The Therapy for Black Girls Podcast is a weekly conversation with Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed Psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, about all things mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves.
When it comes to dating outside of your race, Black women are up against cultural stigmas, thoughts of missing out on Black love, fear of losing our “Black card,” and disapproval from family, friends, and social media. How many of these sentiments against interracial dating are reasonable things to consider, and how many are blocking us from finding what could be true love? To answer these questions and more, I’m joined by Dr. Racine Henry. Dr. Henry is a licensed marriage and family therapist whose practice focuses on Black, interracial, and non-monogamous couples.
In our conversation, we unpack both the common and unanticipated conflicts experienced in interracial relationships, things to consider before and while in an interracial relationship, and how to navigate disapproval from family, friends, and society at large.
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Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, doctor Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to find a therapist in your area, visit our website at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. While I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a licensed mental health professional. Hey, y'all, thanks so much for joining me for session three point fifteen of the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast. We'll get right into our conversation after a word from our sponsors. When it comes to dating outside of our race, black women are up against cultural stigmas, thoughts of missing out on black love, fear of losing our black cord, and disapproval from family, friends, and social media. How many of these sentiments against interracial dating are reasonable things to consider, and how many are blocking us from finding what could be true love. To answer these questions and more, I'm joined by doctor Racine Henry. Doctor Henry is a licensed marriage and family therapist whose practice focuses on black, interracial, and non monogamous couples. Based in New York. She is the founder of Sankofa Marriage and family therapy, creator of the Appaletate for Love series, and a member of the core faculty at the Family Institute at Northwestern University. In our conversation, Doctor Henry and I unpacked both the common and unanticipated conflicts experienced in interracial relationships, things to consider before and while in an interracial relationship, and how to navigate disapproval from family, friends, and society at large. If something resonates with you while enjoying our conversation, please share it with us on social media using the hashtag TBG in session, or join us over in the sister Circle to talk more about the episode. You can join us at community dot therapy for Blackgirls dot Com. Here's our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today, Doctor Henry.
Thank you for having me, Doctor Jord's pleasure.
So you are a licensed marriage and family therapist, Can you talk to us a little bit about your practice and who you see?
Sure? So, I have a practice called Sankofa manage your family therapy here in New York City, and I primarily treat black couples, interracial couples, non monogamous couples, but I do have a good number of individual clients who are also people of color. I purposefully and intentionally wanted to market my practice towards the minority community after working for a number of years in a rather white, homogeneous community and wanting to serve people who look like me.
So tell me a little bit about how you started working specifically with interracial couples.
So that happens really by accident. I never really intended to be an interracial couples therapist, but when working with black couples and other minority groups, I found that they would refer me to their friends who had partners that were not black. So in every interracial couple they've treated, there's been one black partner and then one partner that was other. And some of it came about because of different media opportunities that I had contributing to articles about interracial couples or mostly how to help family and friends deal with their loved one being in an interracial couple. I did a CBS Sunday Morning piece with Rita brave about interracial marriages and how our current socio political climate has not really progressed much since Loving Versus Virginia ruling all those years ago, And since then, I've gotten a lot more people coming to me wanting me to help them navigate their interracial relationship, but again also helping people around them deal with their choice to be with someone who's not of the same race as they are.
That's really interesting. So I didn't expect you to say that you were working with people to help their family and loved one support or not support who they have chosen to be in a relationship with. Can you talk to me a little bit about like some of the concerns that come up there.
Yeah, So ironically, most times people are surprised that their loved ones have an issue with their partner, and how it usually comes about is when they either get married or when they have a child together. When those two milestones happen, I think is when the family and friends externally feel like, oh, this relationship is serious. It's not just a phase. It's not going to pass by. It's on a casual thing, but there's a significant element to the relationship that now triggers our long held belief system or our true feelings about their partner. And so this couple is celebrating something joyous for them, either a childbirth or pregnancy, or engagement or marriage, and then they're finding that grandma or their best friend or their parents are upset. And so that's usually the crux of the issue, right, is that we thought they were supportive, we thought they were fine with it all along. They've been cordial or friendly, we've had holidays, and time has passed, and now the real issues are arising.
