Doctoral Psychology Intern

Pronouns: Any

Education:
BA, Willamette University
MS, University of Florida
PhD, University of Florida (expected 2024)

Professional Interests: Throughout my journey, I’ve gained a clearer understanding that the means through which Black suffering can be articulated are often forced to be made “sensible” to the emotional needs of others. As it turns out, our ability to think comprehensively and critically about navigating this World (and institution) as a Black person is often hijacked by a type of thinking that both constrains and conceals the stakes of understanding that the violence of slavery shares essential aspects with the violence that structures our modern lives. As such, my professional interests are most concerned with wondering, “What would it require to develop the mental fortitude to resist the emotional hydraulics that insist upon the redemption of white people (and more specifically, nonblack people) and the country writ large?”

In practice, my attempts to pursue this inquiry have taken root in varied contexts. Not limited to my academic and clinical training, these attempts have included facilitating support, process, and consciousness raising groups for Black students and Black people in general, individual therapy with Black clients, instructing courses at the undergraduate level on how the worldview of “psycho-pathologization” (determining what is “ab/normal”) depends on antiblackness to exist, providing workshops related to Black wellness within violent institutions, conducting research and writing scholarship, and providing anti-racist trainings to nonblack people. However, one undercurrent has remained consistent: I believe that Black people are worthy of wellness, even though the world and other people’s own psychic investments are enabled and driven by the categorical evacuation of Blackness from personhood (even and most perniciously when the so-called “well-intentioned” announce a mission statement of diversity, equity, and inclusion in an effort to assuage their guilt!).

Theoretical Orientation and Therapy Approach: Often, we’ve been taught in some way to shrink ourselves to literally survive people and spaces that hold power over us. My general approach to therapy attempts to understand our behaviors, thoughts, and experiences as survival strategies that we’ve learned in order to survive both people and spaces. From the perspective that the conditions under which we live diverge along gradations of power and constitute how we can access spaces to breathe, my therapeutic approach relies upon certain streams of Black feminism to inform my work with you. In this way, I try to attend to the ways in which power and violence structure our day-to-day experiences and ways of negotiating our lives. Against the backdrop of power and violence, I draw from interpersonal process therapy to bring attention to certain patterns that might come up during our work together and attempt to foster curiosity to explore the context(s) of their function. During our time together, I hope we might co-create a space where you don’t need to shrink, shift, or change yourself, but instead might feel as though your experiences can be seen and that you might feel heard.