I’m Not Racist, But…

On race, rupture, and what it takes to stay when we get it wrong

TL;DR: What does it mean to be implicated in harm while trying to do good? Ethical practice is not about getting it right, but about being willing to stay in uncomfortable relational space long enough to learn something real.

As a therapist, I am constantly reflecting, learning, and adjusting. Not out of virtue, but because the work demands it. The world, the culture, and the politics surrounding us are shifting rapidly, and the only way I can remain responsive is to keep interrogating how I show up.

For me, the most meaningful place to do that is alongside other therapists. They offer different perspectives, challenge blind spots, and—perhaps most importantly—hold me accountable. And it was in one of these spaces—a process group during my training—that I encountered the sharp end of it. A colleague of colour told me directly that I was taking up too much space. She told me my presence in the room felt dominating. This wasn’t offered tentatively or as an invitation to reflect. I experienced it as an accusation. And at some point the word racist entered the room.

I remember feeling its impact before I could make sense of it. Blood rushed into my head, my hearing blurred, and heat moved quickly through my body. My chest tightened. I folded in on myself. To put it simply: I was freaking out.

Questions came fast. Had I caused harm? Was this true? What had I missed? But alongside them came something else—something harder to admit. I felt misunderstood. Misrepresented. A quiet insistence rose up: that’s not who I am. Part of me wanted my colleague to soften what they were saying so I could continue experiencing myself as a good person while still hearing them. Another part of me could feel myself bracing internally, my body tightening around the possibility that this might be true.

That was the moment my attention shifted. I was no longer with the group. I was with myself—trying to make sense of what this meant about me.

I stopped listening. I stopped participating. I left the room, without ever leaving my seat.

What I think was threatened in that moment was not simply my behaviour, but my moral identity. I wanted to understand myself as one of the “good” people—aware, thoughtful, politically conscious, safe. The accusation disrupted that image instantly.

Conversations about racism do not only confront behaviour; they confront identity. Part of what makes these moments so difficult is that the experience of racism is not evenly distributed. The person on the receiving end of a racial dynamic is often perceiving something the other person cannot fully see from within themselves. Which means that, in practice, the white person does not always get to be the final authority on whether something racist has occurred simply because their intentions felt innocent to them.

And yet, it is precisely that loss of authority over how we are experienced that can feel so difficult to tolerate. Particularly when one’s sense of self is organised around being thoughtful, aware, or “good.” But good intentions do not undo impact.

And I think that is where something in me began to collapse inward. The moment the self feels threatened, curiosity often gives way to self-protection. I could feel it happening in real time—a contraction in my body, as though my attention physically narrowed, my awareness shrinking to the dimensions of my own discomfort.

What unsettled me most afterwards was not simply that I had been accused of causing harm, but how quickly the focus of my attention shifted. The moment my sense of myself came under threat, the person in front of me began to disappear. Their experience became secondary to my need to understand, defend, and restore who I believed myself to be. I could feel myself withdrawing from the contact while simultaneously trying to hold onto the image of myself as thoughtful, aware, and safe.

That recognition did not arrive all at once. It unfolded slowly, and painfully.

What I Couldn’t See

Since then, I have made a conscious effort to reflect on how I show up in the spaces I occupy. As a therapist, I carry a responsibility to hold up a mirror to myself as the field continues to diversify. And I have had to recognise that I do not always have the most informed or nuanced perspective to offer—particularly when working across difference.

This became more tangible for me when a friend, a Black professional working in the UK, described how she moves through her workplace. She spoke about the pressure to become “functionally white”—modifying how she spoke, carried herself, and even aspects of her appearance in order to navigate predominantly white professional environments more safely. She described constantly code-switching, carefully monitoring her language, tone, and self-presentation against the expectations of those around her.

She spoke about the constant calibration. The awareness that confidence might be read as aggression. That being direct might be experienced as too much. That parts of her have to be softened, filtered, or withheld in order to remain acceptable within a predominantly white, hierarchical structure.

She also reflected on what happens to colleagues of colour who are less willing—or less able—to do this. She had watched people become quietly excluded from conversations, overlooked for opportunities, and passed over for promotion because their difference was experienced as difficult rather than valuable. Managers would speak in polished professional language about “not fitting the culture” or “struggling to adapt,” while what was really being communicated was that they had not sufficiently reshaped themselves around white expectations in order to succeed.

Over time, she told me, this doesn’t just shape behaviour. It shapes thought. And I began to understand that taking up space feels very different when the risks of visibility are not shared equally. Listening to her, I noticed something heavy settle in me. Not only sadness, but recognition. A growing awareness of how exhausting it must be to move through the world in a state of constant self-monitoring.

Seeing Things from the Other Side

Hearing this, I began to wonder what my presence in that training group might have felt like from the other side. How often had I experienced myself as engaged or expressive, while others experienced me as taking up space in ways that felt difficult—or unsafe—to challenge?

I started to appreciate what it had taken for my colleague to say what they did. I wondered how many times something like this had gone unsaid. How often had people of colour been dismissed, minimised, or labelled “too harsh” for naming something uncomfortable?

These conversations don’t arrive neatly. They don’t come wrapped in care, precision, and perfect language. Sometimes they land abruptly. Sometimes they hurt.

We often tell ourselves that, with enough awareness, we can navigate difference cleanly. But the reality is far less tidy.

Sitting in the Context of Discomfort

We live in a world shaped by everything that came before us. The context we inherit—structured by systemic inequities of class, gender, race, and more—is not something we choose, and yet it continues to shape how we move through the world. That context does not stop at the door of the therapy room.

