About

Mayowa Obasaju, PhD

Mayowa Obasaju, PhD (she/her), is a Black, Nigerian born, American raised clinical and community, trauma and healing focused womanist and liberation psychologist, trainer, and educator. Mayowa brings over 12 years of clinical, organizing, teaching, and training experience centering the intersectional and complex experiences of Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. In her teaching, training, and private practice, she works at the nexus of trauma and healing work, self-in-community care practices, systemic and intersectional analysis, critical consciousness raising, and anti-oppressive and liberatory practice. Mayowa also works with birthing people, supporting folks with infertility and those who experience postpartum mental health difficulties, making connections across institutional racism, cisexism, and sexism and the pre-conception, pregnancy, birthing, and post postpartum stages. Mayowa has led numerous healing spaces for women of color and survivors of gender-based violence. She has been involved in curriculum creation, leadership development and strategic coaching, and supervising multiracial, mixed-class, multi-generational staff, interns, and externs.

Mayowa is an educator in higher education settings with a focus on integrating cultural, systemic and liberation psychology perspectives and analyses in teaching. She is an Adjunct faculty member at John Jay College of Criminal Justice where she teaches undergraduate students and sits on the psychology department’s Anti-Racism Task Force.

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My Approach

"...we must know and speak who we are. We speak it to ourselves ... and speak it to the world. In the knowing and the speaking, we are made whole." Bryant-Davis & Comas Diaz

My focus is on creating communities of support and healing while connecting people to necessary resources. I use multiple pathways to healing, always taking into account family, community, social, political, and economic influences on our being, including thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

I create space to talk about spiritual, emotional, and physical wellness. Spaces where we explore how systems of oppression impact people and how we can engage in liberatory, healing work.

Therapy is not about me providing you with solutions. It is about supporting your engagement in self in relation to other reflections in order to craft your own path and solutions. I believe that many of the answers are within you. I am on this journey of healing, transformation, and liberation with you and I will offer tools, strategies, practices, and education to support you on your journey.

I work with individuals, couples, and groups. I utilize trauma informed, healing focused, culturally grounded, decolonizing, liberatory, spirituality aware approaches. Specifically, I am an integrative therapist who draws from liberation psychology, mindfulness, contextual cognitive behavioral therapy, narrative therapy, interpersonal therapy, multicultural family systems, and motivational interviewing to create client specific approaches to wellness.

In my work, I draw on inspiration from Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Prentis Hemphil, Thema Bryant-Davis, Lillian Comas-Diaz, and Cole Riley

I am committed to:

Justice, healing, liberation, learning, growth, transformation, and joy

I believe:

There needs to be a nuanced understanding of intersectional realities of privilege and oppression
Current mental health paradigms can serve to oppress and harm and we need to center approaches that are expansive and healing
There is a need to engage in decolonizing practices, critically engage with our beliefs about ourselves and the world, and create spaces of wellness and wholeness
There is individual and collective wisdom that we all can benefit from learning
In the power of storytelling, of exploring and affirming stories, and the healing power of bearing witness to one another in individual and collective contexts
Connection to mind, body, spirit, land, art and ancestors are central to our understandings of health and wellness

I create spaces for:

Meaning making, hope, connection, healing, and compassion
Celebration of culture and community while also holding critical understanding/awareness/analysis of both
Self-definition and determination, agency, survival, coping and resistance strategies,, and joyful growing and thriving
Mind, body, spirit, land, art and ancestors
All emotions, particularly welcoming rage, pain, and grief alongside joy, gratitude, and hope
Embodiment practices
Honoring multiple ways of knowing and being
Challenging hierarchies and working towards the optimal well being of individuals and communities
Relational priority-creating, nourishing, and maintaining supportive and caring relationships with self, others, land, and community
Groups and workshops that are collaborative and noncompetitive sites of storytelling, learning from others, and critical consciousness development and practice
Co-creating different understandings of wellness and health that center those who have been the most impacted by oppressive systems
Visioning, being, and strategizing for collective liberation while never forgetting the uniqueness of each of us.
Being our whole, complicated, messy, beautiful, unique, intersectional selves
Holding accountability for harm done, including the harm we do to ourselves
Transformative mental health and transformative social action

I wonder:

What if we understood mental health difficulties/diagnoses as different ways of being and experiencing the world as opposed to pathologies that experts need to cure?
What if your needs, perspectives, and viewpoints were centered and I was a supporter in your journey?
What if we centered the impact of systems of oppression on our health and lives as we engage in liberatory practices for healing?

Therapy Style

Warm, empathic questioning and listening, and utilization of embodied, coping, and resistance strategies
I hold space for the full range of human emotions, including but not limited to pain, rage, grief, hope, gratitude, and joy

Areas of focus

Black women, femmes and gender expansive folks healing and liberation

Collective and embodied healing

College wellness

Intersectional identity development

Fertility and infertility in BIPOC communities

Life transitions

Multicultural family dynamics and conflicts

People of color, particularly women of color, femmes of color and gender expansive folks of color healing and liberation

Perinatal and postnatal health and wellness

Resistance to systemic oppression

Self-in-community care practices

Spirituality

Stress, sadness, isolation and loneliness

Trauma and healing-racism based, generational, collective, and interpersonal

Treatment Approaches

Anti-oppressive

Contextual Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Culturally Responsive Therapy

Womanist Psychology

Liberation Psychology

LGBTQGNCTIA+ affirming

Multicultural Family Systems

Narrative Therapy

Trauma and Healing focus

Communities Centered

Birthing people

BIPOC women, femmes, and gender expansive folks

LGBTQGNCTIA+

Training Style

My trainings integrate understandings of how power, bias, oppression, intersectionality, trauma, and resistance influence people, organizations, and systems. My approach to training and workshop facilitation incorporates my guiding principles: learning as a practice of liberation, intersectional and accountable approaches to analyzing power, and grounding in the needs and vision of the people most affected by systems of oppression. In the design and facilitation of trainings, I include considerations of intersectional identities, such as gender, race, class, ability, religion, citizenship, and how these identities connect to systems of power and privilege. I incorporate individual self-reflection, small group conversations, large group engagement, group activities, and body based practices. As a facilitator, I am highly participatory, drawing on participants’ expertise, real-life case studies, and a mix of theory and practice. I am flexible and flow with what comes up for participants in trainings, while also holding onto to the purpose and goals of each training. I am experienced in working with a range of needs and utilizing my skills as a trained clinician and facilitator, I can hold space for difficult conversations and support both individual and collective growth and learning.

Past Training and Workshop Partners

Carleton College Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) Program

City College Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) Program

Macalester College Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) Program

Mayowa also co-owns Barrow & Obasaju Consulting, a multi-racial women-owned consulting firm, specializing in the nexus of systems, trauma, and healing. With Kate Barrow, LCSW, we facilitate anti-oppressive, equity, and identity workshops, trauma informed care workshops, and engage in organizational equity development and capacity building. Find more information about these services at www.trainingforjustice.com