It's interesting, Doctor Henry, because of course, I'm sure there have been these kinds of concerns for a very long time, But it feels like in between twenty sixteen, after the election that year until Biden was elected, we got lots of questions from TVG community members around having difficult conversations with like in laws or it's seen that like people recently learned that their in laws were racist, and I'm wondering, like, were people not having those conversations before, Like I'm sure you also saw this in your practice. Can you talk a little bit about that time period and maybe even where we find ourselves now and how that may be changing the landscape or interracial relationships.
Yes, I've definitely noticed since the Biden election, but also during Lockdown is when I had the most interracial couples coming to me. And I think to your point, it was that they couldn't really avoid those conversations anymore. Right, there were so many things happening socially, with all the different killings we can name of black people by white people or police officers. And then I think being in close proximity for that long and not being able to have the diversions of work or friends or outside influences, that people were sort of compelled to have these discussions that things were coming up, whether they were sheltered in place with their interracial partner or with generations in one household, and having to confront some of the things that were always underlying but are now bubbling up to the surface. I think that people have always felt like, while my mom or grandma may have made that comment, but that's not how they really feel, right. They sort of brush it off, were able to convince themselves that it was a minor issue. But I mean, you bring it literally into your home, it's unavoidable. Only so many comments can be made before there's a question asked, or depending on your partner and their temperament, maybe they're the ones to confront the people or person that everyone else let's have a pass to say that ignorance or racist comment. And so I definitely noticed that during the lockdown, and since, I've had definitely an uptick in interracial couples coming to therapy and wanting to really talk about what happened last Christmas or what happens every year at this time, or why does your mother only talk to me about black related things and issues like that.
You know, it's interesting to hearing because I'm listening to you talk, and I'm aware that as therapists we're often talking about this like, Okay, we can only work with the people in the room, right, you can't do therapy for racist grandma. I'm wondering what that looks like then, when it seems like so many of the concerns are actually coming from family members who you know, maybe hold these beliefs that the partner maybe does not.
Yeah. So, one thing I love about being an MFT specifically is my training was really systemic focus, right, and so even if we had one person in the room, we're looking at where they come from. So who do they belong to, the family of origin, the family of creation, what communities that are in, what the work environment is like, and so having that systemic and relational approach really helps in this context because even though we don't have Grandma in the room, we can talk about what do you feel when Grandma comes around, how do you navigate those moments with her, What does it cost you to maybe have some cut off with Grandma or limit your access to her, And how can you sort of pull on those resources and people that do make you feel good and that do scaffold your relationship to sort of offset possibly losing Grandma as a person in your life or not having her in the same role as she's always played in your life.
So what are some of the aspects you feel like people overlook when they decide to be in interracial relationships.
I think people always overlook how hurtful it will be when the people they love the most react to their relationship in a negative way. I think they assume that the relationship will be enough to safeguard them from those hurt feelings, or that the loved ones will come around or make an exception because of how much they care about that individual, when in reality, feelings as strong as racism or other ignorances like that, they often can't be hidden for too long or at all. And again, if your partner is not someone who's going to ignore the snide comment or look the other way, then they're going to a lot of confrontations. And so I think when it comes to race and things that can be race or ethnicity related, people think that saying the PC thing is enough, or if we just don't discuss race and politics, or if we just don't invite that one time member to the function, then there won't be a problem. But often those values and belief systems aren't held by one person, right, They're supported by the unit, by the family or the community. And so that person may be the spokesperson for the feeling, but everyone else may have traces of it that they express in different ways. So by not confronting it or challenging it, you're enabling it essentially, and that often comes at a head when the person you love is that topic of conversation.
So do you find most often that what happens is that the partner who is not black ends up having to cut off family members or discontinues to be like a stressor for the couple.
It depends on what they're willing to risk for the relationship. I've seen it go both ways, where the relationship ends because of the pressure of not being willing to cut off the family members or the friends. And I've also seen where they've had to adjust to not having grandmother or uncle or the mom in their lives. It comes at a cost, though, if those family members are contributing to their lifestyle, right, if they're financially dependent on them, if they live with them, if they rely on them for child's care or other sort of resources. It's not as simple as Okay, we'll talk to my mom anymore, or I won't talk to my uncle anymore. Right. It comes at a cost of how do I adjust to my lifestyle being impacted by this person being upset with my choice, even though I'm an adult and able to make these choices for myself.
