The Price of Freedom

Months ago, as many of us tried to make the most of the new reality we find ourselves in due to the COVID pandemic by baking, taking online courses and generally distracting ourselves from the potential impending doom; I attended a Zoom lecture where it was stated that freedom is not something we attain and then just get to keep for ever. Rather, the freedom we have conquered is something we have to continue to work (or fight) to keep and even continue to expand because otherwise we lose it. This idea strongly resonated with me and made me question what freedoms I have conquered throughout my life, whether I have managed to maintain them, and how I can take my freedom to new frontiers. As a Psychotherapist, I have grappled with the challenging task of building a practice that is rooted in freedom and that springs from a place of truth within myself from the outset. While I found many of Psychotherapy’s tools useful for my purposes – namely my own liberation and that of other Black women – I found its framework, particularly in relation to training, limiting in many ways. I felt that my profession reproduces oppressive social structures including racism, exploitation of labor, elitism, and Western intellectual supremacy, among other things. Thus, a central question that I returned to throughout my training was: can I practice a psychotherapy that is liberating for myself, my clients, and my people in general within this framework?

As colonized people, Black people have been striving for centuries to reclaim our humanity by approximating whiteness – the epitome of humanity, according to the dominant white supremacist view of the world we have all come to internalize to some degree. We have done that by adopting the standards and practices of whiteness and by entering its institutions and other spaces, often at great cost to our well-being and mental health. Against all odds, we have entered fields of study and professions previously barred to us and, 20 years into the 21st century, we continue to celebrate the ‘first-black-or-African-fill-in-the-blank’ phenomenon. Despite the struggle for true liberation, we are still striving. Consciously or unconsciously, we are still striving to prove to ourselves and to the world that we are ‘just as good’. We are still begging or fighting for a seat at the table. We want inclusion, acceptance and recognition by the white establishment. And, on the whole, we still believe that there is only one way to all of this: the proverbial master’s way and his tools. But what price are we paying for it all?

White supremacy – the idea that White people, their culture, heritage, thought, scholarship, way of life, and contributions to humanity– are superior to all other peoples and most of all to Black people, who were placed at the bottom of a supposed human hierarchy by this system, permeates everything. It permeates our being, our thinking, our feeling and our creativity. It influences the kind of art we allow ourselves to make and our life choices.  It affects the kinds of dreams we dream for ourselves, and the kinds of careers we build to serve (or not) our communities. It seems like the only valid way of life in the world today is the Western way of life. Anything else is poor, deviant, underdeveloped, terroristic, emerging, alternative. Thus, our professional choices are defined by a Western agenda, economy and social organization. In my case, for example, I always knew that I wanted to work therapeutically with people, always knew that I wanted to help people heal their emotional and psychological wounds. As a child I did not know what that entailed professionally but, with time, it translated into going into the field of psychology. It did so because the menu of available serious and socially viable professions is a Western menu. It has an addendum of ‘alternative’ professional choices and those tend to be non-Western and relegated to the status of alternative professions. What would I have chosen as a profession had I been operating from an indigenous African frame of reference?

In powerfully subliminal ways, the pursuit of academic and professional excellence (or even mediocrity) as defined above feeds a subconscious feeling of insufficiency and shame in who we are, our identity as people of African descent. It reinforces the internalized and false narrative that we come from nothing, that our Ancestors have made no contribution of value to humanity, that they have left us no legacy to build on, in this particular case, no professions or fields of study for us to build on and create successful careers in. When we decide what careers to pursue, our point of reference for that choice is a Western one. Those are the choices we see as available to us and there is nothing respectable outside of it.  The result of this is that we become participants in the systems that oppress us, agents in our own demise, and oppressors of our own people. The price we pay is poor mental, physical, and spiritual health and the continued colonization of our being, acculturation, loss of our internal compass. This pursuit is killing us.

We have been hacking at this system for centuries now, and there seems to be no end in sight. We could continue to do it for another 500 years and watch as it shapeshifts into ever subtler iterations of itself under our eyes, or we could redirect our energy and focus to ourselves; to our healing, to developing our gifts, to rebuilding our Spirit, and to creating what we want to see in the world for ourselves. There is no healing in the bosom of your oppressor and healing cannot happen amid ongoing abuse. It is not possible for me to fully bloom into the fullness of who I am as a healer and to offer everything that I am equipped to offer as a healer solely within the structures and framework of the psychotherapeutic profession. To remain in that box would be to deny myself the freedom to be the healer I came into the world to be.  As Africans and Black people, we are trying to fit our formidable beings into the Western mould – professionally but also more generally – and it is killing us. It is placing us in very racist environments where we are often isolated, and our mental health at risk. It is taking us away from the innovations necessary for liberation. We need to get out. We need to set ourselves free. This getting out feels like a real and a present Ancestral call. We are experiencing it individually, but it is a Divine call, it is bigger than us. The time has come.

This is the conversation I have been having with many of my clients in various forms in the last few months. As the saying goes, we teach what we most need to learn. And, so, here I am trying to make sense of what true liberation might look like for me and my work. I live in this world under the same constraints as my clients. How do we extract ourselves from the harmful frameworks and structures of oppression of this world while living in it?

To practice psychotherapy within those moulds feels disenchanting to me and, quite frankly, like a waste of my potential and my clients’. I am not interested in helping people to merely cope with the mental, emotional, and spiritual hardships caused by the systems they are trapped in, or in making them grow more and more attached to their diagnoses. I am interested in helping us breakout of the systems that are at the root of many of our modern and widespread diagnoses. I am interested in transformation, growth, and freedom. In building a world where we can be what and who we are and live according to our true nature. I remember saying this to a person who was my therapist a few years ago and they replied shrugging their shoulders that therapy does not promise transformation. I knew then that I needed to change therapists and began to seriously doubt whether I still wanted to become one.

The price of freedom is to break with the status quo. The price of freedom is to break with the things we have come to think of as giving us security, legitimacy, status and recognition. It is to break with people, things, institutions, traditions, and systems that demand that we abandon who we are. As long as we participate in the systems that oppress us, those systems will prevail. We cannot hold on to what imprisons us and be free at the same time. The price of freedom is to let it all go.