Reclaiming Our Wellness: Cultural Strategies for BIPOC Mental Health

Written by: Lujuana Milton, MSW, LICSW
​
Mental health conversations are becoming more common, but they often leave out a vital truth: for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, healing is not just an individual pursuit. It is deeply cultural, collective, and rooted in lived experience.

For generations, BIPOC communities have carried the weight of historical trauma, systemic oppression, and cultural erasure, all while cultivating powerful traditions of resilience, care, and connection. While conventional mental health systems have often overlooked these realities, there is a growing recognition that true healing must honor the values, identities, and practices of the people it serves.

Across disciplines and communities, a shift is underway. Clinicians, healers, and community members are working to bridge the gap between clinical therapy and cultural knowledge. The result is a more holistic and affirming approach to mental wellness that embraces both ancestral wisdom and therapeutic insight.

Culture as a Cornerstone of Healing
Mainstream mental health care in the United States has long operated within a Eurocentric framework that tends to separate emotional pain from social, cultural, and historical context. For BIPOC individuals, this disconnect can feel invalidating or even harmful. It often fails to name racism, intergenerational trauma, displacement, or the lived tension of navigating multiple cultural worlds.

In contrast, many BIPOC communities understand mental health in relational, spiritual, and communal terms. Wellness is not simply about fixing what feels broken. It is about restoring balance, reclaiming identity, and connecting to something greater than the self. Cultural wellness practices reflect this holistic view of healing and offer pathways to wellness that are both rooted and transformative.

Everyday Practices That Nurture Cultural Wellness
Cultural wellness is often built into the rhythms of daily life. It may not always be called mental health care, but its impact is just as profound. These practices offer grounding, connection, and emotional nourishment in culturally resonant ways.

Community care and healing circles provide spaces where people can speak freely, be witnessed without judgment, and draw strength from shared experience. In cultures where collectivism is central, healing often happens in relationship with elders, spiritual leaders, peers, or chosen family.

Ancestral connection and ritual is another core practice. Whether it is lighting a candle for an ancestor, offering prayers, or building an altar, these acts acknowledge the enduring presence of those who came before us. They also serve as reminders of our inherited resilience.

Creative expression through music, dance, poetry, and storytelling has long served as both release and resistance. These forms of expression are not just cathartic. They are culturally encoded ways of making sense of the world, preserving memory, and reclaiming joy.

Rest, often undervalued in grind culture, becomes a radical act of reclamation. For BIPOC communities taught to equate worth with productivity, rest is a way to return to self and resist systems that demand constant output.

Connection to nature and land through gardening, herbal medicine, or simply walking in silence offers another dimension of healing. Many traditions teach that land is not a resource but a relative, one that helps to regulate the nervous system and remind us of our place in the world.

Nourishment through food is also powerful. Preparing and sharing ancestral meals is a form of emotional care and cultural continuity. It is a reminder that healing can also be found in flavor, memory, and communal gathering.

Culturally Responsive Therapy: When Clinical Meets Cultural
While traditional practices hold deep value, many people also seek support through therapy. A growing number of clinicians recognize the need to adapt therapeutic models to better reflect the cultural identities and lived experiences of BIPOC clients.

Culturally Adapted Cognitive Behavioral Therapy integrates traditional CBT techniques with a deeper understanding of cultural context. It considers how racism, systemic oppression, and cultural expectations influence thought patterns and emotional responses.

Healing-Centered Engagement, developed by Dr. Shawn Ginwright, goes beyond treating trauma. It centers identity, community connection, and meaning-making. Rather than asking what happened to you, it asks what gives your life purpose.

Culturally grounded EMDR has also gained traction as a trauma-focused therapy that incorporates spiritual elements, ancestral imagery, and culturally familiar grounding techniques to help BIPOC clients process trauma without feeling disconnected from their cultural roots.

Narrative therapy provides a framework for BIPOC individuals to challenge dominant narratives that pathologize their existence. It allows clients to reclaim their own stories and affirm their identities in empowering ways.

Group-based and peer-led support spaces such as affinity-based support groups for Black women, Indigenous men, or LGBTQ BIPOC youth offer opportunities for healing in community. These spaces validate the complexity of intersectional identities and provide a sense of belonging that is often missing in traditional therapeutic environments.

Reclaiming Wholeness on Our Own Terms
Mental health cannot be separated from culture. Healing is not a singular event, but an ongoing process of remembering, reconnecting, and restoring. For BIPOC individuals, this often means weaving together the threads of the old and the new. It means drawing on ancestral wisdom, community strength, and therapeutic tools that affirm one’s full humanity.

There is no single path to healing. Some will find solace in ceremony, others in counseling. Some will be nurtured by cooking, others by movement or song. All of it counts. All of it is valid.

​In a world that often tells us to harden, healing is a soft and powerful refusal. It is a return to self, a return to community, and a return to the truth that we have always had what we needed. It has lived within our cultures, our bodies, and each other.