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Navigating Racial Landscapes: Wholeness and Wounds

Author(s) : Aileen Alleyne

Customer Reviews

Our customers have given this title an average rating of 4 out of 5 from 11 review(s), add your own review for this title.

Jasmine Thombs on 29/09/2026 19:59:02

(5 out of 5)

Navigating Racial Landscapes: Wholeness and Wounds- 2026

Dr Aileen Alleyne has written a short powerful book on how to live with race psychologically, emotionally and bodily, both inside and outside the therapy room. It is essential reading for therapists and clients alike.

The book's underlying message is that racial wounds are personal, relational, historical and political all at once. They cannot be separated neatly or addressed through intellectual knowledge alone. Healing and greater wholeness become possible when racial experience can be noticed, felt, spoken about, and thoughtfully held within relationships.

Dr Alleyne dissects the interconnections between these dimensions with rare clarity, mapping the space where personal history meets clinical practice. She asks therapists to consider not simply "Am I prejudiced?" but a more searching question: what happens inside me when race enters the room? She offers no fixed set of approved phrases. Instead, she advocates sustained self-reflection, embodied awareness, humility, and the capacity to remain in difficult relational territory without retreating into silence or certainty.

This book will speak to everyone willing to think deeply about race, black practitioners reflecting on racial labour and its emotional cost, to white practitioners willing to examine their racial position and defensiveness, and to anyone interested in how race operates within intimate and professional relationships. It doesn’t supply answers but helps reader’s to develop the capacity to notice, listen and remain present especially when racial difference creates discomfort. For me, “listening in colour” seems to give a particularly meaningful name to an aspect of my own clinical work.
Highly recommend this book

Hattie Berger on 28/09/2026 21:07:00

(5 out of 5)

This is one of those little books which invites deep connection and reflection. Aileen Alleyne writes from the heart and from her insider/outsider experience with candour. The exhaustion of racial woundings and the burden from educating white people is clear. I respond with the need for white people to take responsibility for our own educating around race and racism, to step into the discomforts and fears, relieve some of this burden and travel a bit together - this books invites that. There's fun to be had along the way - l loved the different Guyanan Creole words for stages and aspects of love. My eyes were opened to how language is semantically shifted by culture and politics and its wounding and denying effects. There's lots here to go back to and the book's easy to read style belies the depths Aileen's writing invokes.

Mark Halliley on 28/09/2026 19:51:08

(5 out of 5)

This is a bracing and challenging read for both therapists and clients. Alleyne documents with great frankness the exhausting experience of dealing with layers of racism (sometimes unconscious snd sometimes not) in the therapeutic setting. For her, it resulted in both mental exhaustion and physical pain as her body responded to all the tensions around racial stereotyping and assumptions. Refreshingly free of jargon, this work will also be of value to many who have no connection at all with psychotherapy. As well as highlighting the intransigence so much racism, it also proposes a way of seeing The Other without preconceptions and with openness- even, with wonder. Here Alleyne strikes a note our increasingly polarised and judgmental world needs to listen to. A book for your urgent attention.

Umaa on 14/09/2026 22:28:26

(5 out of 5)

In these incredibly divisive times, we need holding, and this book holds and appropriately challenges. There are novel concepts that have translated into my private practice, and I'm really grateful for how accessible and generous an offering it is, there are clinical sharings, body awareness, and incredible poetry! Get your copy!

Lorraine on 10/09/2026 17:17:46

(5 out of 5)

This book resonates deeply. The line on soul repair struck a chord, drawing on polyvagal theory and co-regulation to describe something many therapists will recognise - the quiet cost of holding what clients bring into the room. Warm yet unflinchingly honest. I think it will land hard for a lot of clinicians reading it.

Sophie Boss on 08/09/2026 18:52:02

(5 out of 5)

This is a beautifully written book that stayed with me long after I finished it. The writing is accessible and engaging, while the ideas are conveyed with warmth, insight and real humanity.
As a psychotherapist and teacher, I particularly value the way the book communicates its message with such clarity and meaning. We use it as one of the course books for our psychotherapy trainees, and I think it offers them something important both professionally and personally. It encourages reflection without ever feeling heavy or overly complicated.