Clients arrive carrying it—in their bodies, in their expectations, in their lived experience. It shows up in what is said and in what remains unsaid, in who feels able to speak and who does not, in how meaning is made and whose meaning is given weight.

Difference is not something we introduce into the room. It is already there, structuring the field.

Because of this, I am less concerned with getting things “right” and more attuned to moments where something shifts—when contact falters, when attunement gives way to misattunement.

I think of a female British Asian client describing what it was like growing up in Leeds in the 1980s—moving through predominantly white environments while carrying the constant awareness of being visibly different. She spoke about being called “Paki” in the playground, hearing it shouted from passing cars, and the humiliation of nobody around her challenging it. She described the exhausting vigilance of trying to anticipate hostility before it arrived, and the pressure to make herself smaller, quieter, more acceptable in order to avoid becoming a target.

As she spoke, I believed I was with her. And then, at some point, I wasn’t.

I offered something in response—first naming what I could understand about the racism she had experienced, and then broadening it outward, trying to connect it to something more universal about difference, exclusion, and being targeted. Part of me was genuinely trying to empathically meet her. But looking back, I wonder if something else was happening too. Whether my attempt to universalise her experience was also an attempt to make it more bearable for me to hear. It was well-intentioned. And it didn’t land.

I remember the shift more than the words. The atmosphere tightened. I could feel it physically—something constricting in my chest, a subtle holding of breath, my body preparing for rupture before my mind had fully caught up. The ease between us gave way to something more guarded. There was no confrontation. No explicit rupture. But something in the space changed.

And again, I felt it in myself. That same pull inward. What did I say? What does this mean about me? My focus shifted from the client to myself. Shame took hold. The relational field narrowed. I could feel myself becoming smaller and more defended at the exact moment the work required me to stay open. I was still in the room—but I was no longer fully in contact.

What I have become increasingly interested in is not only the rupture itself, but what happens inside us when the possibility of being seen as racist enters the room.

Staying When It’s Easier to Leave

What is so difficult about being seen as racist?

For me, it is not only about the possibility of having caused harm. It is about what that accusation threatens: my sense of myself as a thoughtful practitioner, as someone who tries to be aware, as someone who believes I am not that.

There is a particular kind of shame in that moment—not just about action, but about identity. A fear of being mis-seen. Of being reduced. Of getting it wrong in a way that feels irredeemable.

And when that shame takes hold, something predictable happens. Attention turns inward. The priority shifts—from staying in relationship to restoring a sense of self. I notice it first in my body: a tightening, a holding, an urge to pull back from the edge of contact.

That is the moment contact is lost.

I have also noticed how quickly conversations about race can become reorganised around the distress of the white person once shame enters the room. I recognise the impulse in myself too: the urge to explain, contextualise, reach for one’s own history of pain or exclusion in order to soften what feels unbearable about being experienced as harmful.

None of those histories are necessarily untrue. But I am beginning to wonder how easily they can function as a retreat from contact. A way of moving attention back towards the self at the precise moment someone else is trying to describe their experience of harm.

Staying, in those moments, is not passive. It is not simply about “being present.” It requires resisting the pull to explain, justify, or retreat. It means remaining curious about the other person’s experience, even when something in you is bracing against it. It means tolerating the possibility that you are being experienced in a way that feels confronting, painful, or deeply at odds with how you understand yourself. It means allowing the possibility that impact and intention may not align—and staying anyway.

Learning to Return

If we withdraw at these moments, how do we move forward?

When something goes wrong, I don’t always recognise it immediately. There is often a subtle shift before awareness catches up. Then comes urgency—the pull to repair, to fix, to make it right. I feel it as restlessness in my body, a need to move quickly, to resolve the tension before I have fully stayed with it. Alongside that is another movement: the instinct to step back from what feels exposing or uncertain.

To stay in that space—without rushing to resolve or retreat—is difficult. It asks something of us that cannot be reduced to technique. It asks for tolerance—for discomfort, for ambiguity, for the destabilising experience of not being who we thought we were in that moment.

Looking back at that earlier moment in training, I am less interested in whether the accusation was right or wrong, and more in what happened to the contact between us. I left it. Not physically—but relationally. And I see now how easily that can happen again.

The work, then, is not about ensuring rupture does not occur. It will. The work is recognising the moment we disappear into ourselves—when protecting our identity becomes more important than remaining in contact—and then, if possible, finding a way back.

No Tidy Endings

I continue to get it wrong. I continue to feel the pull to retreat when shame surfaces, or when I reach the edge of my understanding. That has not changed.

What is changing—slowly—is my ability to notice when my attention has shifted away from the other and back onto myself. To recognise the moment contact begins to falter. And, sometimes, to choose to stay a little longer.

Or to come back.

For me, engaging with difference is not about holding the correct position. It is about remaining in relationship when something in you wants to withdraw.

The therapy room is not separate from the world. It carries the same dynamics of power, inequality, and history. Those dynamics live in the space between us.

Which means we will get it wrong. We will misread. We will misunderstand. We will fail each other. At times, we may even become the very thing we are trying not to be. The question is not whether rupture will happen. It is what we do when it does. Whether we turn inward and lose contact. Or whether we find a way—imperfectly, and without certainty—to stay. Or, when we cannot stay, to return.

There are no tidy endings here. Only the ongoing practice of noticing when we have left the relational space—the moment the body braces, the attention turns inward, the contact begins to thin—and choosing, as best we can, to step back into it.

Because perhaps the real work begins the moment we can tolerate the possibility that being good does not exempt us from causing harm.