If Black women relied on the news to gauge their standing in modern society, recent headlines would leave them in a dizzying state of confusion. Leading stories drum up a swirl of deprivation, violence, and exploitation—from hundreds of thousands facing job loss, to declines in business funding, to a horrifying rise in femicide, to contentious political platforming. The more distressing layer? Keeping Black women disoriented is crucial to upholding racism and patriarchy. 

In her book The Essential Guide for Counseling Black Women, licensed therapist, educator, and Black mental health expert Dr. LaNail R. Plummer gives credence to this perverted necessity as the basis for how to support Black women: ”Without women, patriarchy could not exist, and without Blackness racism could not exist. Black women were needed and weaponized for the very systems that keep them oppressed.” The reality of being both expendable and integral—a reality being aided by constant gaslighting—is at the root of the weight Black women bear. "Being in a powerless position and at the same time being the very tool needed to maintain one's own marginalization takes a massive psychological and emotional toll," Dr. Plummer writes. It’s no wonder more and more Black women are seeking therapy. 

Throughout her career in education, Dr. Plummer identified a dichotomy that inspired her to take action. “Black women are going to non-Black women for therapy, and those people are not necessarily trained the way that they need to be trained,” she notes. And I know that because I've been in academia for 15 years and I know multicultural courses, and there's nothing that's really centered on the intersecting identities of Black women.” Without the proper positioning and context for Black women’s experiences, their pursuit of therapy could do more harm than good. 

Mitigating harm from others wasn’t the only purpose of The Essential Guide for Counseling Black Women, however. Dr. Plummer is a proponent of Black women seeking therapy and hopes the book can also serve as a bridge for those who are still considering that step. “You may not have major depressive disorder, but if you are about to be your ancestor's wildest dreams, you need to figure out how you’re going to live this newfound freedom that nobody taught you to live,” she asserts. “You’re about to be a trailblazer and didn't even know it. You need to be thinking about how you process your emotions, how you problem-solve.” This was her motivation for adding journal prompts for Black women at the end of each chapter.

Most of The Essential Guide for Counseling Black Women focuses on the various reasons Black women might seek therapy. In the “Choosing Nontraditional Lifestyles” chapter,  Dr. Plummer notes the generational divide between how the civil rights and women’s liberation movements affected older and younger Black generations’ lifestyle pursuits. “There are so many Black women who are living in non-traditional lifestyles and their mamas and them don't understand it,” she says. And when modern Black women choose differently—expatriation, queerness, childlessness—Dr. Plummer notes that an existential inquiry to their elders emerges: “‘I thought you did these things so that I could have a sense of freedom, not so that I had to live this blueprint that you have designed for me?’" The book also tackles another aspect of Black womanhood in its “Creating A Legacy Through Work” chapter, which provides the historical, mental, and emotional ins and outs of attaining education and career success. With the reality that Black women are among the country’s most educated, also comes the reality that they are still often the “only one” in many academic and professional spaces. And though the chapter “Understanding Friendships” appears later in the book, it was top-of-mind in Dr. Plummer’s writing process.

“My first chapter that I wrote in the book was the one on friendship because that's the one that is very, very specifically unique to Black women. The other titles are very much centered on Black women's experiences and their themes in our lives, but our friendships mean something different to us than any other racial group.” By recalling African traditions, slavery, and the ways they’ve shaped Black communities’ relational ethos, The Essential Guide for Counseling Black Women points to how friendship affects Black women’s mental health. “Our friends are mirrors of who we are. So when we change, it's likely that our friendships are going to change—either the actual friends will change or the dynamics of the friendship will change.”

Along with providing historical context and exploratory prompts for Black women, the book also takes non-white therapists to task on purpose. In sections marked “Therapist’s Introspection,” The Essential Guide for Counseling Black Women also serves as a tool for deconstructing inherited biases. “In the book, I talk about core beliefs that Black women have, messages that they learned about themselves and they learned about others and learned about the world. White clinicians in particular have those messages too,” she notes. “These were messages that were embedded, and they didn't have anything to challenge it against. So they continued to think that way until there was a challenging moment, a moment that was a fork in the road where they had to determine how they were going to continue to think and how they weren't.” She intended for questions like “Before reading this chapter, what did you think about Black women?” to create those forks in the road.

When truly used as an aid, The Essential Guide for Counseling Black Women functions as the kind of book you read and interact with in non-chronological order. Along with thematic insights into the experiences of Black women, tools for reflection, and practical therapeutic guides for counselors, the book offers over 200 pages of encouragement for collective healing. As social media wars continue over whose credentials warrant advice, Dr. Plummer remains hopeful that real, offline support from a therapist becomes more accessible.

“I needed Black women to see: all those things circulating in your mind, that you're having conversations with your book club about and with your sisters when you're out at brunch? Those are the things that should be processed with a therapist as well, because your friends can only take you so far based off of their lived experience,” she warns. “But we have lived experience, and we have technical skills that allow us to go deeper into the processing.”

As current times continue to reflect an onslaught of vitriol and violence against Black women, Dr. Plummer still believes in the existence of “Black girl magic,” and that it’s worth protecting. “Take care of that Black woman,” she instructs. “Take care of her, hold her, let people see how special she is. When it's time for you to engage with her, you polish yourself and you polish her too. You make sure that she has what she needs and she's going to make sure that you have what you need too. Because Black women are magical. That's what we do. We cultivate. And it's not going to be because she feels like she must. It's going to be because that's what's natural when you are magical.”