In the beginning there was fracture, self split from self,
the mind taught to bow to a mirror that was never ours,
and truth arrived pre-measured, cut to fit another people’s story.
We wore the fitting like a second skin, forgetting whose hands had sewn it,
until the seams themselves began to ache, quietly, for home.
Then came the turning, a flame struck low in the chest,
ancestors leaning close with names we had forgotten to speak.
Conscience stirred like dawn behind a shuttered window,
and the self that had scattered itself into pieces
began, slowly, to remember it was always plural, always whole.
Illumination is not arrival, it is the unclenching of a fist
held tight since the ships, since the schoolrooms, since the silence.
It is the community within, answering the community without,
spirit and body no longer strangers passing in the hall,
but partners walking the same corridor toward the same light.
So we rise, not as fragments seeking to be mended,
but as a village of selves, gold-lit and gathered,
warriors in the fight for a well-being that was never lost,
only buried. The African spirit does not need freeing
from the world, only re-membering, as it walks free.
From Baltimore to the Circle: Reflections on the Community of Self
In July, Dr Michele Perry-Springer and I stood before colleagues at the 57th Annual Convention of the Association of Black Psychologists in Baltimore to share something that had, until then, lived mostly inside a small supervision group. We called our session “Community of Self Reflections”, and it drew together the voices of six practitioners in London, Kingston, and Portugal who had spent the preceding months working through a supervision framework built on Dr Na’im Akbar’s Community of Self. Writing this now, weeks on, I find I am still sitting with what that room gave back to us.
The course grew out of a conviction I have held throughout my career: supervision rooted only in case formulation asks half a question. Akbar argued, across his writing on the psychology of African-descended people, that Western clinical models tend to treat the self as a single, bounded unit, isolated from ancestry, community and spirit; and that this isolation is itself a wound rather than a neutral starting point (Akbar, 2004). Our supervision group was built to ask the other half, not only “what is happening with your client”, but “who are you, as the instrument through which the work happens”.
Akbar’s framework describes the self as a community of interacting elements: the sense, drivers, memory, conscience, ego, reason and will; each shaping the others, none complete alone (Akbar, 2004). It is a deceptively simple idea with enormous clinical consequences. Practitioners trained, as most of us were, to keep “skills” in one box and “self” in another arrive at supervision already fragmented. What our six practitioners described, again and again, was the relief of being permitted to bring those boxes back together.
Akbar also insists that the self cannot be properly understood in isolation from the collective, that psychological health is a function of connection to community, ancestry, and shared responsibility, not simply individual insight (Akbar, 2004).
This is where the group’s reflections moved me most. One participant, newly arrived from a systemic training that had “not encompassed Black writers, Black philosophy, nothing of that”, described feeling for the first time that her fragmentation between two cultures had a name, and a framework that could hold it. Another spoke of the self as plural, carrying ancestral memory into every clinical interaction, language drawn directly from Akbar’s insistence that we are never only ourselves in the room.
A third strand of Akbar’s thinking runs through conscience, which he treats not as a fixed inner rulebook but as a living, developing element of self that must be consciously cultivated if a person is to act with integrity toward their community (Akbar, 2004). It was striking, and unplanned, that two participants independently made conscience the centre of their final reflections: one as a handwritten poem asking “who am I, what am I responsible for”, the other as a structured self-audit workbook now being used to train others.
Akbar’s fourth thread, that self-mastery begins with turning inward, building the “community within”, before a person can rightly serve others, was, in the end, the quiet thesis of the whole course (Akbar, 2004). It showed up almost verbatim in one participant’s words: “This is a supervision model that’s about building me as a black woman, not about problem solving.”
What Michele and I had not fully anticipated was how the group would answer the brief in forms beyond the written word.
Reflections arrived as voice notes, a poem with mixed-media collage, a workbook, a structured written account; the range itself became part of the finding. One collage showed a radiant gold sun above a village stitched from layered fabric, many fragments composing a single luminous whole, an image that could have illustrated Akbar’s text directly. We had asked practitioners to reflect on a framework of integration, and integration is exactly what refused to stay contained in a single format.
In Baltimore, what struck me watching the room was how quickly recognition moved through it. Colleagues who had trained across very different systems- UK, US, Caribbean- kept nodding at the same lines: the exhaustion of practising from a borrowed model, the relief of a framework that welcomes spirit and energy into the clinical room rather than asking practitioners to leave them at the door. Several attendees told us afterwards that they recognised their own supervision experience in what our participants described as the shift from a model that centres the case to one that centres the practitioner’s own becoming. Others asked, simply, where they could find something similar for themselves. That question has stayed with me since.
It is also worth naming what did not resolve neatly. One of our six practitioners was honest that the framework still feels “hard to use day to day”, and that the group itself, not the concepts alone, is what makes the work possible. I take that as instruction rather than shortfall. Akbar’s Community of Self was never meant to be applied in solitude; it assumes a community of practitioners holding the framework, and each other, together. That, more than any single insight from the data, is what I carried out of that room in Baltimore.
Presenting this work with Michele reminded me why I do it in this form, not as a finished model to be exported, but as a living practice, tested first on ourselves before we ever offer it to a client.
The next cohort of the clinical supervision programme is now being planned. If this reflection speaks to your own practice, or to a fragmentation you recognise in your own training, you can find details of the next intake at www.angels-without-wings.co.uk, or by contacting Clancy@angels-without-wings.co.uk
Reference
Akbar, N. (2004). The Community of Self (Rev. ed.). Tallahassee, FL: Mind Productions & Associates.
Photos Courtesy of Dr. Hal Fairchild
Clancy Williams|Angels Without Wings|www.angels-without-wings.co.uk
