In Motion Sessions: Walk and Talk Therapy for Black Women
This work is for Black women who are tired in a specific way.
Not tired from one hard week. Tired from years of being capable, dependable, and self-sufficient — while quietly carrying more than anyone around you knows.
You've managed it well. That's part of the problem.
Some things are easier to say when you're moving. Not because sitting still is wrong; but because for some of us — especially those of us who have spent years being watched, evaluated, and performed for — a room with two chairs and a closed door can carry its own kind of pressure. The expectation to arrive with something. To make good use of the time. To be a good client.
Walking doesn't ask that of you.
What this is:
Walk and talk sessions are 50-minute therapy sessions that I hold outdoors in the Los Angeles area. We walk side by side. The conversation moves at whatever pace it needs to.
Instead of thinking of this as a lighter version of therapy, know that walk and talk sessions are still depth-oriented talk therapy — the same quality of attention, the same clinical presence, the same relational groundedness — only in a different environment. We are held in motion, in air, in a space that was not designed to contain you. That last part matters more than it might sound.
On the uncontrolled environment
A therapy office is a manufactured space. Everything in it — the lighting, the furniture, the temperature, the silence — has been arranged to produce a particular kind of safety. That arrangement is genuine and often useful. It can also, without anyone intending it, replicate the conditions of being managed.
The outdoors is not (completely) arranged. A dog walks by. The light shifts. You choose whether to cross the street or keep going. Someone is sitting on a bench and you navigate around them together. These are small moments, but they are not nothing.
In a setting that cannot be fully controlled, you are not a recipient of an environment someone else prepared. You are a person moving through the world, making micro-decisions, responding to the unexpected, finding out in real time how you handle what you didn't plan for. That is not a distraction from the therapeutic work, in fact, it is the therapeutic work! Embodied, immediate, and uniquely yours!
For women who have spent years deferring, accommodating, and making themselves smaller in manufactured spaces, the simple act of navigating an unscripted environment — with support, at pace, without performance pressure — can be a practice of agency that the consulting room cannot replicate.
