Racial Injustice IS A Mental Health Issue

Racial Injustice IS A Mental Health Issue

Mental Health & Wellness • June 7, 2020

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Good morning friend,

You, like me, are probably angry and heartbroken about the state of our country.

Angry and heartbroken not only from the recent news about racial injustice. The racist murders of Armaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor. But also enraged by the hateful rhetoric spewed and lack of leadership around these events from the highest office in the land.

This week has been a hard week for many of us as we question what kind of world we live in these days where our Black family members, friends, and neighbors have to live in a country that essentially state sanctions their murders.

1. These recent weeks have been a reminder of so many things.
2. Oh, and of course, we’re dealing with all of this against the backdrop of a global pandemic, the likes of which most living has never known.
3. But White silence is violence, too.
4. Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
5. Self-Care Support If You’re A Person Of Color:
6. Strong POC voices to follow and learn/unlearn from now:
7. Additional multimedia resources if you want to learn about White privilege, White Supremacy, Racism, and what you can do to help:
8. Understanding Racial Trauma Through Social Justice-Informed Therapy
9. Please understand: I don’t have the answers.

These recent weeks have been a reminder of so many things.

A reminder that the ancient wound of racism, supremacy, and violence (in thought and in action) is wide open and still festering in this country.

A reminder that our current President does not stand (nor take a stand) firmly rooted in esteemable morals and good judgment. (And let’s be real, that’s putting it extremely mildly).

A reminder that even our family, friend, and acquaintance groups may be divided in themselves about how (if at all) to respond or react to this.

These past few weeks have been a reminder of so much personal and collective pain, a reminder of so many deeply entrenched, destructive systemic issues that seem to have no solution.

Oh, and of course, we’re dealing with all of this against the backdrop of a global pandemic, the likes of which most living has never known.

I had a blog post scheduled to go out this week all about boundaries and the downside to being a high-functioning overachiever.

That post is on pause and, depending on events and the coming weeks, I may even delay the launch of my course. 

I don’t want to draw attention away from the most important issues right now: racial injustice, white supremacy, and the horror of what it means to be a POC in this country.

And honestly, my voice is not the most educated, relevant, or important voice to talk about this, even in my own blog post. 

I’m a privileged White woman. 

This is not my time to speak up, it’s my time to listen, to learn, and to amplify and elevate other more marginalized voices who have powerful and important things to say.

White apathy is lethal and what’s also true is that we can use our voices and rage in ways that might unintentionally harm and silence others when we’re doing so. 

But White silence is violence, too.

And so I’m speaking up, but hopefully in a way that elevates and supports. I may get it wrong, but I’m willing to try.

So to that end, what I want to do in this post is to share a curated list of activists, thought leaders, and resources (organized by topic category) if you, like me, are hungry to learn more and do more to play a part in the undoing of White supremacy and brutal racism that is woven into the fabric of this country.

And for anyone who questions why a therapist might share such a “non-neutral” “non-clinical” blog post, know that social justice issues are INEXTRICABLY linked to mental health because therapy clients do not live in a vacuum.

They are shaped and formed by society, culture, and context. Social justice issues ARE clinical issues, full stop.

Please, don’t stay silent, be willing to be uncomfortable, and weave the undoing of White supremacy into your personal growth work as much as you might any other mental health issue.

Self-Care Support If You’re A Person Of Color:

• 4 Self-Care Tips for People of Color After Charlottesville (from Teen Vogue in 2017 but yes, it’s still relevant).
• Radical Self-Care.
• 5 Self-Care Practices Black People Can Use While Coping With Trauma.
• How racism impacts our mental health: a podcast episode by Dr. Joy Harden Bradford of Therapy for Black Girls.

Strong POC voices to follow and learn/unlearn from now:

• @laylafsaad⁠
• @decolonizingtherapy⁠
• @theconsciouskid⁠
• @rachel.cargle⁠
• @thegreatunlearn
• @zenchangeangel
• @ckyourprivilege
• @showingupforracialjustice
• @refinedtherapy
• @moemotivate
• @jessicawilson.msrd⁠
• @blackandembodied

Additional multimedia resources if you want to learn about White privilege, White Supremacy, Racism, and what you can do to help:

• The Charleston Syllabus – compiled by Chad Williams, Keisha N. Blain, Melissa Morrone, Ryan P. Randall, Cecily Walker, this is a truly phenomenal and comprehensive list of multimedia resources.
• Addressing Race And Racism With Young Children – A terrific list compiled by Lovery, the children’s toy and education company I fervently love.
• “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Peggy McIntosh, Ph.D. An article I read in grad school which began my journey into understanding White privilege.
• White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo: I just downloaded this to Kindle since they’re sold out of hard copies.
• Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad: Again, sold out of hardcopy but I downloaded the Kindle version.

