This thread is great and hopefully I can help some people with finding more supports. I didn’t sleep at a Holiday in Express, but I am a practicing therapist and have a Ph.D. In Psychology.
I am a super advocate of therapy for everyone-especially Black people who are exposed to so much trauma on a daily basis, and trauma reactivity is literally written into our genes and passed down. A lot of behavior is neurobiological based and are not a matter of will or desire. Trauma has a lot of automatic physical exactions that can be predicted and expected- and thus ameliorated through specific means.
Therapy is one of the few places where there is a space for us to explore who we have been, what was done to us, who we are, and who we want to be without judgement and only your betterment in mind.
Therapy is a space where the connection between biology, internal processing, cognition, and the social are all conceptualized as working together to hurt or heal us. There are different ways to go about achieving this. Here are some questions to ask
What is their theoretical orientation- what theories of human development and skills do they think underpin problems and underpin how we heal?
How long have they been a therapist and what populations- you want to see the range of what they have experienced, will they overreact to some things or be scared or even unable to recognize what is going on?
What is their experience with Blacks and our many groups- we are not a are their views on medication and holistic options- you want to know will they just pill push or even dismiss your notions of healing, e.g. traditional methods that work for our people.
Are they active therapists who engage, tell you what is going on in therapy, do psychological education, give homework or do they let a process happen slowly and focus more on your insight.
Will they make explicit connections and teach you about your neurobiology and how it interacts with your environments? And will they teach skills, and help assess our strengths, supports, and vulnerabilities, while giving us skills and opportunities to practice these skills for coping and improving in therapy and the real world.
hope this heps