The White British Counselling Psychologist: Personal and Professional Experiences of Whiteness. A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Approach

Practitioner psychologists are 90% White (Moore et al., 2020) and work in contexts where there is evidence of ‘racial’ disparities in mental health and psychological service provision towards racialised ethnic minority groups*. Schooley et al., (2019) propose that counselling psychologists can help to dismantle ‘racial’ oppression through the psychological examination of Whiteness. Whiteness appears to have been widely explored in the multi-disciplinary and international counselling psychology literature. Exploring the lived experience of Whiteness for qualified White British counselling psychologists may offer new insight into this complex phenomenon and make a tentative contribution to advancing scholarship in this area. The current study aimed to explore the personal and professional lived experiences of a group of White British counselling psychologists. It sought to understand how contributors constructed, understood and made meaning from the phenomenon of Whiteness. Six counselling psychologists who self-identified as White British took part in semistructured interviews, which were transcribed and analysed utilising hermeneutic phenomenological analysis inspired by Max van Manen.

The analysis revealed four themes: Whiteness is a bypass, Whiteness is a vessel, Whiteness is a trap, and Whiteness is a conditional home. The results suggest essential aspects of the lived experience of Whiteness for this group of contributors include the centrality of White privilege, an ambiguous understanding of Whiteness, emotional discomfort, uncertainty about how to speak or act ‘racial’ issues, operation within a racialised paradigm, and interaction with intersectional aspects of identity. Clinical implications of the findings are discussed, including how existing psychological frameworks may be applied and suggestions for how to respond to Whiteness in professional practice. The findings may serve as a point of further exploration, discussion, and action around the topic of Whiteness within the field of counselling psychology in Britain and associated disciplines.

*Term formulated by the author