And friends, I want to learn from you: what other resources would you add to this list? What other strong and important POC voices and activists would you recommend that I/we follow?

In times like these, it’s important that we take care of ourselves, and that we take care of each other in whatever ways seem possible for each of us.

We are living in extraordinarily challenging times plainly seeing and feeling painful, social systemic wounds that, perhaps, many of us with privilege haven’t had to confront or live with so acutely yet.

Understanding Racial Trauma Through Social Justice-Informed Therapy

When you enter therapy carrying not just your individual trauma but the collective weight of systemic oppression—the hypervigilance from being Black in America, the grief from watching another murder trending on social media, the exhaustion from explaining your humanity to those who should already see it—your therapist must understand that if you’re a black sheep, here’s why you should stand with Black Lives Matter because recognizing patterns of systemic abuse in any form prepares us to identify and interrupt them everywhere.

Social justice-informed therapy recognizes that your mental health doesn’t exist in a vacuum separate from the society that shaped it. Your therapist understands that treating your anxiety without addressing the racist encounters causing it, or working on your depression while ignoring the systemic barriers crushing your hope, would be clinical malpractice.

They see how racial trauma compounds with individual trauma, how microaggressions accumulate into complex PTSD, how code-switching exhausts your authentic self, and how gaslighting about racism mirrors the gaslighting in abusive relationships.

The therapeutic work involves both individual healing and systemic awareness. Your therapist helps you process the unique burden of racial trauma—the inherited grief, the anticipatory anxiety, the complicated anger that’s both justified and policed.

They validate that your hypervigilance isn’t paranoia but an adaptive response to real danger, that your exhaustion isn’t weakness but the toll of navigating hostile systems, that your rage isn’t “too much” but an appropriate response to injustice. Together, you develop strategies for surviving and thriving within oppressive systems while maintaining hope for change.

Through this work, therapy becomes a radical act of resistance—refusing to pathologize normal responses to abnormal circumstances, refusing to treat symptoms while ignoring causes, refusing to separate personal healing from collective liberation.

Your therapist holds space for both your individual story and the larger narrative of systemic oppression, understanding that true mental health requires not just personal coping strategies but societal transformation.

The goal isn’t to help you adjust to injustice but to support your psychological wellbeing while you work toward a more just world.

Please understand: I don’t have the answers.

Instead, I join you in the question of how to best help in the small ways I can, including continuing to own and understand my own White privilege, elevating voices that are relevant and important, and taking personal action to eradicate racial injustice and raise an anti-racist White daughter, and to do this as I labor in my daily life and tend to my corner of the world in Berkeley, California.

This post is less an article than it is a letter from me to you, wanting you to know that I’m in it with you, that I’m thinking of you, that I have a couple of resources that might feel helpful for you.

But most of all to let you know that we’re all in this together. I’ll keep trying to do what I can to be of support to you as these weeks, months, and years unfold.

And so, I wonder:

How are you doing? How’s your heart been in this past week? What and who has been supporting you in moving through your feelings about the times?

Leave me a message in the comments below. I’d love to know how you’re doing in your corner of the world.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

PS: And please, if you do not support Black Lives Matter, unsubscribe from my articles. Thanks.

Related Reading

• What does it mean to be an ambitious, upwardly mobile woman from a relational trauma background?
• Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections
• Trauma and Relationships: When Your Professional Strengths Become Your Relationship Blindspots

Both/And: Progress and Pain Can Share the Same Timeline

Driven women often approach healing the way they approach everything else: with goals, timelines, and measurable benchmarks. They want to know how long therapy will take, what “done” looks like, and whether they’re doing it right. I understand the impulse — it’s the same competence that built their careers. But healing from relational trauma doesn’t follow a project management timeline, and treating it like one can become its own form of avoidance.

Aisha is a corporate attorney who, after eight months of therapy, told me she was frustrated with her progress. “I still got triggered last week,” she said, as though a single difficult moment erased months of genuine change. What Aisha hadn’t noticed — because she was measuring against perfection — was that the trigger resolved in hours instead of days, that she reached out for support instead of isolating, and that she could name what happened in her body instead of just pushing through.

Both/And means Aisha can be making real, measurable progress and still have moments where the old patterns surface. It means healing isn’t a straight line, and a setback doesn’t erase the foundation she’s built. For driven women, this is perhaps the most radical reframe: that effectiveness in recovery isn’t about eliminating hard days. It’s about changing your relationship to them when they come.