More from our conversation after the break, so it feels like there have been some recent examples in pop culture of interracial relationships. So one of our favorite shows to talk about here is Insecure, of course, and so we saw with Molly Molly kind of talks about throughout the series wanting to kind of eventually marry a black man, but she ended up dating Andrew, who was an Asian man. But I think that some of the feelings that she talks about in the show around this isn't what I expected and like, oh, I'm not sure, like how we got here? Can you talk about maybe some of the feelings that come up for people who end up dating, you know, someone interracially and that had not necessarily been the play in.
I think the feelings that I've seen my clients have are questioning their own racial identity and questioning their loyalty to their race. I think for Black women, especially who date interracially, there's always a question of don't you love yourself, don't you love black men? Or what is it about this other man that is more sufficient than a black man is? And I think that undue pressure can really get to a person and make you think twice about who you know yourself to be and who you believe yourself to be. I think we as a community, a black community, we've become more comfortable with seeing black men with other women who are not black, And I think in a lot of ways society supports that, right, they support diminishing or dismissing the black women as the black man's partner are equal. And so I've also seen where the white partner feels like there's no big deal here, that it's no different for them to date someone who is white or not white, that they don't grasp that there's a significant impact as far as socially but also personally to dating outside of your race. And I think again that socially we give more allowances to people who are not Black to make those kinds of choices and to have those kinds of relationships. So I think a lot of the pressure or a lot of the stigma and backlash lands on the black women. No surprise there though.
Right, right? And this may be a bit biased because I think you mentioned like a large percentage of your caseload is black or other people of color. But do you feel like black women are put in that place in ways that women of other cultures are not? Right, So, this expectation that black women would only date black men as opposed to other races being able to kind of date more freely.
Yeah, I think that as a whole of course, we live in a white supremacist society where proximity the whiteness is always favored. And I think for other cultures, other races, there's a positive to dating a white person, right that you're somehow elevating yourself or you're doing the right thing. Maybe you're assimilating more for your family or for your culture than past generations have been able to. Whereas so black women, it's seen as you're selling out or you're abandoning or betraying your race. And I think we always have the onus or responsibility to favor our race and stick by black men no matter what they're doing, no matter what is happening, and that becomes very unfair, especially when this is about love and who you're attracted to and who you have that unspeakable connection with that no one can or be able to regulate.
In the situation with Molly and Andrew, I think it was interesting because he was an Asian man, right, so not necessarily a white man. Do you see the dynamics play out differently if it is a black woman with another person of color partner as opposed to a white partner.
Yes, I've had several couples who have been black and Asian partners and other configurations that don't involve a white partner, and there's less of the battle against white supremacy for the one partner. Right In those relationships, both partners are able to speak to their shared experiences of being minorities and the ways in which racism impacts their lives, so they have more of like us versus them bond, whereas with the black and white partner, there's a double fight, right of like your partner's family and then the larger society that happens, so there is more connectedness, I think when they're both minorities, but there's still a different way in which black and Asian people respond to white supremacy historically or have been impacted by it historically, and so it's not a battle of who's more marginalized in whom, but rather it's very different for me to be a black woman or black man than for you to be an Asian woman or man, especially when we're gettingto discussions like colorism or skin tone and things like that.
I'd love to hear doctor Henry your thoughts on what kinds of conversation should people be having, maybe before they even decide whether this is going to be a serious kind of relationship because I think even in the dynamic with Andrew and Molly and his family, we know that they are differing levels of anti blackness for lots of different communities, right, even though they are also people of color. So what kinds of conversations should a couple be having around things like colorism and all of these other things before they even maybe decide to have a serious relationship with one another.
