The first thing Tham Fuyana wants to do in a therapy room isn’t diagnose. It’s witness.
‘People want to be seen,’ he says. ‘My job is to hold a space where someone can be seen through their own lens—how they want to be seen.’
It sounds simple. It rarely is.
For Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) negotiating Australia’s mental health system, the practical task of finding a therapist who ‘gets it’ can feel like threading a needle blindfolded—juggling waitlists and costs while also scanning for someone who can recognise the weight of migration files, microaggressions, language gaps, and the subtle armour a person wears to survive any given week.
Tham was born in Zimbabwe, grew up in the UK, and now lives in Australia. Throughout his professional life, in both Australia and abroad, he’s worked with people from diverse ethical and cultural backgrounds.
‘What many people are looking for in a therapist is not just competence but kinship,’ he explains. ‘It’s about finding someone who can relate to your unique lived experiences—your intersectionalities—and walk with you there.’
The invisible labour before the first session
If you’ve ever had to preface your pain with a primer on your culture, you know the extra labour BIPOC clients carry into therapy. Tham has lived that dynamic across continents.
‘I grew up with a script,’ he says. ‘Everywhere I went: Hi, my name is Tham. I’m from Zimbabwe. This is why I’m here. People were curious. Over time, you internalise the need to explain yourself before you can be yourself.’
That same dynamic follows clients through clinic doors. A session can easily tip from healing into education—the client teaching the clinician what racism feels like in the body, why certain words land heavy, how the immigration office lives in their nightmares.
‘With a BIPOC therapist, some of that explaining eases,’ Tham says. ‘There’s a shared shorthand. You can get deeper, faster.’
The armour that keeps you safe—and alone
Ask Tham what he sees most often and he doesn’t hesitate: armour.
‘As a Black man, you learn early to be overly polite, to never give anyone in power a reason to label you “aggressive”,’ he says.
He recalls being stopped and searched many times growing up in the UK—none of his white friends were searched once.
‘That teaches you to defend your existence,’ Tham says. ‘The armour helps you survive outside. But inside relationships, it can suffocate connection.’
Tham knows that vulnerability can come at a price when safety is conditional. If we take our armour off, who will hold us?
‘Many clients don’t have places to put that stress, so the body wears it,’ he says, ‘invoking that familiar trauma lesson: the body keeps the score. Over years, constant vigilance turns into a baseline.
‘People tell me, It’s nothing, we’re used to this. My work is to honour the survival while making room for softness—without asking anyone to surrender what keeps them safe.’
We listen for the dangers armour can bring—especially in love. The task is helping people choose when to wear it, and when to rest. — Tham Fuyana
Intersectionality is contextual
In classrooms and clinics, ‘intersectionality’ can read like a Western academic buzz word. But as Tham knows, the lived reality is messier.
‘In the West, race often becomes the primary identity marker. But in many African contexts, your second name—your tribe, your language—says more about where you belong,’ he notes.
‘Diaspora changes the calculus. People who might be divided at home find solidarity here under the banner “women of colour” or “African”. Both can be true.’
That nuance matters when choosing a therapist. Clients might want someone who shares racial identity but not gender, or vice versa.
‘Listen to both voices,’ Tham insists. ‘If your culture says, “I only discuss this with women,” honour that. If race-based understanding feels paramount, honour that. Start where you’ll feel most heard.’
Systems teach us where we do—and don’t—belong
Mistrust of statutory services rarely begins in a therapist’s office.
‘For so many migrants, it starts with immigration,’ Tham says. ‘Years of proving you deserve to stay. The message is: belonging can be revoked.’
That logic bleeds into health, policing, schooling—and therapy.
‘By the time someone sits with me, they’ve had a lifetime of conditional welcome,’ Tham explains. ‘Of course it takes longer to trust.’
He’s blunt about the stakes. In the UK, Black men are disproportionately detained in mental health facilities; in Australia, First Nations people are overrepresented in incarceration. Power imbalances shape outcomes.
‘We need services that measure and see these patterns through an ethnic lens—not to pathologise communities, but to correct the imbalance,’ he says.
What ‘fit’ really looks like
Therapy is often compared to dating because chemistry matters—but for BIPOC clients, ‘fit’ also includes cultural safety. Tham suggests a few practical tests before you commit to a therapist.
- Ask about lived and learned experience: ‘Some therapists share your identity, others don’t, but have done the work. Both can be excellent. What you’re listening for is humility and curiosity—Can they see me the way I wish to be seen?”
- Name your non‑negotiables: ‘Gender, language, faith literacy, migration understanding—be explicit. You’re allowed to “interview” us. A good intake team will help you find the right fit.’
- Expect whole‑person curiosity first, not a rush to tools: ‘I invest early in who you are before we touch your “presenting issue”. That’s not detour; that’s the work.’
Representation also matters at the doorway. Tham works within a multicultural service precisely because front‑of‑house signals safety.
‘I wanted to grow up seeing people like me not only in sport or music, but reading the news, teaching, law—therapy,’ he says. ‘When a service reflects its community, it invites people in.’
From ‘education’ to encounter
If there’s a single, uniting theory behind Tham’s approach to therapy it’s this: story is the bridge away from stereotype and toward encounter. Not What are you? but Who are you—here, now, in your own words?
Tham’s own words point to an ethic rooted in the Zimbabwean philosophy of Ubuntu—’I am because we are’.
‘It’s a collective sense of togetherness,’ he explains. ‘My lens is always from the person outward to the community, not the organisation inward to the person. The task isn’t to make clients “less sensitive” to a hostile environment; it’s to centre their reality and expand their choices.’
A gentle door in
If you’ve been debating therapy for months, take heart in Tham’s first invitation: well done for being in that place.
‘For people of colour especially, just reaching for help is huge,’ he says. ‘Start with what makes it easier—someone who shares your identity, or someone who has done the work to meet you. Let that be the gateway.
‘Over time, as trust grows, your circle of care can, too.’
Beyond the acronyms and assessment tools, good therapy is an act of social repair. It asks systems to see what they have refused to see, and it offers individuals the chance to put down their armour—if only for an hour—and feel, at last, seen, heard, and held. And that is where healing begins.
by John Holton
This article is the result of an interview with Tham Fuyana by Marie Vakakis on her podcast Inside Social Work (episode 74). Thank you to Marie and Tham for allowing us to publish this important article. Listen to the full interview at: https://player.captivate.fm/episode/9e446518-add6-40a4-a403-0e7ba050f649
