A growing number of women of color are seeking alternative mental health services to help cope with stress and other recurrent struggles in their lives more effectively. Many of these women are now utilizing hypnotherapy, breathwork, and reiki as means of effective therapeutic intervention minus psychiatric labels and medications.
One of them is "Maya," a 36 year-old African American woman. Among many things, Maya is a single mom of two pre-teens, and a lawyer. In the past, Maya sought treatment from a psychiatrist and was diagnosed with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). She had been an incest survivor since age 8 and experienced recurrent nightmares, flashbacks, and anxiety attacks. Maya also had difficulty maintaining relationships with men as a result of her childhood trauma. Years of intensive talk therapy and anti-anxiety medication led Maya to see very little improvement in her recovery, until a friend recommended that she try hypnotherapy.
Maya says, "At first, I was skeptical about hypnosis and what it could do for me. But I was frustrated. I felt like I was hitting a wall with my therapist and that she didn't really understand where I was coming from. This had been the eighth therapist I had been to, and I was beginning to feel like talking about my symptoms and my past was beating a dead horse. When was I going to get over it? I just wanted to feel better and stop the panic attacks. . . "
Shortly after her friend suggested hypnotherapy, Maya found a therapist that specialized in alternative therapies and for the first time, she was able to find a therapist who was a woman of color. After six months of hypnotherapy, Maya's panic attacks have completely gone away. She says,"What I wasn't able to accomplish in 9 years of talk therapy, hypnotherapy helped me in just a matter of months. It's really unbelievable. I recommend it for anyone who wants to put the kind of suffering and isolation I went through to an end. The greatest part was that I finally found a therapist that I didn't feel was busy getting caught up in diagnosing me and putting me in a box. Unlike my other therapists, I finally found someone who understood where I was coming from. And I felt like she really cared and wanted to see me get better. Now I've moved on to doing breathwork, which is even more amazing. . . "
What is Hypnotherapy?
Hypnotherapy puts a person in a deep state of relaxation, helping her to relinquish defenses and then access deeper emotions and memories at a subconscious level. Once there, the hypnotherapist facilitates whatever content comes up for her during a session. Over time, a hypnotherapist can guide the person to uncover traumatic events and memories to help the person break down and eventually release emotions related to trauma or unwanted patterns of behavior. This type of therapy differs from traditional practices of talk therapy by tapping into the subconscious, focusing on one's emotions, and offering a non-judgemental treatment space- absolutely crucial for improvement and recovery. In contrast, talk therapy runs a higher risk of making a person feel like she is being judged and critiqued by her therapist rather than being helped.
Like Maya, many other women of color often resist traditional mental health services mostly out of a historically embedded distrust of the mental health system. They may also experience frustration over a serious shortage of culturally competent and sensitive mental health professionals. Women of Asian, African American, Native American, Multiracial, Caribbean and Latina descent share a common thread of often feeling misunderstood when seeking help, leading them to resist dominant paradigms of mental health, psychotherapy, and psychopathology. These frameworks often lack accuracy and misrepresent the stories of women of color. Distrust then, is often justified as women of color may be further victimized by arbitrary sexist and racially stereotypical uses of psychiatric diagnoses, governed by the Diagnostic Statistical Manual. Frequent misapplication of mental health diagnoses revolve around women who struggle with common symptoms of anxiety, depression, anger, and systemic trauma-- even by the most well intentioned mental health professional.
Alternative therapies reduce the likelihood that women of color will be further victimized by these mental health practices, especially since many of these treatment methods- hypnotherapy, breathwork, and reiki have historical origins in ethnic cultures of their own. Also, alternative practices are more focused on coping with difficult emotions and challenging circumstances instead of diagnosis and psychiatric labelling. These interventions may significantly reduce the social stigma that is attached with seeking help, instilling trust in a culturally competent mental health professional, and ultimately resulting in positive treatment and more empowering experiences for women of color.
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