I think the first question is always like, what's the mama going to say? Right? Like, what's your mama going to say about this? But take a step further, like when you think about your partner and your relationship, whose face comes to mind immediately that you think will have a problem with that? And how are you going to deal with possibly losing that person in your life and the role they're currently playing. How are you going to have those discussions with this person? How are you going to protect yourself, your partner, your relationship, your choices in the face of this person's anger or their possible violence even about it. You know, I've seen some cases where it's gotten praise severe and there's been physical threats or a lack of physical safety with family and friends because of who their partner is. And then I think among the two people involved, you need to have discussions about what are the impacts to your life and your lifestyle because of other people's feelings and values? Is there a threat for your employment? Imagine that your employer or your coworkers are going to have viscual reactions to who your partner is. How are you going to deal with again, standing firm and your choices and your feelings and your beliefs when other people have those feelings? How are you going to react social life when others strangers have comments or they have reactions to your partnership. If you think about having children together, how a you're going to raise your children to navigate being biracial and to navigate learning about and identifying with these two cultures. What does that look like for you? What are the resources that you have that can help support you and protect you in those environments? In those contexts, Who will be supportive and who can you turn to as an ally? But also what do you understand about your partner's culture? What do you know about their culture? How can you be sure that you're not perpetrating some of that ignorance? Yourself just because you don't know and you're letting lovely the way I always say, like love is great, but it's not everything, and you need to have more than just that. Your partner can't be the one to teach you about black people or black culture, and you should have other people in your life who are black or who can talk to you about those things, people who can help you learn about what you don't know, and vice versa.
Did you get a chance to watch You People the film on place? Yes, so tell me about your reactions to that film. Do you feel like they portrayed into racial relationships in a fair way?
Yes, and no. I think that they were extreme about it in some respects. I did appreciate that they had Lauren London's character become a Muslim family. I don't think that we see black Muslim people very often in positive roles in movie and TV, so I was happy to see that. But I don't think that they spent enough time establishing what the couple's bond was, right. I think they talked about, you know, their love for fashion and being different in their respective communities, but I didn't get a sense of what keeps these two together, and so when the families got involved, I think the focus went from the two of them to everybody else, which is usually what happens, right, other people's feelings and reactions take presence over. We found love. You know, we're in love with each other. We want to have a feature together, and so I think I would have liked to see more of Lauren talking to her black girlfriend about her relationship in a more in depth way or how she's navigating this, and Jonah Hill's character doing the same thing. They didn't shy away from the different aspects of both Muslim culture and Jewish culture, and they had a lot of important discussions around what it means for both people to be in their respective religions and cultures. So I think that was great, you.
Know, and it's interesting because the first family we saw that had an issue with it was Laurence family, Right. I do think that it's interesting Historically you think about like black families maybe being more accepting or they may not react as strongly than in you people. We of course saw that, you know, her family had a very strong reaction to him not being black.
Yeah, I think that black people, I think we sort of have to be more accepting right, because we're usually the other We're usually the ones that people have the reaction to. But you're right in my experience with my clients, at least, it's not that the black family has the issue. It's usually the other family because of what I think blackness means to people who are not black, right, there's sometimes usually a negative connotation with blackness in America and whether the family believes that are not they're susceptible to society's opinions and views and having to combat that and truly believe differently in their own households.
So you mentioned in one of your earlier responses that black women sometimes are worried about like their black card being pulled or questions around their identity. What kinds of suggestions or advice would you give to people who are maybe struggling with them maybe they're thinking about, like, Okay, do I want to open up the pool of who I date but are worried about this?
I help them navigate their black identity what that means to them. What does blackness mean to you? How do you maintain your connection to your own culture and the fact that those things don't have to change because you're with someone who's not Black, that in fact, you can help that person learn what your Black experience is like. Because we're not a monolith as black people. Everyone's experience of blackness is different, everyone's lived experience in their black bodies is different. And so I help my clients not define themselves by other's opinions or other's metrics, but by their own and sort of empowering them to understand that an interuacial relationship is not a black relationship right, there is still a black love element to it because you are a Black person, and that you can redefine for yourself what that means and how you maintain your blackness with someone who is not black, and not letting that diminish what you think about yourself.
You know. The other argument I think we often hear is people saying like I want to be with somebody who understands my culture, who I won't have to explain things to in some ways. What pieces of the conversation do you think they're missing?
I think they're missing that again, black people are not a monolith. That there is diversity within the black community. For example, I'm Jamaican, my husband is Black American. We've had to have a lot of conversations about our different cultures because they are very different and it means different things. So we're both black, but we're not the same kind of black or the same flavor of black. And so even though you're with somebody who is black and who looks like you, that doesn't mean that there's a guarantee that you'll have similarities because of your blackness. There are some things that you will, of course have in common, but there are still things that you have to get to know about your partner because they're a different person than you are. So appreciating that blackness can have a lot of nuances to it and a lot of variation to it, and it's about who you love and who you choose to go through life with, and there being a core value that you're looking for or core values that you look for, and that not having to be defined by the skin color or race the person is.
