‘We all walk with privilege and otherness’

Can you tell me a bit about your background and what ultimately inspired you to pursue a career in psychotherapy?

My route into psychotherapy was not a direct one. After leaving school at 16 and spending a couple of years in college not doing particularly much, I ended up working in the Royal Air Force and then taking on a job within the Government. It was after this that I ended up doing my own therapy, post the end of a relationship. I decided, and was encouraged by my therapist, to do a foundation year course in counselling at a local centre. This foundation course – and in particular the lecture aspects of it – encouraged me to actually continue training and to undertake a four-year postgraduate diploma and then a Masters on top of that and become a psychotherapist.

As for my background, I am actually of Caribbean parents. My father is Jamaican and my mother from Trinidad. My father served in the RAF during the World War and stayed in the UK, and my mother arrived as part of the Windrush. I am first generation born in this country of immigrants.

What was your experience of training as a psychotherapist like, both in general and as someone from a minoritised background?

Like many minorities, my whole identity – that of being a black African-Caribbean man – was not really discussed or acknowledged at all on my training course. When I trained we had perhaps two hours out of a four-year course where issues of diversity and difference were discussed, with the only non-white teacher on the course, and she was actually brought in from outside.

My experience on the course as a whole though was fairly positive. I enjoyed the experiential aspects of the training, aspects of play using sand tray, drawing, visualisations, those sorts of things. But I did find myself unable to bring aspects of my identity to the trainings out of a pre-learned means of adaptation, things that I had learned back out in the wider world.

You juggle multiple roles…as a psychotherapist, course leader and senior lecturer; what do each of these roles entail?

In some ways, all these roles are like parts of a watch in that although they are distinct in their own ways, they sort of overlap and one feeds into the other, into the other and so on. My work as a psychotherapist involves me working two days a week with my clients, seeing a wide range of clients from differing backgrounds, be they from the dominant culture or from minority groups.

My work at the University of Brighton is a slightly different one, in that I am the course leader for students who are on a postgraduate course in humanistic counselling and psychotherapy where they learn a lot about phenomenology and existentialism. My work as an author and as a presenter and so on means that I get to combine all these roles, all of my ideas that have come out of these roles, and build a narrative around intersectional approaches to counselling and psychotherapy which can then filter through back into my work as a therapist and also into the trainings that I am blessed to work upon.

You've written and spoken on issues of race, difference and intersectionality in counselling and psychotherapy; can you tell me about this and where your drive and interest for this stems from?

The drive to actually write about issues of difference and diversity, I now realise, goes all the way back to my time in the military. When I was in the Royal Air Force I spent four years serving in Berlin and it was during this period of time that I discovered and read voraciously a number of books around civil rights in the United States that I manage to obtain from visiting the American sector of the city. The ideas that were contained within these texts have always stayed with me and have influenced the idea that an intersectional approach to issues of race and difference moves us as a profession away from this more tokenistic idea of difference to one which becomes more inclusive, and also allows for more complexity in how we work with difference and diversity and otherness. The issues that I discuss are as much about privilege and otherness and how they sit within each one of us in turn, as they are about the ways in which our intersecting identities then make us far more complex and more human in our complexity than the pre-descried categorisations, such as the Equalities Act 2010, would have us all believe.

What has your experience of navigating a career as a psychotherapist in a predominantly white profession been like, and are there any particular challenges you've experienced?

The obvious ones are the systemic racism within the profession. People like to suggest that these are not there and yet if psychotherapy is a mirror of the wider environment, then of course there are going to be pockets of resistance or racism and of white supremacy that reside within psychotherapy and within psychotherapist, irrespective of their colour. Barriers that I have encountered have included marginalisation, scapegoating, racialised putdowns about myself and my work. But I have to say given the sheer range of difference and diversity that there is within the profession, there has also been a huge number of activists and allies who have come out of the woodwork especially in the last five years, and have helped and walked alongside myself as I have marched up the ladder in my career.

Tell me about your books.

I currently have two books published within the profession. The first one, Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy, is as it says and explores how we all walk with privilege and otherness, how they form core parts of our identities, and how psychotherapy using creative techniques can often work with the internalisations of microaggressions and other ways in which we may feel marginalised and excluded. The second book, the Psychology of Supremacy, takes this perhaps a stage further and looks at supremacy as a phenomenological construct that we all either have a relationship with or have internalised in some way, often from a very early age and again uses creative techniques, in these cases sand play and so on, to explore the deeper unconscious internalisations of supremacy and look at how we might work with these and move these on.

Can you share a piece of work or research that has really changed or shaped your practice?

It would have to be my own doctoral research which I completed in 2017, which again was about privilege and otherness and was entitled Being the Other. That piece of research, which involved interviewing 25 people about their experiences of being the other, helped to frame many of the ideas which I am still researching to this day and I am developing and moving forward with.

What advice would you give to other aspiring psychotherapists from minority backgrounds?

If I was to offer three core pieces of advice:

(1) Carefully research courses which offer scope and space for your particular form of minority difference.

(2) Find groups which sit either within the student cohort or alongside the teaching environment, whereby you can feel safe enough to actually have the difficult conversations that you might need to have whilst walking through areas of marginalisation in your courses and experiencing the microaggressions which will inevitably come within those.

(3) Do not be afraid to bring whatever activist part of your previous lives to your work as counsellors and psychotherapists. Do not leave those outside.