Racism is still a blind spot in psychotherapy

On the phone, Lucía Muriel says that she is careful when talking to journalists. Only a few psychotherapists could tell what she has to tell. The topic is sensitive, and what you read about her is often read as representative for a whole community.

As one of the few psychotherapists in Germany, she says, she takes on the topic of racism in therapy. She was born in Ecuador and has lived in Germany since her early childhood. At the end of the seventies, she studied psychology at the Free University of Berlin, then went into educational work and dealt mainly with the topics of racism, migration, and exclusion. Eight years ago she established her practice as a psychotherapist.

Ms. Muriel, you describe racism as a “blind spot” in psychotherapy. What do you mean by that?

Psychotherapists in Germany can be therapists without even dealing with the topic of racism. For many, this is far away. It is also until today no part of the psychotherapeutic training, no access to racism-critical theories is created. After all, psychotherapeutic practices are ultimately nothing more than the spaces of this society. In the way this society deals with racism, you can also find it in these rooms. This is what I mean by “blind spot.” When I started my practice, clients of color and black clients explicitly asked me if I would deal with racism, if I knew terms like “whiteness” and “of color”. Therapists they had been to before did not take up the topic, they even denied it.

What experiences does BIPoC tell you about when they come to you?

Either they could not even address the topic or their experiences were played down. Many of them also experienced racism again during therapy. Sentences like: “Well, where you come from, that’s just the way it is” — and this with clients who were born in Germany. What I also often experience is that clients experience racism in their relationship with their partner and are not allowed to mention it in therapy. Anyway, it takes a lot of effort to talk about these experiences. If therapists do not respond to this, it can be additionally harmful.

In what way can this harm the client?

It triggers unbelievably and can trigger a retraumatization. It leads to all the emotional injuries that a racist experience in everyday life can also lead to. Clients of Color then have the same experience that they often have outside the therapy rooms: they are not seen with their injuries and traumas.

“Racism is always connected with the experience of not belonging. This is experienced as an insult and great insecurity. “

How to react correctly?

No matter if racism, homophobia, transphobia, or sexism: it is essential to acquire a profound knowledge. A first step would be to admit that you are not so familiar with the subject and are unsure. That as a therapist you are a learning subject. For a long time, I had an Afghan client who confronted me a lot with the dramatic relationship between men and women in her country. I learned more in the first year than she did, she told and explained an incredible amount to me. This is important because she realized that I listen and want to understand. That I see her. And that I recognize that her experiences are painful.

How do experiences of racism generally affect the human psyche?

Racism is always connected with the experience of not belonging. This is experienced as an insult and great insecurity. As human beings, we come into the world with a primal connection that tells us: This is where we belong. People who experience racism are often signaled early on: In no case, you belong. This is a foreign determination, which results in serious damage to the soul.

One’s self-image is taken away. Suddenly you are only the person that others want to see. Or even worse, racism makes BIPoC and their experiences invisible, it negates them. This leads to the fact that some BIPoC wants to become like the others, the whites. And that in itself is great psychological damage. Researchers* in the USA have recognized racism as a form of traumatization some years ago.

“Racism is borne by society, although we know that it makes people ill. My clients are not sick, they are symptom carriers”.

So is racism an amplifier or even a trigger for psychological problems?

From my point of view, it is rather the other way round: Actually, psychological problems are a healthy reaction to a phenomenon that makes you ill. There is, so to speak, a collective psychological problem in society, if one would attribute to it a collective psyche of beliefs and norms. There is something in a total malaise. People who are racialized react with symptoms as an indication of these pathological conditions. That is how I see it, and that is how we must see it: Racism is borne by society, although we know that it makes people ill. So from my point of view, my clients are not sick, but bearers of symptoms.

Would you say that white therapists can put all these experiences and feelings of clients of Color into context and understand them correctly?

I would say that they cannot. I have some colleagues who say they have been to Thailand, Hawaii, or Guinea and were stared at as white people there, and from their point of view, they became victims of racism. But that has nothing to do with racism at all. White therapists do not have racist experiences. If they want to deal with these topics in their practice, they first have to deal with their whiteness. I call this the decolonization process or racist deconstruction. That takes time.

How can BIPoC and people who have racist experiences find therapists who are specialized in this?

There are therapist directories where therapists can indicate that they are multilingual or of color. That did not exist in former times, today there are more and more. You can turn to migrant, women’s or social counseling centers, they have such directories. As far as I know, the telephone counseling service often has lists of therapists of color.

Why do you think there are so few specialists here who are familiar with topics such as experiences of racism, migration, and life in the diaspora?

As a therapist I have to make sure that my actions are professional and technically secure. Therefore young Psychologists of Color need rooms where they can develop their expertise and gain confidence, for example in supervision groups. The big problem is that they hardly exist. I am currently in the process of starting a few such groups, and the demand is there. They should already exist, but the Corona pandemic has set me back somewhat in my planning.

“An important step would be to create chairs on racism at universities. “

Can such groups and spaces improve the situation in Germany in the long term?

They are a small step in that direction. Another would be to create chairs for them at universities, in courses of study such as psychology, medicine, social pedagogy. The answer to the question of how our society as a whole can change is greater: Germany is finding it very difficult to look at its own very rooted and strongly institutionalized racism. There is still a tendency not to concede Germany as our home.

This gives me hope: I am a grandmother of five grandchildren who were born in Berlin and are growing up here. My generation still struggled a lot with itself and didn’t know whether it wanted to see Germany as its home at all. My children and grandchildren will no longer be denied. They have answered this question for themselves, they see themselves as Germans and position themselves that way. They are not waiting for their homeland to be conceded to them.