What kinds of things do you think a non black partner needs to know about what it means to create a loving and supportive environment for a black woman partner.
I think the non black partner has to be willing to learn a lot, and they have to be willing to be uncomfortable. They have to be willing to be not defensive, but like open to criticism and feedback. Right that for black women especially, we navigate a whole lot, We juggle a lot, we carry a lot, and there are ways in which our partners have to learn from us what we need from them in the way that we need it. So even if you think, okay, I want to support you by doing X, Y and Z, I may need a B and C. And it can't be about your ego or about the kind of partner you want to show up for me as but rather, here's what I need from you, how I need it, and when I need it, and be open to learning that. I think the non black partner again should pursue relationships with people who are black who are not their partner. So who else do you have in your life that may look like me? If I'm your only black friend and your partner, that may be very uncomfortable for both of us. It may be a huge runing curve for you and that you have no other supports for outside of me. And it can't all come from me. I can't be burdened with being the only person helping you advocate black culture. I can't be the one answering all of your black related questions or teaching you all about why I do the things that do in the way that I do them. So if that partner is not willing to seek their own edification and willing to seek understanding through their own experiences and through their own efforts, their relationship is going to really suffer. And I see that happen a lot too, where the black partner feels overwhelmed with having to be Black in America, which is its own full time job and trauma filled experience, and then having to help the other person understand their black experience and understand other people's Black experiences as well. So if you can lighten that load by doing your own work and seeking your own supports and understandings, that can definitely help. And your partner can help you process those things, but they shouldn't be the only person or entity introducing you to those things.
And you mentioned earlier, you know, and I can imagine in twenty twenty twenty twenty one, like you mentioned so many people and still there were so many people Black people dying at the hands of police and other you know, white supremacists and just in everyday life. And I can imagine that maybe did bring up some difficult things for people that maybe they were not having to consider before. Can you talk about what it looked like to be able to like successfully navigate some of those more difficult conversations.
They're very, very difficult, and I think they need to happen as a series of conversations, not just like we discussed this one time and that's it, right. I remember I had a couple with a black woman and a white man, and she wanted her partner to put himself physically between her and police officers whenever they were in public, and she felt like that was how he could keep her safe, that's how he could support her by having his body be a physical intermediary between her and what she saw as a threat. And it took him a long time to understand why she needed that right and to understand that he didn't see the place as a threat. He didn't see himself as unsafe around cops. He felt the opposite, and she felt very differently. And this was when you know, the height of the Black Lives Matter protests and marchers that they would attend together, and in those contexts, especially she wanted him to protect her in that very physical way. And that's just an example of things that I think white people don't have to think about, they don't have to be aware of. But if you have a partner who is black or another minority race, you have to start developing an awareness for things like that. You have to sort of train yourself to think beyond your own experiences and imagine, if my partner were here, or if they were seeing this altercation happen or hearing this conversation, what kinds of things may land differently for them, what may be triggering for them, what may be hurtful for them, and what role am I playing in either stopping this thing from happening or enabling it to continue.
Further More from our conversation after the break on their particular themes you have seen in the couples you've worked with that you feel like allow them to navigate their relationship in more successful ways.
For couples that have a lot of playfulness or use comedy a lot, I think there's been a way that can ease some of the conversations. We can call on different comedians and different stand up routines that have talked about interocial couples, about black people or people in certain ways, and have fun conversations around like the things that are true or the stereotypes that are not true, and navigate some of these more difficult discussions in a lighter fashion. Other themes are when they have siblings who are supportive some things, who are either closer in age or who themselves are also in intucial relationships that they can develop a community with. That's always helpful because maybe the parents or grandparents are not on board. But if your siblings, the people who are like your first friends are willing to support your relationship, that tends to eat the blow a lot. And then those who live in bigger cities or bigger communities that have more diversity to them. So I treat people in New York, but that runs the gam of New York State, and so in some more rural areas there aren't the same kinds of communities or events that expose you to different cultures, whereas in New York City proper, of course, you can find a lot more diversity and a lot more places you can live and gyms you can go to. In different events you can attend where you'll see intracial couples, that people who look like one or both partners, and that can feel like you don't have to rely only on your family of origin, that you can develop a support system outside of that that can be loving and there for you without your relationship.
So you have developed your own way of working with couples. So you've developed a model called integrative culinary therapy, which involves cooking and sharing cultural meals. Can you tell us a little bit more about that work, yes.
