more than simply becoming better at enduring what harms you.
Healing is not learning to tolerate racism more quietly.
Mixed heritage, identity and the question of belonging
For mixed-heritage people, racial identity can carry particular complexity.
You may have been told that you are not Black enough, not white enough or somehow required to choose between parts of yourself. Other people may define you differently depending upon your appearance, the environment or what is convenient for them.
You may feel deeply connected to more than one heritage while still experiencing uncertainty about whether you have the right to claim either.
Family members may have very different experiences of race. A white parent or relative may love you but struggle to understand what happens to you in the world. Conversations about racism, colourism or identity may be avoided, minimised or treated as a rejection of the white side of your family.
There may also be grief around cultural knowledge, language, family history or community connections that were interrupted or never passed down.
Questions such as these can carry enormous emotional weight:
- Who am I?
- Where do I belong?
- Who gets to decide what I am?
- Am I allowed to claim all of my heritage?
- Why do I feel different within my own family?
- Which parts of myself are safe to express?
- Can I belong without dividing or diminishing myself?
As a mixed-heritage man from a working-class African-Caribbean, Barbadian and Irish family, I know personally that mixedness is not simply a harmonious blending of cultures. It can contain beauty, richness and connection, but also contradiction, loss, ambiguity and the experience of being interpreted differently wherever you go.
Your identity does not need to be made simpler for somebody else’s comfort.
Therapy can provide room to explore what each part of your heritage means to you, what may have been lost or silenced and how you might belong more fully to yourself.
Racialised shame and the parts of ourselves we learned to hide
Racism does not only tell us that we are unsafe. It can teach us that something about us is inherently wrong.
You may have learned to dislike features of your face or body, distance yourself from your accent, hair, family or community, or feel embarrassed by cultural and spiritual traditions that were treated as primitive, excessive or inappropriate.
You may have received messages that you were too loud, angry, sensitive, intimidating, emotional or difficult—or that success and acceptance depended upon remaining agreeable and unthreatening.
These messages can become internalised. Even after leaving the original environment, we may continue policing ourselves from within.
You might criticise the parts of yourself that most need protection. You might feel shame about your anger while overlooking the violation that produced it. You might judge yourself for code-switching while forgetting what it helped you survive.
A decolonial therapeutic approach asks us to become curious about where these judgements came from.
Whose voice taught you that this part of you was unacceptable?
Whose standard of respectability are you still trying to meet?
What did belonging appear to require you to sacrifice?
What might become possible if you no longer viewed yourself through the eyes of those who misunderstood or diminished you?
The aim is not to replace one rigid identity with another. It is to help you develop a relationship with yourself that is spacious enough to hold your complexity without shame.
Anger, grief and violated dignity
Racial trauma can involve enormous anger.
Anger at what happened. Anger at not being believed. Anger at yourself for freezing, remaining silent or thinking of the perfect response too late. Anger at institutions that protect their reputation more carefully than the people they have harmed.
For many Black and mixed-heritage people, expressing anger can also feel dangerous. Racial stereotypes may mean that understandable anger is interpreted as aggression, hostility or instability.
You may therefore turn it against yourself, suppress it until you become numb or release it only when it can no longer be contained.
In our work, anger does not need to be treated as a problem simply because it is uncomfortable.
Sometimes anger is violated dignity trying to speak.
We can listen for what your anger knows: the boundary crossed, the value betrayed, the protection required or the change that needs to happen.
Alongside anger, there may also be grief.
Grief for the safety you should have had. For opportunities denied or relationships damaged. For histories that were erased, families separated and cultural knowledge interrupted. For the energy spent surviving environments that never fully recognised you.
Therapy cannot undo these realities. But anger and grief become less isolating when they no longer have to be carried alone or hidden in order to protect others.
The body remembers what the mind is asked to dismiss
You may understand intellectually that you are safe while your body remains prepared for threat.
A look, tone of voice, workplace meeting, police presence or apparently innocent question can activate memories and expectations shaped by earlier experiences.
Your breathing may change. Your body may tense. You may become intensely alert, lose access to words, feel an urge to leave or find yourself becoming unusually compliant.
These are not signs that you have failed to move on. They are nervous-system responses developed through experience.
Our work may involve gently noticing:
- Where racialised stress is held in your body.
- What situations activate fight, flight, freeze, fawn or shutdown.
- How to recognise activation before it becomes overwhelming.
- What helps you return to a greater sense of presence and choice.
- Which people, places and practices help your body experience safety.
- How rest, movement, breath, creativity, nature, spirituality and community support regulation.
- How to respond compassionately rather than turning the reaction into another reason for self-criticism.
We will approach this carefully and collaboratively. You will not be pushed into bodily practices or asked to relive traumatic experiences before there is sufficient trust and stability.
The purpose is not to train your body to accept harmful conditions. It is to help you recover choice, connection and a more trustworthy relationship with yourself.
Culture, community, spirituality and ancestral meaning
Individual therapy takes place between two people, but healing does not belong to the individual alone.
Culture, family, friendship, community, music, food, spirituality, creativity, political action and relationships with ancestry can all be sources of identity and restoration.
