Therapy for People of Color
Depth-oriented psychoanalytic psychotherapy for adults. Telehealth throughout New York State.
The Double Life
There is the self you are, and the self you manage — the one that walks into the room already accounted for, already read, already assigned a meaning you did not write.
You learned early to watch yourself from the outside, to see through the eyes of people who had decided in advance what they were looking at. That second sight never turns off. It is not paranoia and it is not sensitivity. It’s a mechanism resulting from the false racial narratives imposed on you—and it costs you something every day to maintain.
45-minute sessions, weekly, by secure video anywhere in New York State.
What was imposed on you can become the lens through which you watch yourself. You learn to anticipate, monitor, and adjust before anyone else has to ask.
The work is getting free of that constant watching. What was installed may still be there, but it no longer sticks. You stop organizing yourself around narratives that were never yours.
What comes back is spontaneity—and the mental bandwidth that hypervigilance took from you. You can live without everything having to pass through a check first.
You won’t have to explain the terrain
This is not cultural competence, and it is not a therapist who will handle the subject carefully.
Those are the usual offers. Neither is a method.
A shared background creates understanding, and careful handling can leave you managing the clinician rather than being understood by them.
What you need is someone who knows the terrain without instruction and can then work at the level where the narrative was installed.
The narratives arrive before you do
You did not choose them and you cannot decline them. The angry one. The articulate one — said as a compliment. The exception. The one who made it. The threat. The credit to the race.
Whichever one gets assigned, your life organizes around it: confirming it, refuting it, staying carefully outside of it, or performing its opposite so persistently that the performance becomes a character you can no longer put down.
Here is the part that rarely gets addressed clinically: what is imposed from the outside does not stay outside. The observer you built at seven years old — the one who checks your tone, your volume, your face, your name on the résumé — is still on duty. He was never given leave.
Most people describing this to a therapist have to start by proving it exists.
What this actually looks like
You are successful and cannot enjoy it, because success arrived attached to a story about being an exception, and exceptions are provisional.
You are the only one in your department, and the ordinary mistake other people make on Tuesday is a mistake you cannot afford, and you have run that calculation so many times it no longer registers as effort.
You carry family material — a parent who survived something and would not discuss it, an obligation with no American translation, ambition that was never only yours, an achievement that separated you from the very people it was meant to honor.
You will not have to prove this is real
That is usually the first hour with a new therapist and often the first several — establishing that the thing you are describing exists before you can get to what it costs you. Then it comes up again six months later, and you decide it is not worth the effort of explaining, and you route around it.
Here, it is the premise. We start from it.
You also do not need an incident. There is no meeting that finally made it obvious, no event you can point to that justifies the appointment. The second self is not an emergency. It is a running expense, paid daily, for years, and that is reason enough.
Why I do this work
I work with people of color to get free of the false narratives society has laid on them.
Not to cope with those narratives more gracefully. Not to understand where they came from. To separate what is actually yours from what was installed in you by people who never knew you.
Nearly thirty years of my own analysis taught me how to examine those narratives, question what I had internalized, and find what was actually mine. But that experience alone is not the qualification. I also bring clinical training to help others do the same.
It is the combination—having done the work myself and knowing how to facilitate it for someone else—that makes this work effective.
What that means practically: you do not have to explain. Not the family, the workplace, what happened in the meeting, or why it landed the way it did. That is not a courtesy. It is clinical time you get back—spent on your actual life instead of on my education.
How the work goes
I work analytically. We are not simply managing your reactions; we are looking at what produces them and what it would take to change what is underneath.
Race is part of that work—not a topic we set aside for a particular session. It is woven into how you were seen, what your family transmitted, what authority has felt like, and what you expect from me.
That is all material.
I am not going to reassure you toward feeling better about something that has not changed. Your perception may be accurate. The work is not about making you perceive less, but about loosening the hypervigilance and self-monitoring that grew around it.
Over time, you can begin to see yourself directly rather than through the narrative you were given.
What comes back is spontaneity—and the mental bandwidth to live without constantly checking yourself. Living that does not have to route through a check first.
What this is actually like
Sessions are 45 minutes, by video, at a consistent time each week.
There is no agenda or curriculum. You talk, and we follow what is there. A session may begin with something from the week and end somewhere much older. Some sessions will be about race; many won't.
You may notice yourself managing what you say or anticipating my reaction. That calibration has been part of your life for a long time. Noticing it here is part of the work.
I talk less than you might expect. The room is not organized around getting a reaction from me.
Change tends to arrive quietly—a meeting that would have cost you something and didn't.
The consultation is a conversation, not an intake. You tell me what brings you, I tell you whether I think the work fits, and you decide.
The practical details
Fee — $250 per session.
Frequency — weekly at minimum. Work of this depth sometimes asks for more, and that is generally something a person arrives at once they are in it rather than something decided in advance. We would take it up when the work indicates it.
Reduced fee — I hold a small number of reduced-fee slots. Whether one is open depends on the panel at the time you ask. When they are filled, the fee is the fee.
Insurance — I am an out-of-network provider. I can supply monthly superbills for possible reimbursement.
Format — secure telehealth for clients anywhere in New York State.
If this is the work you want
You are not looking for a therapist who understands your background. You are looking for a therapist you do not have to educate, and who can then work at the level where the narrative was installed — not the level where you describe it.
Those are two different requirements. You should insist on both.
Most searches end at the first one. The work starts after it.