Psychology has evolved, and the Brilliance of Black lives and ways have caused it.
On returning to the practice of Psychology, and the brilliance of Black minds and ways making me a better Clinician, perhaps, The Best.
I knew that I would return to the craft at some point. I am a Clinical Psychologist, and a fatal flaw scratched along the inside of the skin of most of that tribe is a refusal to steer away from the cliff that is worrying away at the mental wellness of others. When I was offered a position as an Assistant Professor, sometime in the Summer of 2018, I knew that I would return, or weave a means to continue to practice, somewhere in between my duties to students and my campus community.
Holding room for others, standing alongside as they chose to heal and save themselves, was never a truly heroic act for me. I was always aware of my skill as a therapist, and a teacher of psychology as a practice and science, and I drew equity out of the work. Seeing the progress made by so many others, and even my own past progress in therapy affirmed my sense that I could forever be redeemed, and was worthy of personal emotional Wellness, as all beings were. That I was able to fire rounds out the passenger window of a therapy dyad while so many diverse humans stole a better self from an often brutal and unforgiving past, drew something resembling purpose around parts of my career. Even from the first moment of my first Research Methods course, there was no doubt in my mind that I would dust off my therapy mats and return to that dojo.
Re-entry came in the Winter of 2020. I had been away for over two years, but the question was pitched my way just about every week. I would often wonder, as others had when I would start seeing souls in treatment again. In my time away, I had done more speaking engagements, mentored a number of youngsters, enjoyed the energy of an HBCU campus from the front of a classroom, and observed the ways in which my truest tribe, Black women, men, elders, children, and families, had created and mastered self and other care practices during the pandemic. So-called.
Perhaps it was inevitable, as our family is always confronted with warding off and inoculating generations before or after from some new threat. The young, so long viewed as gleefully vapid and lost, had joined in our Wellness practices, lending their voices. Our elders had invited us all around the fire. Our sisters were calling for rest, and self-focus. Our brothers were taking accountability, and stock, and crying out, in any way they could. It was curious. It was marvelous. It was inevitable.
The approaches to preserving and growing the self were being scrawled across so many shared spaces as the second nature they have always been to our family. It was all brilliant, and chaotic, and the work of we star children, the life language given through our ancestors, to us, the spaces of our consciousness which so long had been left blank now ready for our brush strokes.
I recall several instances just prior to re-entry, having the conversation with other practicing mental health specialists about what so many of them viewed as the danger inherent in organic and lay practices. The rebukes many offered seemed forced, frightened and sometimes smug. I wondered aloud about what I was seeing, all around me. I was invited to participate in wide open and free discussions in new gathering spaces, without rules or pretense, to speak with family about what they had been doing. I found myself both Sage and Student, same day. It was baffling and glorious. Most important to me, was the access. My family, so long denied and neglected with regard to mental health and wellness resources, had used the crisis of the day to create a path toward saving us all. I didn’t care in the least about what sacred intellectuals scrolls had been burned. Not at all. Here was the answer. My family had determined that we would build our own practices, and we would do it ourselves, with our divine energy, and build these spiritual temples in a way to allow for them to always begin person-first, and evolve.
My family, with the world having closed its doors, had created conversational portals around daily wellness, and honoring tradition while away from others, and rethinking our relationship with oppressive and racist workspaces, and redefining our relationship with boundaries within our family settings, and burning away our addictions to our generational curses. Hero teams were being created everywhere, and many of my family were calling for me to grab my blades, and join the fray. I was asked about my next TEDx Talk, and my next Live on Wellness, and when my practice would emerge somewhere in the Citadel, a headquarters for the Work. I knew after a time that I would need to scheme a means of returning, but not until I had taken a knee, and offered my understanding over to the new therapy and approach to Wellness that my family was creating.
In the midst of this pandemic, I was seeing song as salvation. I was seeing dance as a community. I was seeing vanity and self-care as essential therapy practices and community-wide love languages. I was bearing witness to individual affirmations, and shifting and reframing of self-assessments, and group therapy around the reworking of our family and racial identities in the wider context of a world self-immolating. We dug through the chaos of it all. We found ways, over and again, to cope with the brutalizing of Black bodies, and dehumanizing of Black beliefs in public spaces. We, for ourselves, processed and repurposed the justified rage. It seemed, daily, in 2020, that our nation and world family were devoutly committed to severing our tie to sanity. What my family, our family, decided to do was to shatter and then organically grow a new reality. One beginning with our voices, and a refusal to sanitize our spaces, and demand that room be made and held, for all of us. It was the room that stunned me into full belief. We had arrived at the point of no negotiation. We had come to the space between dimensions, the Afrofuturists entry point, where everyone Black could demand to be seen, and spill out all over the canvas. And throw the canvas away, and craft a new one to make the messy life masterpiece. It was most certainly time for me to return to the craft.
The practice of psychology in offices and in treatment facilities had not changed much in my absence. I knew that I initially felt uncomfortable, almost stifled, by the conservative safety of it all. I realized early on that what was boiling within me was the demand that I use my family’s approach to self and other healing. I reached back and in for it, noting all that I had learned. I pulled for all that I had been gifted with. All of those days in 2020 had washed over me as flame, burning away old flesh and tearing my will away from sameness. It forced its way to the very surface of my practice. What all that learning and teaching in 2020 had given me was a type of practice freedom that I had never known. It had tethered itself to me upon re-entry.
Now, I could see what all of that past classroom and text learning had failed to show me. It had failed me in a broad sense. It had kept me from using my family’s approach, drawing an analog of each psychology and treatment concept around a pint or evidence from our lives and existence, to reach individuals and groups. I knew then, that my family hadn’t simply been avoiding therapy. Not alone. It was layered. We, family, had too many of the answers, and no griots and guides who could create and hold a space for us to live out the practices of our Wellness. A true absent resource in those available spaces were those equipped and humble enough to learn what it would take to let we star children paint our sky right there, free, without interruption. None of us had been trained that way. Where my Western learning had authored in me a sense that my duty was to demonstrate for others how to believe other and distract and cope until better arrives, an elder had demanded of me that I commune with others and begin with the notion that we all Create a Great Day. Never passively have one. These lessons were arriving, are arriving, daily.
Re-entry for me, returning to the work of a practicing Clinical Psychologist, has brought with it the blessing of many of my family, and lessons learned of how to better hold the space needed. Creating space for my family is like building a galaxy. It has given me the understanding that I must always refresh my knowledge of the agenda of my family. With the burning away of that old self has come the dual consciousness of the Smith, and the Learner, never the Expert. There is no room for that hubris in our family space. I have returned with the boast that I am The Best Psychologist in The World. The grace and sharing of my family those months back have given me the wings to make that boast and mean it.
Re-entry feels some days like flying or seeing what our children have to teach me of their ways, and what our elders are prepared to share, and we as a family have to save us all. Most important, is my family calling for rest. Them saying to me, and us all, that we need not be those heroes each day. It is work that is setting us free. I came back, re-entered, with the blessing of my family, my divine Black family. I learned that every great problem can be solved, should I simply listen and live with them long enough. Just so.
