COMBAHEE THERAPY
Therapy is a political relationship. It should be a liberating one too!
Combahee Therapy is the space in which I - Dr. Montinique McEachern - invite individuals, families, and partners into a healing relationship through interrogating all of the systems of oppression that have made us feel unwell. Using Black Feminist Narrative, I encourage us to question beliefs we have always held as "truths" in hopes of creating enough freedom from those truths to tell our own stories.
Dr. Monëy
Dr. Montiniquë McEachern (her/she) is a Black lesbian healer from Queens, New York who believe that our problems – as well as the solutions to them – are connected, no matter how different our identities may seem.
“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives”. This quote by Audre Lorde sums up Montiniquë's therapeutic approach, merging Black feminism and Narrative Family Therapy.
"Black feminists often talk about their feelings of craziness before becoming conscious… The fact that racial politics and indeed racism are pervasive factors in our lives did not allow us, and still does not allow most Black women, to look more deeply into our own experiences and, from that sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression.”
- Combahee River Collective
Black Feminist Narrative Therapy
I call my approach to therapy Black Feminist Narrative Therapy. My work intentionally centers and serves the stories and strategies Black and other third world queer and trans people have always used to heal and survive. Our narratives of survival are healing, but are often not honored or made space for. My therapy work is committed to using abolitionist, antiracist, queer affirming, and anti-imperialist therapeutic interventions. I firmly hold that therapy is inherently a political process, because the healing of oppressed people requires us to question, subvert, and resist the assumptions of our social world. If we are to truly be well, the world as we know it would have to change. So, I use narrative therapy strategies like deconstructive questioning and externalizing the problem to make space for you to breathe outside of the problem, long enough to see ways we might be able to change your world.