Therapists shouldn't all be white and middle class. We need more from marginalised backgrounds

In 2004, I wrote a letter to my estranged father that I had placed in the ground alongside his ashes. I told him that I forgave him.

It had taken me years of growing up and nearly a year and a half of therapy to put some perspective on our wrought father-daughter relationship; to view the once formidable, secretive and often violently hateful figure of my father as just a painfully flawed human being who was capable of redemption.

He died, both estranged and a stranger to me. The secrets of the life that made him ‘him’ were lost forever, too. I speculated that a severely troubled past – childhood or otherwise – must’ve led him to become the fearful and angry man I once knew.

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What level of rejection or violation of trust must he have faced as a child from those who should’ve loved and protected him the most? What atrocities had he seen when he fought in the war? What path did he tread that made him see and expect the very worst in people first, before seeing good? I saw vulnerability and loneliness, and – for the first time – I felt empathy for him.

That was when I became truly interested in matters of the mind. And through simply being his daughter, I learnt many positive things about what I yearned for in my own life partner. I also knew the high benchmark for parenting that I would set myself, as I became a mother too.

I grew up a shy, bookish girl, but what this made me become was a keen observer and listener of people. I would sit on the periphery of action and just watch. Perhaps that was where my fascination with people, their behaviour and the untold stories behind each and every individual was seeded.

I believe in the power of therapy, in its ability to purge hidden hurt from deep within and in its ability to heal. My own experiences of therapy have given me resilience, grit and a commitment to always find new ways of becoming a better and more self-accepting person for myself, my family and for all those I may meaningfully encounter.

I reflect on some of the darkest moments that have defined my life, even before I was born – from my pregnant mother, left by my father, to give birth to me alone and homeless; to my formative years being brought up impoverished in rat infested social housing; to going to a failing school on a council estate and being the only brown child in the class.

Therapy enabled me to gain control over emotions and issues invoked by circumstances over which I had no control. To be met, unflinching, in the thick of my pain – to have someone hold it without turning away – gave me the relief I didn’t know I needed. The process eventually enabled me to tackle life and the future with determination, hope, gratitude and self-compassion.

That’s what inspired me to become a psychotherapist and leave a two-decade-long career in PR and media.

During my clinical placements in some of London’s most deprived inner-city schools, I sat with children who carried burdens too heavy for their small shoulders: neglect, abuse, racism, and grinding poverty. They attended school withdrawn or violent. Some cursed and some upended the room with their anger. Others curled into silence. These were survival defences I knew too well. But while my history didn’t automatically make me become a better therapist, it did mean I could sit with them without recoiling, minimising, or plastering on false positivity. I could hold their mess.

This is where therapy as a profession must face its truth. Built on the ideas of privileged men, psychotherapy is now propped up by underpaid women. The founders were hailed as visionaries. Today’s workforce is expected to absorb endless emotional labour under the guise of vocation – the old curse of ‘caring work’. Training is prohibitively expensive, takes years, and often requires unpaid placements. Without financial safety nets, working-class and minority trainees are systematically excluded.

The result is an industry that claims to be about empathy but too often lacks practitioners who have lived through the realities of poverty, racism, or housing insecurity.

Clients from disadvantaged backgrounds may sit opposite someone well-meaning but unable to feel what deprivation or shame tastes like. And as child poverty rises in Britain, that blind spot becomes even more glaring.

Empathy, of course, doesn’t require identical life stories, but lived experience can bridge a gap that theory alone cannot. If therapy is to remain relevant – especially for the most vulnerable – it needs practitioners who know both the theory and the taste of hunger, the weight of shame, the fear of being othered.

I never imagined I’d be calling for it, but therapy needs more men – especially for children and young people who long to see themselves reflected in the person listening or need access to positive male role models, as I once did. It needs more people of colour. More people who have known poverty first-hand, not just those from relatively privileged backgrounds.

According to a Health and Care Professions Council survey in 2020, 90% of registered practitioner psychologists in the UK identify as white.

Of course, there are bursaries, scholarships, and occasional NHS-funded routes into therapy training, but these are few, fragmented, and rarely cover the true cost, which encompasses years of unpaid work, mandatory weekly therapy, mandatory supervision, residential away days and much more besides. A conservative grand estimate of my training fees over the seven years has, for example, seen me spend approximately £68,000. For that, I gained a master’s degree, not even a doctorate.

Is it worth it? It depends on how you define ‘worth’. To be trusted with something so precious and burdensome as someone’s innermost secrets and shame is no small thing. It is an actual privilege. But if psychotherapy is to stay relevant and truly reach the most vulnerable, then its practitioners must also reflect the diversity – and the realities – of those they hope to help. And that means breaking down the barriers that keep therapy the preserve of the privileged – funding training properly, paying therapists fairly, and recruiting from the margins, not just the mainstream. If we want a service that can meet people in their darkest places, it must look more like the world it serves.

Andrea San Pedro-Lunn is a psychotherapeutic counsellor and founder of Subliminal Space.

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