So, integrative culinary therapy is my baby. It is a systems oriented approach that really aims to help couples develop a deeper intimacy through cultural understanding. So I begin by asking each partner if your partner could eat something from your culture and learn more about you, what would that dish be? And we meet in a cooking space and we'll go through these different interventions that are therapeutic but really involve the act of cooking and eating the traditional foods to help them work on things like communication or making decisions together. How do your problem solve? How do you trust and respect each other? And the different exercises really challenge couples both as a unit but also individually to do these things in a very experiential way. But the whole time I'm there, I'm asking questions. Right, We're talking about different things, like if you're cooking together and one of the exercises, each partner can use one hand, so they have to do the whole recipe to using just one hand to cut everything and stir everything thing. And so I'll ask, is it easier to do things together or separately? What strengths do you both bring to this exercise or this intervention that you're doing in this moment? How can you talk more about what you're doing to make it easier for each of you. And so, even though it's not really about knowing how to cook, the act of being in this space is something that they can replicate on their own time. Right, we all cook and eat every day. Most of us do at least some of us do with our partner, some of us do it alone. But this is a way that therapy can become a part of your everyday routine. And so when the sessions are long gone, you're still implementing this way of being purposeful about your relationship. How are you intentionally and consciously attending to your relationship on a regular basis, and I think cooking food together and eating together can be one of those ways.
I love then thank you for sharing that. Can you say more about like why the one hand, what is that? In force to do?
So? I have these four exercises that I put couples through. One of them is called hands off, where one partner can do the actual cooking and the other has to hold the recipe and tell them a step by step and that forces them, of course, to communicate and think about how they're talking about things. But it really is about trust and respect. And trust and respect a sort of elements of my clinical work and my approach to couple's therapy. And so it's not only about like, hey, cut that onion, but do I feel like you're cutting the onion wrong? Is not going to cause an argument because I think I want you to cut the onion a rounds and you're dicing it instead. How can I give my partner space to do this in their way and respect that the job is still done, The task is still completed, and I can appreciate that their way is different than mine, but it still is good enough or correct in some way. The other is, like I said, each partner using one hand, and that is really just to see how they make choices together when they both have a limitation. How do they compromise? How do they decide who takes the charge or who follows, or do they come to the table and discuss everything together. Do they stick to the plan the whole way through? Do they change the plan because maybe it's harder to stir with the left hand, but I can open the jar with my left hand. The third exercise is that they have to do every single step of the recipe together, so they can use both hands, but they can't do anything independently. And that's really to challenge how do they work as a unit together? Right, So again more of the problem solving and compromising, but also what happens when they have to do something as a unit. Are they used to sort of living independent lives in the same household or do they really integrate themselves with one another? And the fourth exercise I call the risotto experience. And if you ever cooked wisoda, doctor joy, but you have to stand by the stove and stir this pot the entire time. You can't stop stirring, and you have to integrate like warm chicken broth or wine as you stir and have the resulta absorb it and that's how you cook it. And so it takes a very long time. It's a very tedious process. And while they're saying they're doing this, we're having that hard discussion whatever it is they've not been able to resolve or work through. Now is the time, while we're cooking this rice, that we're going to have that conversation. And it really shows again how you can incorporate having these hard discussions, overcoming these barriers or these really hard moments in your relationship while doing everyday tasks. And so you may not be able to always carve out time for a therapy or for a whole session, or maybe because of the kids and your busy schedules, it's just not a possibility. But how do we then not ignore what's happening in our relationship. How do we make this space and time to resolve those things? So we sort of alternate an office session with a cooking session throughout the entire model. At the end of it, it's really about how did I learn more about my partner for who they are, where they come from, who raised them, the things they learned as a child about relationships and how that manifests in their current adult relationship through this vehicle of cooking and eating food.
So how do you decide which couples would be a good fit for this kind of an experience.
