Discussion of ‘The Internal Oppressor: The Veiled Companion of Racial Oppression’1

This paper presents some very important issues for therapists working with black and minority ethnic patients and adds to the scholarship of psychotherapy as a discipline. The paper discusses the psychology that is specific to people of colour as a result of the experience of slavery colonization and contemporary racism. The psychology of oppression and survival is common to many groups, to Jews, blacks, gays, people with disabilities and others, and is literally a minority issue that is too often left to the minorities to engage with. In doing so, many majority therapists do not learn about the rich and complex issues sometimes involved in an intercultural or diverse dyadic therapy.

The issue of the internal oppressor is also instructional for black therapists working with black patients. Many black people can fool themselves into thinking that the work is done once they have confronted racism in their social and political worlds. In her paper, Dr Alleyne notes that the real battleground is the personal and not the political, lending emphasis to the importance of facing the internal oppressor. An early companion of racial oppression, the internal oppressor is the complex, unseen, two-thirds of the iceberg of racism that can contort, regulate, and restrict thinking and feeling. The fight for survival is not just against the banal daily expression of racism but against the self-doubt and self-reproach that always serve to undermine.

This valuable paper discusses the internal organization of black people resulting from the relationship that enslaved people had with their enslavers. The internal organization of oppression can be difficult to understand both by black and white people, each for their own particular reasons. Viewing the consequences of the wreckage variously provokes pain, anger, guilt, and indifference. Much is invested in telling Black people not to look back at their history. Yet history and heritage is such an important part of British pride. A huge sti