Forums Interracial Couple Therapy & CommunicationNeed advice on finding a therapist who gets interracial couples stuff

Need advice on finding a therapist who gets interracial couples stuff

11 posts

I'm in Dallas and my girlfriend and I have been looking for a couples therapist for about a month now. She's Latina, I'm white, and we've been together since college, but now that we're talking about moving in together and maybe getting engaged, all the family and culture stuff is coming up hard. Her mom is super involved and my family is more like 'do whatever makes you happy,' which sounds nice until you realize we're both annoyed by the other's setup. I tried searching on TherapyDen and a few local clinics, but it's hard to tell who actually gets interracial relationship issues and who just says they do. We had one intro call where the therapist kept calling it a 'communication mismatch' and it felt kind of dismissive. Has anyone had luck finding someone who doesn't force everything into a generic template? I'm not expecting them to understand every culture perfectly, just enough to not be clueless about it.

Mar 11

145

2 replies

Aisha JohnsonPREMIUM

#1 · Mar 11

We ran into this in Philly and it took us forever to find the right person. What helped was asking straight up in the consult call how they work with racial/cultural differences and whether they have experience with mixed couples. If they get defensive or give a super vague answer, that's usually a bad sign. Our therapist actually said, 'I don't need to be the expert on your culture, but I do need to be curious and not make assumptions.' That was a good sign. She also asked practical stuff like how holidays work, who gets consulted on big decisions, and what kind of family pressure each of us deals with. That made it feel way more useful than the usual relationship advice.

Test User

#2 · Mar 12

I’d also suggest looking beyond just 'couples therapist' and checking for someone who lists family systems or multicultural counseling. My wife and I are in Oakland, she's Mexican-American and I'm Nigerian-American, and the best therapist we found had a background in both trauma and cultural identity work. She didn't act like every issue was about race, but she also didn't pretend it wasn't part of the room. One weirdly helpful thing was reading reviews for clues. People would mention if the therapist was warm, direct, or actually listened. We ended up booking someone after a review said, 'she asked the questions we were scared to ask each other.' That ended up being true. Sometimes the first consult tells you more than the website does.