- Virtual Sessions Only
- 646-918-1181
- 220 5th Ave, Floor 11, New York, NY 10001
- 704-218-9194
- 3623 Latrobe Drive, Suite 110 #A6, Charlotte NC 28211
You don’t need someone to tell you that racism exists. You live it. What you need is a therapist who understands how it gets under your skin, literally and figuratively, and who has the clinical tools to help you process, cope, and heal without asking you to minimize what you’re going through.
At Kind Mind Psychology, therapy for race-based stress and cultural identity is not a niche add-on. It’s a core part of who we are. We are a Black-owned practice founded on a mission to reduce healthcare disparities, and our founder, Dr. Monica Johnson, co-authored Addressing Race-Based Stress in Therapy with Black Clients: Using Multicultural and Dialectical Behavior Therapy Techniques (Routledge), a clinical framework that mental health professionals use to provide culturally responsive treatment. That published expertise is the foundation of how our entire team practices.
You won’t have to educate us. You won’t have to code-switch in session. You won’t have to convince your therapist that what happened to you was real. We already know.
Racism doesn’t just hurt in the moment. It accumulates. The research is clear that chronic exposure to racial discrimination produces measurable psychological and physiological effects, including elevated cortisol, chronic hypervigilance, disrupted sleep, increased risk of depression and anxiety, and higher rates of cardiovascular disease. Race-based stress is not a feeling you need to get over. It is a predictable response to an oppressive environment, and it deserves clinical attention.
Here’s what it can look like in your daily life:
The constant scan. You walk into a meeting, a store, a new neighborhood, and part of your brain is automatically assessing whether you’re safe, whether you’re being watched, whether you need to adjust how you present yourself. That hypervigilance is exhausting, and it doesn’t turn off when you get home.
Code-switching fatigue. You spend all day performing a version of yourself that’s palatable to the dominant culture, then come home drained in a way that has nothing to do with your actual workload. Over time, the gap between who you are and who you perform can erode your sense of self.
Microaggression accumulation. Any single incident might seem small. The comment about your hair. The assumption about your competence. The surprise that you’re “so articulate.” But microaggressions are cumulative. The weight of hundreds of small cuts over years creates real psychological damage: anxiety, anger, self-doubt, withdrawal, and a pervasive sense of not belonging.
Racial trauma. Direct experiences of racial violence, police brutality, hate crimes, or severe discrimination. Vicarious trauma from media exposure to racial violence against people who look like you. The intergenerational trauma passed down through families and communities that survived slavery, colonization, forced displacement, or systematic oppression.
Cultural identity confusion. Feeling caught between worlds. Not “enough” of one thing for one group, too much of it for another. First-generation Americans navigating the expectations of their parents’ culture and the realities of the one they’re living in. Biracial and multiracial individuals trying to figure out where they fit. Immigrants dealing with acculturation stress and the grief of leaving a homeland behind.
Isolation. The loneliness of being the only one in the room. The exhaustion of carrying experiences your white friends, colleagues, or partners can’t fully understand. The feeling that no one truly gets it.
We use evidence-based approaches adapted for the realities of racism and cultural stress. Your treatment will be tailored to what you’re dealing with, not pulled from a generic textbook that wasn’t written with you in mind.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) processes racial trauma that your nervous system hasn’t been able to resolve on its own. If specific incidents of racial violence, discrimination, or hate are stuck in your body and your memory, EMDR helps your brain reprocess them so they stop triggering you in the present. EMDR is also effective for vicarious racial trauma from media exposure.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) builds skills for managing the day-to-day emotional toll of racism. Emotional regulation skills help you process anger, grief, and frustration without being consumed by them. Distress tolerance skills help you get through acute moments of racial stress without the coping mechanisms that might provide short-term relief but long-term harm. Interpersonal effectiveness skills help you navigate conversations about race in your workplace, your family, and your relationships. Dr. Johnson’s published work specifically integrates multicultural and DBT techniques for treating race-based stress in Black clients.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) addresses the cognitive impact of racism: the internalized beliefs about your own worth that systemic oppression plants and waters. CBT helps you identify which thoughts are yours and which were put there by a racist system, then build a more accurate, self-affirming narrative.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) helps you understand the internal parts that developed in response to racial stress. The protector that code-switches. The part that carries rage. The part that learned to make itself small to survive. The wounded part underneath all of them. IFS creates a compassionate relationship with these parts so you can lead from a place of wholeness rather than constantly managing your survival responses.
Psychodynamic approaches explore how your racial and cultural identity was shaped by your family, your community, and your earliest experiences. Attachment theory, object relations, and mentalization-based approaches help you understand the relational patterns that emerged from growing up in a racialized world and how those patterns show up in your relationships today.
Our Culturally Affirming Therapy page describes the practice’s overall philosophy: how Kind Mind approaches all clients across all identities, our values of anti-oppression and cultural humility, and how our team is trained. It’s about who we are as a practice.
This page is about a specific clinical service. If you’re a BIPOC individual seeking therapy specifically for the mental health effects of racism, racial trauma, cultural identity challenges, or the stress of navigating a racialized world, this is the page that describes what that treatment looks like and how we approach it clinically.
All services are available virtually in New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina. We accept Aetna, Cigna, BCBS (NC only), Northwell Direct (NY only), and offer a sliding scale starting at $25 per session. For full details, visit our Insurance & Fees page.
Race-based stress is the psychological and physiological toll of living with racism. It includes the impact of direct discrimination, microaggressions, systemic inequality, vicarious trauma from media exposure to racial violence, code-switching, and the chronic hypervigilance of navigating environments where you are marginalized. It is a well-documented phenomenon with measurable effects on mental and physical health.
Race-based stress is the cumulative, ongoing toll of living in a racialized society. Racial trauma refers to the psychological response to specific traumatic events involving racism, such as experiences of racial violence, hate crimes, police brutality, or severe discrimination. Both are treatable. Many BIPOC individuals experience both simultaneously.
No. The daily, cumulative weight of microaggressions, systemic racism, code-switching, and cultural stress is itself a valid and treatable concern. You don’t need a single defining incident. If racism is affecting your mental health, relationships, or sense of self, that’s enough.
Kind Mind Psychology is a Black-owned practice. Our team is diverse across race, gender, sexuality, and lived experience. If having a therapist who shares your racial background is important to you, let us know when you reach out and we’ll do our best to match you accordingly.
Yes. Research consistently shows that chronic exposure to racial discrimination is associated with higher rates of anxiety disorders, depression, PTSD, sleep disruption, and physical health conditions. Race-based stress is not separate from these conditions. It is often a primary driver of them.
Addressing Race-Based Stress in Therapy with Black Clients (Routledge), co-authored by Dr. Monica Johnson and Dr. Michelle L. Melton, provides mental health professionals with a practical, non-pathological framework for treating race-based stress. It includes worksheets, vignettes, and case studies grounded in multicultural and DBT techniques. This framework directly informs how our team treats racial trauma and race-based stress at Kind Mind.
Ready to start? Contact Kind Mind Psychology or call 646-918-1181 (NYC) / 704-218-9194 (Charlotte, NC).