The Systemic Lens: Why the Healing Industry Often Fails Driven Women

The wellness and self-improvement industries generate billions of dollars annually by selling driven women solutions to problems those industries have no interest in solving. Heal your trauma — but not so thoroughly that you stop buying products. Practice self-care — within the narrow window your 60-hour work week allows. Find balance — in a system designed to extract maximum output from every waking hour.

For driven women pursuing genuine healing, the systemic barriers are real. Therapy is expensive, and many of the most effective trauma treatments require multiple sessions per week — a financial and logistical impossibility for many. Insurance covers a fraction of what’s needed, and the most skilled trauma therapists rarely accept insurance at all. Workplace cultures punish vulnerability, making it difficult to prioritize mental health without career risk. Even the language of healing has been co-opted: “boundaries” becomes a buzzword stripped of its clinical meaning, and “doing the work” becomes a social media aesthetic rather than the slow, unglamorous process it actually is.

In my practice, I name these systemic barriers because pretending they don’t exist places an unfair burden on the woman doing the healing. Your recovery isn’t happening in a supportive cultural container. It’s happening despite a culture that simultaneously tells you to heal and makes it structurally difficult to do so. Acknowledging that isn’t defeatism — it’s realism, and it’s the starting point for building a recovery plan that accounts for the actual conditions of your life.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

How to Begin Healing: Addressing Racial Injustice as the Mental Health Crisis It Is

In my work with clients who are living at the intersection of racism and mental health, I want to be direct about something: what you’re experiencing isn’t an overreaction, and it isn’t simply stress management issue. When your nervous system is chronically activated by discrimination, racial microaggressions, or the vicarious trauma of witnessing injustice repeatedly, you are carrying a real and legitimate psychological burden. The path forward starts with naming it accurately — not as a personal failing or sensitivity, but as an injury sustained in an unjust system. That naming is itself a clinical act, and it matters.

Healing from racial trauma is not the same as healing from other trauma, and the clinical approach needs to reflect that difference. It requires a therapist who doesn’t just acknowledge racism conceptually but understands, from training and ideally lived experience, how it lives in the body, how it shapes the therapeutic relationship itself, and how dominant culture can be baked into treatment models in ways that do more harm than good. Finding that alignment is not a luxury — it’s a prerequisite for the work to be safe and effective.

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is one modality I’d highlight for racial trauma specifically, because racial trauma is so often held in the body — in the hypervigilance that activates when you walk into a room and assess it for safety, in the way your jaw tightens before a performance review, in the exhaustion of code-switching across an entire workday. SE works directly with those physical manifestations of trauma rather than asking you to narrate or analyze them. For many clients, it’s the first treatment that actually reaches where the pain lives.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) can also be powerful for processing specific incidents of racial trauma — the meeting where you were talked over, the performance review that felt like it assessed your identity more than your work, the interaction that left you questioning your own perception. EMDR helps the brain reprocess those experiences so they stop carrying the same emotional charge, so you can think about what happened without being flooded back into it.

Community and collective healing deserve an equal place alongside individual therapy. The isolation that often accompanies racial trauma — particularly for women of color in predominantly white professional spaces — is itself wounding. Peer support, affinity groups, and community with people who share your experience provide something that one-on-one therapy can’t fully replace: the experience of not being alone, of having your reality reflected back to you by people who know it from the inside. If you’re navigating this largely alone right now, finding community is a clinical recommendation, not just a social one.

I’d also encourage you to take stock of what you can actually control in your environment and what you can’t, and to be deliberate about what you’re able to change. That might mean advocating for change within your organization, setting clearer limits on what you absorb from news and social media, or making decisions about where your energy goes and where it doesn’t. Connecting with a therapist who gets it is one of the most important decisions you can make for yourself right now.

You deserve care that sees all of you — including the parts of your experience that are shaped by structural inequality, not personal pathology. Therapy with Annie is a space where your full humanity is welcome, where your experiences of injustice are taken seriously, and where you don’t have to educate your therapist before you can get to the work. You’ve been holding too much. You don’t have to do it alone.

What I see in my work with women of color is a particular and underacknowledged exhaustion: the exhaustion of being professional in environments that are not designed with them in mind, of managing white colleagues’ discomfort around race, of doing the emotional labor of educating the people around them while also managing their own grief and anger. This is a real and compounding burden, and it deserves to be named as such — not dismissed as oversensitivity, and not just absorbed as one more thing to manage.

For the driven women reading this who are doing their own racial justice learning: go at a pace that’s honest. Discomfort is appropriate; overwhelm is a sign to slow down and integrate. The goal isn’t performative fluency. It’s genuine change — in how you see, what you notice, and what you choose to do with what you notice. If you want support in this work, including finding a therapist who is experienced in working with race-related trauma, I’d encourage you to start at my connect page.

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