Christopher has struggled all his life to fit in—first at school, then in the military, and most recently in relationships and in the workforce. Angry, depressed, and having turned to alcohol to regulate himself, he feels vulnerable, isolated, and without direction despite his immediate family ties and proud ancestry.
Carver presents primarily with issues in his relationships with women—both his current partner and his ex-girlfriend, with whom he has a child. Underneath his sadness and frustration are the residual effects of having an absent father and his difficulty feeling anger about this. When we first meet him, he reminds us that as a Black man, “self-preservation is the first order of law—if that means being on guard 24/7, then the answer is yes, but that is the burden, and it’s very heavy to carry that.”
Chad is freshly out of a long-term relationship, unemployed, struggling with insecurity and self-doubt, and trying to balance a complex identity comprised of being gay, raised as a Jehovah’s witness, and Black. When we first meet him, he tells us what it is like to feel invisible and asks us to consider that “if to be present is to be threatening as a Black person, then you’re getting all these signals around that you’re threatening, to the point where you’ve now got a literal target on your back and can be killed because of it, and that’s really hard to digest.”
Glimpses into their unique therapeutic experiences will focus on:
- Racism
- Microaggressions
- Identity Issues
- Impacts of Slavery
- Mistrust of Helping Professionals
- Creating Safety by Going into their World
Length of video: 2:49:09
English subtitles available
Group ISBN-10 #: 1-60124-583-1
Group ISBN-13 #: 978-1-60124-583-0
Darrick Tovar-Murray, PhD, is an associate professor of counseling in the Department of Counseling and Special Education at DePaul University in Chicago, where he teaches a wide range of graduate-level clinical and counseling courses. He is the author (with contributions from Jan Louis Gaetjens) of
Basic Therapeutic Counseling Skills: Interventions for Working with Clients’ Thoughts, Feelings and Behavior (Cognella, 2017). Dr Tovar Murray’s primary area of scholarship is multicultural counseling, and his research interests include identity development, African-American well-being, and counseling and spirituality.
CE credits: 3
Learning Objectives:
- Describe the developmental and clinical impact of racism on African American men
- Describe race-related concepts such as invisibility, microaggression, and oppression
- Discuss how to create a safe therapeutic space for African American men
Bibliography available upon request
This course is offered for ASWB ACE credit for social workers. See complete list of CE approvals here
© 2021