Dr Rima Lamba on 11/08/2026 23:55:03

(5 out of 5)

There are words strung together to create meaning. And then there is Dr Aileen Alleyne. Her words don't just sit in one's mind, they enter and take residence in one's soul.

I love chapter 3 which examines the word and concept: Woke, something that has been demonised in much of society. Her poem at the beginning of the chapter speaks to what so many of us are witnessing as a cultural battleground as Aileen aptly named in her chapter 3 title.

You need to read this book. You will not be disappointed!

Julia de Greff on 01/08/2026 18:28:47

(5 out of 5)

Simple and complex. Personal and political. Analytical and creative. Dr Aileen Alleyne's book is a great read. I read it mostly in one sitting and I will read it again.
It uncovers the defences we can use as therapists and as humans in regular interactions that keep us from true connection. It invites us to 'see' to 'be with' all that arises for us in our personhood and our bodies, and all that is there in the historical, societal, political and cultural context. In that way it invites us to be whole. It helps us to push off and let go of the cloak of lies and untruths and to open up to a much vaster way of being. Putting our micro interactions both within ourselves and within the racial landscape under keen observation, we are invited to lean into the discomfort, instead of turning away from it. This is surely what makes us more human.

Jubriel Hanid on 01/07/2026 13:46:25

(5 out of 5)

You've finished your training; you're up to date with the latest CPD; you think you've done everything to ensure you're at the top of your game, then this book comes along.

So many new concepts, some of which I identified with as victim, some as unwitting perpetrator, and some as both, but all delivered with the kindness of a benevolent teacher. I highly recommend it.

Dr Isha Mckenzie-Mavinga on 01/07/2026 13:11:31

(4 out of 5)

Dr Aileen presents an honest and raw account of the complex landscape of racial dynamics. She opens with transparency about the emotional, physical and mental cost of her transition from book one to book two. The book is well researched and poignant in many aspects of political and personal dilemma when learning and teaching about supporting, holding and engaging the vulnerability of those impacted by Antiblack racism. Most certainly a model for listening to and engaging with the underbelly of inter racial dialogue,when acknowledging and addressing these contexts. Kudos to Dr Aileen for sharing examples of tenderly holding racialised case material. She generously demonstrates knowledge and wisdom regarding the historical underlay to journeying through the impact on her expertise as a therapist modelling emotional robustness in the field. The book provides guidance for all therapies, and an asset to training as she elucidates concepts such as ‘Polyvagel Theory,’ ‘Wokeness’ ‘Tone policing’ and aspects of attentive listening in colour. The Author takes a deep dive into the naunces of listening in colour to black and white embodiment and interracial relationships, showing each lap of the articulated journey of Kintsugi (symbolised on the front cover)and the reality and legacy of holding ourselves together whilst practicing as black women in the psychotherapy profession. Very well researched and written . A must for training, supervision and relationships within the helping professions.

Tania Caliendo on 30/06/2026 15:17:27

(5 out of 5)

There is a candid generosity which ripples through this legacy work. With global relevance, exposing and tending to micro level dynamics of power,such as the sonic colour line, every one of the 5 chapters of this book is packed with originality and crafted to be applied today in our work, personal and inner life.
Showing HOW and why listening can liberate, in Chapter 4, "To listen in colour is to resist silence and distortion, to hold language with care, and to open dialogue as a space of liberation", this work is a treasure for our generation.
In Dr Alleyne's 2nd Chapter, reflection on the fatigue, the burden and the fullness of a lifetime of DEI work and on the refusal of the obligation/role of super co-regulator, we are led with polyvagal awareness to the re-enlivening 5 point legacy - A manifesto for race work.
The illustration of a neurobiopsychosocial approach to the "White-body" phenomenon, is a mike drop moment. Systems thinking is grand and necessary, and thankfully Dr Alleyne has the means, both in research scope, and concise authority, to map the racial landscapes of today with timely clarity. Here, a chord is struck with all our lived experience. Presented with case studies and examples from the language of Guyanese Creole, in Chapter 5, Dr Alleyne expounds on the universal,intimate bond of love. There is literally a feast of wisdom and in these pages for which I deeply express my gratitude.
The author shows us how reflecting on the atomic/micro level is loaded with the force for individual liberation, which affects the whole, exponentially, starting with those closest to us. It was a pleasure and a challenge to begin absorbing this brilliant book.