You Deserve a Therapist Who Gets It: What Allyship Actually Looks Like

July is BIPOC Mental Health Awareness Month, established in honor of writer and mental health advocate Bebe Moore Campbell, who worked to bring visibility to the mental health needs of Black communities and other underrepresented communities.

For those of us working in mental health, this month asks us to do more than acknowledge disparity. It asks us to look honestly at the care we're offering and ask whether we're actually meeting the needs of the people we say we serve.

At Roots and Branches Therapy in Brooklyn, this isn't something we think about only in July. It shows up in our hiring, our training, our team culture, and the way we show up in the therapy room. Our mission has always been to serve a diverse client base with empathy, honest feedback, practical tools, and evidence-based treatment, while continuing to grow as clinicians ourselves.

And still, whenever I sit down to write about allyship, I feel the weight of knowing there is always more to do. That feeling matters, not because guilt is useful on its own, but because it keeps the work from becoming performative. Allyship isn't a title we get to give ourselves. It's something we have to keep practicing.

Why "Culturally Competent Care" Isn't Enough

The phrase culturally competent care comes up often in therapy and mental health spaces, and while the intention behind it is good, the framing has always felt a little thin to me. Competence sounds like something you can complete: a training, a checklist, a box you check before moving on. But culture, identity, race, power, and lived experience don't work that way. Being a person of color in this country isn't a subject to be mastered from the outside. It's layered, historical, personal, embodied, and shaped by the daily reality of moving through systems that weren't always built with you in mind.

What many BIPOC clients need from therapy isn't simply someone who has read about their experience. They need someone who doesn't require them to explain it from the beginning every single time. That's something different than competence, that's attunement. And attunement asks more of therapists. It asks us to examine our own identities, histories, assumptions, and blind spots. It asks us to understand that race, culture, immigration, religion, sexuality, gender, disability, class, and family history aren't side issues in therapy. They shape nervous systems. They shape relationships. They shape what safety feels like.

What Allyship Looks Like in Practice

At Roots and Branches, allyship isn't something we want to just say on a website. It has to show up in practice: in the composition of our team, in the therapists we hire, and in the communities we aim to serve. Our team is rooted in diverse life paths, identities, and theoretical approaches, with a shared commitment to authenticity, teamwork, growth, and continual learning. That includes therapists of color, LGBTQ+ therapists, multilingual therapists, and clinicians who bring different lived experiences into the work.

Representation matters, not because shared identity automatically guarantees understanding (it doesn't), but because it can change the starting point. Some experiences arrive in the room already more legible. Some things don't have to be translated before the work can begin.

And for clients working with therapists who don't share their background — which is often the reality, and which can still be deeply meaningful and healing — allyship means those therapists are actively engaged in their own work. It means they don't pathologize cultural difference. It means they understand that anxiety, hypervigilance, anger, grief, exhaustion, or mistrust may be responses to lived realities, not simply symptoms to be corrected. Most of all, it means clients don't have to manage their therapist's discomfort in order to be cared for.

Why This Month Matters

Bebe Moore Campbell helped bring national attention to the stigma surrounding mental illness in communities of color. She spoke directly about how mental health stigma can land differently when people are already navigating racism and marginalization: "People of color, particularlyAfrican Americans, feel the stigma more keenly. In a race-conscious society, some don't want to be perceived as having yet another deficit."

That quote still feels painfully relevant, because stigma doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's shaped by history, by family, by community, by access to care, by diagnosis, by mistrust of systems, and by whether therapy has historically felt safe, relevant, or available. That's why BIPOC Mental Health Awareness Month can't just be about encouraging people to seek therapy. It also has to be about asking whether therapy itself has done enough to become trustworthy.

Centering Voices Beyond Our Own

Part of allyship is knowing when to speak, and when to make room for voices that have been doing this work long before us.

Resmaa Menakem, therapist and author of My Grandmother's Hands, writes and teaches about racialized and intergenerational trauma, especially the ways trauma lives in the body and can be carried across generations. As he puts it: "Our bodies carry the trauma of what has happened to us — and sometimes what has happened to those who came before us." That idea matters deeply in therapy. If trauma isn't only cognitive, then healing can't only be cognitive either. If harm has lived in bodies, families, communities, and systems, then healing has to make room for the body, for relationship, and for collective repair.

Joy Harden Bradford, psychologist and founder of Therapy for Black Girls, offers another reminder that feels central to how we think about therapy at Roots and Branches: "Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion." Healing isn't just insight. It isn't just symptom reduction. It isn't just coping skills, though those matter too. Healing also happens when someone can be seen clearly, held respectfully, and met in the fullness of who they are.

What BIPOC Clients Deserve in Therapy

BIPOC clients deserve therapy that doesn't ask them to shrink. You deserve a therapist who understands that your anxiety might be a rational response to an irrational system, and someone who knows the difference between cultural values and pathology. You deserve a space where you can talk about race, racism, family expectations, immigration, religion, code-switching, grief, rage, exhaustion, joy, pride, and belonging without worrying that your therapist will become defensive, minimize your experience, or steer the conversation somewhere more comfortable for them. You deserve care that sees you as a whole person — not just your symptoms, not just your diagnosis, not just the part of you that's easiest for the room to hold. All of you.

A Personal Reflection on Anti-Oppressive Practice

As a white Latina therapist and practice owner, I don't want to write about allyship as if I've figured it out. I haven't. What I can say is that anti-oppressive practice requires ongoing self examination. It means recognizing where I hold privilege, where I have blind spots, and where I still have more to learn. It means consulting, reading, listening, and repairing when mistakes happen. It means building a team culture where these conversations aren't treated as optional or seasonal, so that clients don't have to carry that work for us.

Anti-oppressive practice isn't a credential. It's a practice in the most literal sense of the word — something we keep doing.

We Are Working to Be That Space

At Roots and Branches, we aren't doing this perfectly, but we're doing it intentionally. We're working to build a therapy practice where clients can bring their full selves into the room, where identity isn't treated as incidental, where systemic harm isn't minimized, and where therapists keep learning. Representation, humility, and accountability matter to us.

If you've been looking for BIPOC mental health therapy in Brooklyn, or for a therapist who can hold conversations about race, culture, trauma, identity, and belonging with care, we hope this gives you something to go on. You deserve a therapist who gets it — not perfectly, but genuinely. And we're working every day to be that kind of place.