Books

The book addresses the absence of the exploration of the unconscious experience of privilege within counselling and psychotherapy. It not only presents an exploration of intersectional difference, but also discusses the deeper unconscious understanding of difference, and how privilege plays a role in the construction of otherness. It does so by utilising material from both within the world of psychotherapy, and from the fields of post-colonial theory, feminist discourse, and other theoretical areas of relevance. The book also offers an exploration and understanding of intersectionality and how this impacts upon our conscious and unconscious exploration of privilege and otherness.

With theoretically underpinned and inherently practical psychotherapeutic case studies, this book will serve as a guidebook for counsellors and psychotherapists.

The book is published by Routledge.

As we all live within these interlocking intersectional systems, this therefore suggests that within humanity there is an innate desire to lead and more so to dominate. But what are the psychological impacts of such systems, and how to they impact upon the other both individually and on a collective level?

This book, which follows on from my previous text, Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counsellor and Psychotherapy, presents philosophical ideas as to just how and why supremacy exists, both overtly and in its more subtle versions, some of the psychology behind supremacy and also how it impacts upon our clients and our training courses within counselling and psychotherapy.

This book will also offer means and ways of observing and challenging systems of supremacy as they may appear in our counselling and psychotherapy relationships.

This book challenges our profession, by offering practical ways in which we might diversify our practices, proffering varying perspectives about how to create pathways for greater inclusion in training courses, and examines the many opportunities to explore and expand the ways in which we undertake research. Most importantly, it will encourage the therapist to look at the internalised experiences of colonisation on themselves. The book shows that working creatively with techniques common to counselling and psychotherapy could lead the profession to not only broaden out what it knows and understands of human nature, but through a process of decolonisation, assist in meeting the needs of a wider range of clients.

This book will be invaluable to counsellors, psychotherapists and psychologists working in the helping professions, and to those whose activism drives them to want to make our helping professions more inclusive and equitable.

This book recognises that race in its origins was a social system built out of white European supremacy which held within itself both class and patriarchal structures. It examines the extensive layers of societally embedded racism; from those more obvious and fuelled by hate, to the covert but equally as psychologically destructive, to that which then becomes more deeply internalised by those seen as the racialized other.

Theoretical explorations of how our early life experiences build our relational identity around race and the long-term internalised impacts of racism, be they neurological, psychological, or trauma-based sit central to this exploration. Utilising personal and case material, I detail how working creatively with dreams and other means of accessing the unconscious can be essential pathways for counsellors, psychotherapists, and psychologists, as we work assist our clients (and ourselves) in working through the pain of the internalisations of racist experiences.

This unique text is designed to assist professionals across the helping professions in understanding and working more wholly and effectively with the constructs of race and experiences of racism.

The leading Black male practitioners gathered here describe the thinking, theories and conceptualisations of Blackness and masculinity that underpin their practice, and how they apply these in their meetings with clients: cishet, trans, gay and straight.

Weaving these chapters together is the fundamental belief that how Black men are perceived and perceive themselves, how they behave and how they relate, is fundamentally shaped by the attitudes, expectations and assumptions of others. They are further impacted by Whiteness and the legacies of colonialism, migration and slavery, as well as their personal and intergenerational histories and heritages. Black men are disproportionately represented in our criminal justice and mental health systems, yet are the least likely group in UK society to access therapy, due to both internal defences and external structural and cultural barriers.

Taking an intersectional approach, the book’s contributors write about anger, power, pride, silence, sexualisation, hypermasculinity, identity, shame, fear, love and loss. They draw on European psychotherapeutic theory and social constructionism, but they also, most powerfully, reach to African ancestral beliefs, traditions and healing practices, and bring the stories of their clients to illustrate their work.

These chapters show what therapy can do when the therapist is able to speak with their client in a shared language and with a shared understanding of what it is to be Black and male in the UK today. Black Men, Trauma and Therapy is the companion text to the top-selling book Black Women, Trauma and Therapy, edited by Helen P. George.