Feminist Jawn

I wish mental health care in America was not built around waiting for people to break.

Too often, we are forced to name our pain as “mental illness” before insurance companies will pay attention. Black women especially are expected to endure, overfunction, care for everyone else, and keep moving until the weight becomes undeniable.

That is why Feminist Jawn LLC and Well Womanist Therapy Practice are preparing to offer both clinical therapy and liberation sessions.

Clinical therapy will support people when distress, trauma, depression, anxiety, and other symptoms require treatment. Liberation sessions will offer space to tend to mental health before crisis, to strengthen boundaries, name oppressive conditions, reconnect with the body, reclaim voice, and practice choosing ourselves without apology.

Because Black women do not only deserve care after collapse.
We deserve care that helps us remain whole.

We deserve spaces where our pain is not pathologized.

We deserve support that understands that healing is personal, ancestral, relational, and political.

Prevention is care.

Rest is care.

Liberation is care.

And we should not have to fall apart before anyone believes we need it.

What would change if you stopped requiring yourself to be understood before you protected yourself?

Do not abandon yourself in the name of being “understanding

Today, while speaking on the Perinatal Mental Health Panel with the Greater Washington Urban League, I unlocked a part of me.

A part of me, in need of expression, being witnessed and in safe communion.

I as able to find a way of articulating one complicated truth in one simple healing fact.

"At 13 weeks and 6 days pregnant, I lost my Black father while preparing to give birth to my Black son, while escaping my Black husband...."

Grief and trauma have a way of stopping ones ability to express depth of feeling. This is a prtectuve factor when facing acute and life changing events. As a therapist, I help people process this overtime everyday.

No matter my profession, when the information is known both in intellect and in personal life, it def hits in a different way

And I am still contemplating the meaning

Tomorrow I’ll be serving as a panelist with Greater Washington Urban League for “Lived Perinatal Experience, Barriers, & Community-Based Interventions.”

Holding space for the realities Black women/birthing people carry what we survive, what we navigate in medical and intimate spaces, how it impacts us and how we heal together.

This work is clinical but it is also deeply personal.

I’m bringing my voice as a perinatal mental health therapist committed to single mothers, LGBTQIA+ birthing people, and survivors of intimate partner violence, naming how these experiences shape mental health and overall health outcomes, care, and survival.

I'm so grateful to be in rooms like this.

I'm grateful to do this work. These conversations are so important because we do not heal alone. We heal in community... and I have a voice, it started off as a whisper turned into a scream. I am growing daily. 🖤

Sis said its not "mental illness" , its male pattern violence, and my eyesight just got clearer.

When women come in seeking to "regulate their emotions", I ALWAYS assess for interpersonal violence.

Too many times women are told they are overly dramatic
they need to learn to contain their emotions in relationships.

They believe they are to blame..
if only they could just get how they express themselves right then things will be "okay".

When in reality their emotional response is in proportion to harm they are experiencing.

Because society tells women they are being dramatic, it is hard for them to decipher that they are being abused.

They are told to be silent
Be small
Be less

Feminist Jawn is over here breaking cycles.
A feminist framework is essential to protecting the minds of women and the integrity of what it means to be mentally healthy.

End the patriarchy in mental health, encourage accessing self agency, assess for interpersonal violence. ALWAYS.