Cultivating critical Sankofa and constructing thirdness

Abstract

This article seeks to evidence the exploration of faith as a protective factor in the context of suicidal ideation by demonstrating my use of dramatherapy as a Black male dramatherapist with my client, a young Black boy seeking asylum in the UK. Although an adolescent/teen, the adultification Black children and young people face requires sensitivity to honour the youthful innocence children and young people of the global majority are often denied.

The intentional inclusion of the Black, British, Caribbean, male identity as a part of this discussion in the African diaspora serves as a reminder of the vast diversity across the African diaspora. Literature pertaining to Black Jamaican men, in the context of the mental health spectrum, suicidality, and in psychotherapy, is sparse in Britain, with Black men often removed as the tellers of their own stories. In this article I share aspects of my own history with a lens of compassion and curiosity.

This article encourages the active reclamation of critical thinking for the present, past, and future by re-visiting the impact the clinician has on a client’s accessing and identification of protective factors, and offering a framework to exercise cultural humility, to not disregard the ‘toolkits’ clients come to therapy already familiar with. When Blackness is spoken for, by us and for us, we can speak to the totality of our experience without compromising parts of our identity.

This year, 2025, has seen a rise in the political discourse regarding the topic of legal migration; as such, this article combats noisy misinformation by documenting the underrepresented reality of seeking asylum in the UK. As a client-led therapy, the ethical use of dramatherapy with non-white, non-European clients demands the decentring of Eurocentric whiteness. African-centred philosophy is proposed to fill-in the systemic gaps predicated by Western teachings of psychotherapy. This bold shift in paradigm invites us to re-examine our relationship to self-disclosure as therapists, subverting the idea of being a blank canvas, and instead honouring the spaces we inhabit as both professionals and members of a wider shared community within the therapeutic alliance.

Dramatherapy is a type of creative-arts psychotherapy practice requiring both a master’s from a recognised university institution, as well as registered accreditation from the healthcare professional’s council to practice using the protected title ‘dramatherapist’. Dramatherapy is informed by developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and the artform of theatre. Dramatherapy offers clients who have lost their voice the opportunity to take up space by locating an authentic self.

Dramatherapy emphasises the cultivation of a co-created space, the shape of which is informed by that which the client brings, and the dramatherapist’s response to this. This modality of psychotherapy is an invitation to a liminal space, offering clients to identify for themselves what they would like to keep and/or leave behind with the dramatherapist alongside. This retrieval process mirrors the African-centred philosophy of critical Sankofa.