I hated going to my therapist every week. Every Wednesday morning I would wake up with a pit of dread in my stomach that would last with me through the day. At the end of my work day I would sigh and get into my car and drive to my therapist’s office.
Things would not improve once I got to my appointment. I would start to explain an issue that I had encountered that week. I would talk about the sexism I faced at work. I would talk about my fears as a Black woman in a racist society. I would talk about my fears of intimacy in a world that was unsafe for women. I would try to figure out why I felt so sick all of the time, why there were some days where I was so tired that my arms and legs felt like they were made of lead. I would look over through tears at my therapist for a sign of understanding, and I would see nothing but confusion. I would blink back my tears, embarrassed. I would talk about something a little less personal. At the end of the session, the only advice offered to me was to come back again the next week. I would leave feeling like I had pulled myself apart, piece by piece, for an audience that could do little more than yawn and then leave me to pick up the pieces.
And every day I went back, for months and months. Why did I go back? I went back because something was wrong with me, and when something was wrong with you, you sought professional help. I went because I had been told time and time again that therapy worked. Therapy helped.
So if therapy wasn’t helping, the problem must be me.
One day, I decided to take a risk and voice my shame to a friend. I confessed that I hated therapy. I hated my therapist. I wasn’t getting any better and I didn’t know if I ever would feel better. I felt guilty and broken and embarrassed.
My friend thought for a few seconds and then said, “It sounds like you need a new therapist.”
The suggestion brought forth immediate denials from me. No, I didn’t need a new therapist. My therapist had already invested so much time on me, and I owed it to him to fix whatever was wrong with me that was stopping him from being able to help me.
My friend looked at me, shocked, and said, “You deserve to have a therapist you like.”
I was, mind you, a full-grown woman in her thirties at the time, and yet I couldn’t quite grasp what she was telling me. Why on earth did I deserve to like my therapist?
My friend continued, “Ijeoma. You are a queer Black woman. You are a single mother. You’ve been going through a lot of shit. Your therapist is a white man who doesn’t seem to listen to you and has no reference point for what you’ve experienced in life. He doesn’t sound like someone you’d want to talk to on a good day, let alone when you are in crisis. I’m pretty sure you are supposed to like your therapist.”
And right then I realized that the reason why I had insisted on going to this therapist over and over and over was because I did not believe that I was supposed to like my therapist, because I did not believe that therapy was ever designed for someone like me. I had devalued myself because traditional therapy had devalued me.
Western therapy and mental health counseling had not been developed for me. The majority of mental-health professionals did not look like me, had not grown up like me, and would never face many of the issues around race, sexuality, or class that I faced every day. I was a fat, queer, poor, Black woman trying to seek connection, healing, and guidance from a straight, white, upper-middle class man who had been trained to help people like him. It was never going to work. And if I was ever going to feel better, I was going to have to start with the idea that I deserved care that made me feel better.
I began the long search for the right therapist. After some trial and error, I finally found a promising candidate. She was not Black—there were no Black therapists in my area. But she was queer, and she had experience working with issues around food insecurity and financial hardship. She openly identified as a feminist. She had spent years counseling survivors of sexual abuse. And when we sat down for our first conversation, she discussed the limits of her work experience. She had worked with Black women for years, she said, but she had never been a Black woman. So while she had become well versed in issues impacting Black women in America, she would never be able to connect as directly to my lived experiences as a Black therapist would. But she would listen to me, and trust my ability to reliably convey what was happening to me, and offer the best counseling she could give. Would that be enough for me, she asked. She understood if it would not.
I immediately started crying with relief. In years of seeing different therapists, I had never once heard from a professional that if therapy wasn’t working for me, it might not be because I wasn’t a good fit. It might not be me that was broken.
I am a whole person. I am a fat, Black, queer woman. I’m a mother. I’m a sexual assault survivor. I’m a writer. I’m an activist. I’m a feminist. In me lies victory, trauma, humor, despair, love, and so much more. And yet, when I tried to engage with traditional practices of mental health—like medicine, therapy, or self-help books—I was never given space to bring my entire self along the journey. Often, the rejection of my whole self in the mental health and self-improvement fields mirrored the same rejection I felt from the broader world. It was constantly reinforced that I was the piece that didn’t fit.
Over the years I have—first with that important therapist and then with my own work with community support networks—come to realize that not only do I need to be seen and accommodated as a whole person in society in order to be healthy, but that it is an obligation of society to make sure that we are seeing and caring for everyone. I have come to see how, in a world built to cater to people who are white, cisgender, abled, straight, and male, not only are systemic oppressions and injustices making people sick, they are also building barriers to any attempts at healing or wellness.
But we all deserve connection. We all deserve care. We all deserve compassion. Radical Belonging is a rare book in which I saw some reflection of myself in every chapter. It is a book that endeavors to hold space for people who have consistently been told that they don’t fit in the framework of mental health and healing. This is a book that affirms that we are not the wrong shape, we are not the wrong size, and we are not broken. It is a book that I wish had been written many therapists ago, but I’m so glad it exists now. I want to reread it with my partner, with my friends, so we can, as Bacon puts it, “restore the connection that was interrupted by a culture of othering.”
I deserve that connection, my community deserves that connection, and you do too.
—Ijeoma Oluo