I definitely have some exclusion criteria around my practice just being a private practice in itself, so I don't tend to take on couples that are more intense or have active domestic violence happening or active substance abuse diagnoses. I am starting to narrow down how I assess for individual psycho pathology and the severity of that in couple's therapy. So if I have a couple where one client may have a mental illness and they're not properly medicated or they're having bouts of severe symptomology, then they wouldn't be a good fit for this kind of exercise. So it's more of the couples who are low risk but maybe high intensity in other ways that they have a lot of conflict or tension. There have been times when we've started doing some of the cooking stuff and then stopped because other things come up that necessitate having those office sessions more so than the cooking ones, But normally people sort of hesitand of I don't know how cooking is going to work with this whole thing, But once they start doing it, they realize that the cooking is secondary to what we're discussing while we're cooking, and how comfortable it is to approach therapy in a different way. And a therapy can look like all these different things that are cathartic, but it can also be therapeutic as well. And I have to be that we're just sitting and having this still working clinical discussion, but rather we can be eating, and I do eat with my clients sometimes, and we'll be eating and still maintaining that conversation able to work through those same therapeutic and presenting problems.
And I can imagine it would be even more comfortable for some people just because of like not requiring like the intense eye contact or like, you know, the confinement that sometimes happens in a therapy office. Like if we're cooking and it feels a little more casual, people may be able to approach maybe more difficult conversations than they would in an office.
And that's really how I came up with it, because I realized that I love to cook and feed people. But also when you have to deal with your friends or you know how to have girls mind or even date night, you're more relaxed because you are in that, like you said, other environment, right, you're having really good food. You're in a different space, and you just approach it with a different mindset. And it's not about, OK, go to therapy and talk about this really serious thing. But we're going to cook together and see what comes up and work through the things that we want to really resolve and discuss in our relationship.
So I want to go back to something you mentioned in your introduction around the piece that you did for CBS Sunday Morning, in the fact that, like, not much has changed since Loving Versus Virginia. Can you say a little bit more about that?
Yeah, So the piece was about three different interracial couples, but Rita Braver and I spoke about, like you said, what is it that bothers these families, right, Like, what is it that they feel so triggered by or threatened by? And I was speaking to her about the fact that it's really about how people have envisioned their life and their family's lives, right, Like the people shot of envisioned that my grandkids would look a certain way, or my children will marry a certain kind of person, whether that means gender, sexual orientation, but specifically race too. And so it becomes a thing of feeling that my legacy is being threatened, that my bloodline is being tampered with. And that sounds very like prehistoric, right. It sounds very old fashioned in that line of thinking, but it's still what happens to this day. It's really about what are people going to think if my grandchild is black? How people going to react to me. It doesn't mean about me if my son goes and marries an Asian woman or a black woman and doesn't find a white woman to be a suitable partner. And we saw that with even like Megan Markle and Harry Right, that the family was asking about how dark skin the child would be and what that might mean. Because we still have so many people in the society who think that darker skin or black people are bad and wrong and that it means something negative or less than that. Those things get stepped on and get triggered when you bring someone home who is black.
Thank you for sharing that. So where can we stay connected with you, Doctor Henry. What is your website as well as any social media handles.
My website is Sankkopha Therapy NYC and on Instagram, I'm the same Sankopha Therapy NYC. On our website and on Instagram, you can find different links to articles I've contributed to, things like the cbspiece, other videos I've done with different media entities. I'm also hosting a couple's retreat this September in Belize, and it's not a therapy couples retreat. There will be some theraputic elements to it, but it's really about helping couples be in this beautiful place but make time for themselves and have fun together and explore different aspects of their relationships together. Socided about that, and I've also published a cookbook that has theraputy exercises in it as well as recipes, so it's sort of like the model in a book form, and there are exercises that you can do by yourself with your partner, with your family, with your friends, as well as recipes that align with that. So there's like a section on food that you can eat by yourself that's really indulgent food you can share with your partner, etc.
Perfect well, we will be sure to include all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for spending time with us today, Doctor Henry.
Thank you so much like to join. It's been a lot of fun.
I'm so glad Doctor Henry was able to join us for this episode. To learn more about her and her work, please visit the show notes at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com slash Session three point fifteen, and don't forget to text two of your girls right now and tell them to check out the episode. If you're looking for a therapist in your area, check out our therapist directory at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com slash directory. And if you want to continue digging into this topic or just be in community with other sisters, come on over and join us in the Sister Circle. It's our cozy corner of the Internet designed just for black women. You can join us at community dot Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. This episode was produced by Frieda Lucas alis Ellis and Zaria Taylor, and editing was done by Dennison Bradford. Thank y'all so much for joining me again this week. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you all real soon take good care. What