It was somewhere between me debating whether to report this man to the police or walk around my local area with the possibility of getting slapped in the face that I started to consider that my therapist was wrong. When I messaged her to explain my predicament, her response cemented my belief that I would not be seeing this woman again.

I have long been an advocate of therapy and counselling. I first started when I was sixteen after a breakdown at school. The six week sessions helped but I knew I needed more. At university, I tried their service and the local council before I realised that I needed a Black woman as my therapist. However, the head of counselling at the university I was attending at the time, a white man, was against the idea of such requirements and requests. Later, I would find out that he was the counsellor I saw, and I remember him asking why I could not just explain to my mother how abusive she was to me to make her stop.

At the time, I was yet to interact with a single counsellor of colour, much less a Black counsellor. Luckily, I soon acquired a job that could fund my private therapy sessions with a Black therapist I found via BAATN. My only requirement was that they had to either be Black or woman, so finding a Black woman meant I had hit the jackpot. To this day I find it amusing, suspicious and a gift from God that I found a dark skin Black woman of Jamaican descent to be my therapist who was based in the same town that my university was.