The always-already-thereness of loss at various scales as constitutive of Black1 women’s lives.

"You know more about loss in your bones than any thesis could capture", I wrote to my sister at the end of my PhD. In those years, grief in my orbit was not slow or quiet. It was hot. It is no coincidence that loss became my research lens: I am a psychotherapist. Furthermore, therapy, in many ways, is an education in the experience of loss.

During my research, I immersed myself in Black feminism, decolonisation, whiteness and misogynoir. I became interested in women on the margins of the margins: racially minoritised women. In the NHS, my research setting, women like these make up a significant proportion of the workforce but remain underrepresented in senior roles.

I interviewed 15 racially minoritised women leaders about their career journeys. Gendered racism, where racism and sexism are co-created, was a consistent thread. Through the lens of loss, I waded through stories of heartbreak, body break, breakouts and break throughs.

A conceptual turning point came through Jennifer Nash’s writing on 'the always-already-thereness of loss' in Black women’s lives. She defines loss capaciously: as absence, erasure, invisibility, dispossession, and the lingering presence of the past - and how the measure of these can be unknown and unknowable. This framing gave me a language to recognise experiences rarely named as loss by participants or clients.

For instance, several women described a lack of social support at work. I came to understand this as absence: one facet of loss. These absences limited access to informal networks and, in turn, to power and opportunity. They are also related to unknown and unknowable losses of potential. Others spoke of being overlooked or forgotten, echoing forms of invisibility and erasure. Distance from dominant norms, i.e. white, male, able bodied norms, often shaped these experiences.

Psychotherapy, too, risks such erasures. Historically rooted in white, Western frameworks, the field often overlooks marginalised experiences unless practitioners actively widen their attention. Scholar and activist Mari Matsuda’s method of ‘asking the other question’ is helpful here: when something appears racist, ask where patriarchy is; when sexist, ask where racism is. No form of subordination stands alone.

Yet some erasures are more elusive. Drawing on postcolonial thought, I came to think in terms of epistemic erasure, i.e., not being recognised as a knower; and ontological erasure, not being fully recognised as a being. Participants described being relied upon but not seen as leaders, or being excluded from policy considerations altogether. These ‘screaming silences’, as Laura Serrant-Green terms them, were especially resonant for migrant and/or Black women of all heritages.

Such erasures cannot be separated from Britain’s colonial histories and their ongoing effects. They are lived across intimate, organisational and societal scales and across time. For some participants, even future leadership possibilities felt foreclosed.

In the therapy room, this has shaped my practice. I am attentive to the systems of power shaping lives, while taking care not to impose interpretations on clients. They may just want to talk about their mother.

Toni Morrison described racism as a profound distraction from the work of living. In this context, gendered racism similarly disrupts the real work of navigating a career. Almost all participants reported not having achieved their potential; some merely survived the workplace with losses of health in abundance. This is not to suggest victimhood, or to overlook all the living and leading (professionally and personally) done regardless. 

Rather than offering familiar recommendations, I align with calls for greater empathy and less defensiveness within organisations. Addressing inequality requires both structural change and affective labour: acknowledging and feeling the losses that are so often unspoken. Perhaps it is through this work that more liveable futures and more equitable leadership can begin to emerge.

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