For some people, reconnecting with cultural or ancestral traditions can offer belonging and meaning. For others, these relationships may be complicated by family conflict, religious harm, displacement, limited knowledge or uncertainty about what can be authentically reclaimed.
There is no culturally correct way that you must heal.
Decolonial therapy should not demand that you adopt a spiritual practice, idealise ancestry or perform a particular version of Blackness. Nor should it assume that every tradition or community relationship has been safe.
Instead, we can explore what genuinely nourishes you.
This may include:
- Your relationship with family, heritage and community.
- Cultural practices that bring affirmation, joy or connection.
- Experiences of faith, spirituality, ancestors or the sacred.
- Religious or cultural wounds.
- The meaning held in music, movement, food, language, art and storytelling.
- The communities in which you can exhale and feel recognised.
- Grief for traditions, histories or relationships that feel inaccessible.
- The forms of belonging you wish to create for yourself and others.
Where spirituality matters to you, it can be welcomed without being imposed. Where it does not, it need not become part of our work.
Healing may involve reconnecting with what racism attempted to devalue. It may also involve releasing expectations—including cultural expectations—that do not allow you to live freely.
What therapy with me may involve
Our work will be shaped by who you are and what you need. There is no fixed racial-trauma programme through which everybody must pass.
Therapy may involve:
- Making sense of particular racist or racialised experiences.
- Recognising trauma responses and developing ways to remain grounded.
- Rebuilding trust in your perceptions after experiences of denial or gaslighting.
- Exploring racialised shame, internalised racism or colourism.
- Finding safer and more truthful ways to experience and express anger.
- Grieving losses that have not been adequately recognised.
- Understanding code-switching, perfectionism and overachievement as protective strategies.
- Exploring identity, mixed heritage and cultural belonging.
- Examining relationships affected by differences in race, culture or power.
- Developing boundaries around harmful people, workplaces or institutions.
- Reconnecting with the body after repeated experiences of racialised threat.
- Exploring cultural, communal, creative or spiritual sources of support.
- Becoming less governed by the need to prove your worth.
- Considering what dignity, rest, resistance, joy and liberation mean in your life.
I will bring my professional knowledge and lived experience, but I will not presume that my relationship with race is the same as yours.
Our task is to understand your particular world—and to create a relationship in which you can be more fully present without shrinking, performing or translating yourself at every turn.
Beyond individual therapy
Racial trauma does not exist only within individuals. It is also carried within groups, workplaces, institutions and communities.
Alongside individual therapeutic work, I have facilitated reflective groups, healing spaces, workshops and programmes concerning racial trauma, identity, belonging and collective wellbeing.
This has included facilitating circles for staff of colour at National Museums Liverpool, including people working in the emotionally demanding context of the International Slavery Museum.
I have also co-facilitated racial-trauma workshops and training with wellbeing consultant and coach Saeed Olayiwola, as well as delivering the Radical Resilience programme together for leaders, health workers, diversity and inclusion practitioners, changemakers and community activists of colour.
Through Ubuntu, the Liverpool-based grassroots collective I founded, I facilitate healing circles, retreats and community wellbeing spaces rooted in collective care and the African humanist principle:
I am because we are.
This experience informs my understanding that racial healing cannot rest entirely upon the person who has been harmed. Organisations must examine their cultures, relationships and use of power. Communities also need spaces for truth-telling, rest, joy, affirmation and mutual care.
I offer workshops, training, reflective practice and facilitated spaces for organisations and communities seeking to engage this work with depth and integrity.
Healing without erasing the reality of racism
Therapy cannot promise that racism will disappear from your life.
It cannot make an unjust workplace fair, prevent every act of discrimination or remove the need for social and political change.
It should not teach you that peace depends upon becoming untouched by what happens.
What therapy can offer is a space to recover parts of yourself that racism has required you to suppress, doubt or abandon.
It may help you:
- Trust your perceptions more fully.
- Respond with greater choice rather than only from survival.
- Recognise when a burden does not belong to you.
- Set boundaries without interpreting self-protection as failure.
- Make room for anger without being consumed by it.
- Grieve without believing that grief makes you weak.
- Rest without needing to earn it through exhaustion.
- Receive support instead of always carrying others.
- Reconnect with culture, creativity, spirit, community and joy.
- Develop a sense of identity that is not governed by the racial gaze.
- Live with greater freedom, dignity and belonging.
The purpose is not to make you more successfully adaptable to an unhealthy world.
It is to help you remain connected to your humanity while deciding how you wish to live within it.
You are more than what happened to you—and more than what the world has projected upon you.
Beginning therapy
Reaching out can feel vulnerable, especially if previous professionals have misunderstood, minimised or pathologised your experience.
You do not need to explain your entire history in your first message.
You can simply tell me a little about what is bringing you to therapy, whether you would prefer to meet in Liverpool or online, and anything important you would like me to understand from the beginning.
We can then consider whether I might be the right person to support you.
This page particularly centres Black and mixed-heritage people because these are communities with whom I have significant personal and professional connection. My wider counselling practice welcomes adults of every racial and cultural background.
Whoever you are, we will approach race, culture and identity in the way that is meaningful to your life.
You should not have to divide yourself in order to belong.