What This Means For You.

Africana Existential Psychotherapy sits at the heart of my practice. It offers a therapeutic space that recognises how culture, history, and lived experience shape our mental health and sense of self. 

For many Black clients there is understandable mistrust of traditional therapy. Too often, psychological services have overlooked or dismissed Black lived experience. My approach begins by acknowledging this history and creating a space where you can feel heard, respected, and understood. 

But this work is not only about addressing racism and trauma. It is also about recognising strength. Africana traditions carry deep resources for resilience, creativity, spirituality, and survival. Therapy can help reconnect with those resources so that healing becomes not just coping, but reclaiming voice, dignity, and freedom.

​While this perspective centres Black experience, the insights it offers about identity, oppression, resilience, and meaning speak to the struggles many people face in today's world.  

The Philosophy Behind It

Africana Existential Psychotherapy draws on Africana philosophies of existence. These perspectives differ in important ways from European existential traditions. 

European existential thinkers such as Sartre, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard explored themes of freedom, anxiety, and choice largely in abstract and universal terms. Yet these philosophical traditions also emerged within societies shaped by colonialism and racial hierarchy. 

Africana existential thought begins from a different place. It arises from the lived experiences of Black people across the African diaspora—experiences shaped by slavery, colonialism, segregation, and ongoing struggles against anti-Black racism. 

For this reason, Africana existentialism is not abstract philosophy. It is grounded in survival, resistance, community, and creativity. 

In therapy, this means: 

• Personal struggles are rarely separate from wider histories. What you feel today may be connected to deeper cultural and social experiences. 
• Distrust of systems can be a valid response. Rather than treating mistrust as a symptom, we explore it as part of understanding your history and finding new ways forward.  
• Healing draws on cultural resources. Music, spirituality, storytelling, community, and ancestral wisdom can all become resources of strength.  
• The aim therapy is not simply adjustment. It is about reclaiming the ability to live authentically and resist limits imposed by the past. 

Why this matters

Africana Existential Psychotherapy challenges the idea that therapy should be "neutral" or detached from culture. Instead,  it recognises identity, power, and lived experience as central to how we understand ourselves. 

By working together in this way, therapy becomes a space to understand how the past has shaped your life—and how new possibilities for freedom and meaning can emerge. 
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