Beyond Colorblindness in Mental Health:
Developing White Racial Identity Awareness for Equitable Therapy and Supervision
[This is an expanded workshop building on the
breakout session at MaMHCA's 2024 Annual Conference.]
LIVE IN PERSON
White clinicians have remedial work to do in developing awareness of our racial identity and racial socialization; learning to talk about race, racism, and privilege; and identifying the ways in which white supremacy is embedded in our psyches. Deconstructing whiteness is an ongoing, non-linear journey of unlearning internalized racism and developing critical consciousness. When in mixed groups, white folks tend to rely on BIPOC folks to do the emotional labor and risk-taking associated with addressing these topics and to resist being honest and vulnerable for fear of offending or being perceived as racist.
For this reason, this workshop is open only to white clinicians.
While the theory and practice of psychotherapy centralizes whiteness, the particularity of whiteness remains an untold story in the field. Understanding whiteness can help white therapists and supervisors have genuine cross-racial conversations that include their own identities instead of discussing race in terms of “others.” In this experiential seminar, white therapists are invited to challenge counterproductive ideologies of colorblindness, explore cultural humility, and increase awareness of their own racial identity and racial socialization. White clinicians will learn how to move from colluding with the harm perpetuated by the myth of colorblindness and a stance of “neutrality” to co-creating an environment in the therapy room in which identity, culture and race are unequivocally recognized as robust systemic contexts that impact all relationships, thus contributing to a more equitable mental health system for all.
Presenter: Yael Bat-Shimon, LMHC
I am a white woman married to a Black woman for 17 years. We are both family and relationship therapists. We developed an introductory experiential training for white therapists to explore their own racial identity. The training emerged from our own challenges as an interracial couple addressing the impacts of race, racism, and privilege on our marriage. As a white woman I had minimal consciousness in the early years of our marriage of my white racial identity or of how my whiteness influences my perceptions, assumptions, behaviors and thus the impact it had on my marriage. My Black spouse, who navigates the tumultuous waters of systemic racism, felt the additional burden of educating me about whiteness and privilege and the ways she suspected it was impacting our marital dynamics. We took on the task of upending the status quo of conflicts rooted in old racial conditioning, racial harms, implicit bias and old habits using a dialogical process rooted in Imago relationship therapy. We committed to listening to each other with curiosity, to each other’s racial stories without defensiveness, anger or shame. I discovered, for the first time, what it meant to be a white person and come to terms with privilege. Through our own racial healing, it was clear to us that our relationship patterns and stories are fertile places to begin noticing and renouncing old racial habits of harm and to shift toward caring, humility and empathy, which is essential to racial awareness, racial identity healing and transformation. Our training is designed to assist white therapists in understanding the importance of racialized self-knowledge and to provide a systemic context for cross-racial conversations that emphasizes a vigilant and ever-growing attunement to race and privilege in the self of therapist.
Saturday April 25, 2026 from 9 am to 12:30 IN PERSON at the MaMHCA Bergstrom Center at 17 Cocasset Street, Foxboro, MA
[allow 15-30 minutes after the workshop to complete the evaluation]
3 CEUs
Members: $110
Non-members: $150
Registration closes 5 days before the event even if there are open spaces.
Some workshops have limited 'seats' by request of the presenter.
When that limit is reached, registration will close.
