Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout podcast, Kelly here.

And as a team and I continue to opt in to rest and take the week off, we are going to be sharing more segments for my interview with Cassandra Dunbar and her fantastic podcast, Be Well, Sis.

So enjoy another segment of that interview, maybe the year before, to therapy. And I'm like, I'm so frustrated. I'm just like, you know, we've been together for a while now and you're an amazing therapist. But why am I not healed? And she's just like, girl. She was like, you've made strides. Like you've grown. Like, can you see your growth? I'm just like, yeah, I can see my growth. But how come I'm not together yet? She's just like, girl, like it's a practice. Like, we are all just practicing, like to practice.

It's a journey, like you said. And where do you think the struggle with self-compassion comes from?

I think it's, I think it's historical and cultural.

Like that's kind of my lens with how I see the black experience a lot and particularly

the black woman's experience is that I think we have not had space historically to even

explore identity, to explore passions.

You know, I talk a lot about joy as well.

I'll circle back to that later.

But there just isn't space for that historically.

And when we look generationally, that just gets passed on, it's like just getting through

the day, just getting things done.

And so as a result, there isn't room for compassion because there isn't room for, you know,

I'm struggling. There isn't room.

There's not permission to be. And when you don't feel like culturally you have permission to be,

the kind of fallout from that is that you just push, push, push, go, go. I should be better.

I should do better. Why haven't I done this? Why? It's just this very negative and critical lens. And I feel that we've been programmed to to kind of do that. Because if you're an African American,

for example, your legacy is one of like hard work. Like working an inhuman amount of labor and

being measured by inhuman amounts of labor. And so it trickles. Obviously, no one is being expected to go

out into a field and labor there. But that attitude has trickled down. So it's not, I have to pick

400 pounds of cotton. It's more like, I need to do 50 things off my checklist to be valuable.

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