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The Difficulty Finding a Therapist as an Interracial Couple
An interracial couple’s journey to find a competent, unbiased, baggage-free therapist only highlights how much harder it is for Black people to find mental health help
My mother had a theory about therapists. She surmised they go into the profession chasing solutions to their own psychological demons. When she first told me this, it seemed confusing and contradictory given that therapists are the ones tasked with helping the rest of us to solve our mental health problems. Based on my recent experiences, my mom’s theory wasn’t completely off base.
Let’s be clear, I am open-minded about therapy. But my mother’s words resonated more than ever when I started marital counseling. I knew going in that our situation was “complicated.” We are a biracial couple, we live in the South, my husband is divorced, and there is an age difference. My husband suggested going to couples therapy from the onset of our marriage to keep our marriage solid. But the construct of who we were, in whole or in parts, consistently conjured up emotional ghosts and biases in the therapists who treated us. I quickly learned that it’s difficult for us to find a qualified, competent, unbiased, and baggage-free therapist. Unearthing the person who checked all those boxes for us was comparable to finding a unicorn with a rainbow-colored horn.
We tried more than a handful of therapists at the outset of our marriage. One of them was a middle-aged, White woman. I saw her for an individual session first. Her advice resonated with me although I did not initially reveal to her that my husband was White. But in person with him, things changed. Her questions were riddled with assumptions during our first couples session. “How are you coping with your wife’s family’s problem with your race?” she asked. My husband and I looked at each other perplexed because we’d never suggested that was an issue because it wasn’t. The next question was about our age difference and lack of compatibility, which was another baseless assumption. After that session, we agreed not to see any more White, middle-aged female therapists. In our daily walk, we had had our fill of older, White women acting threatened by me being married to…
