Mayowa Obasaju
PhD
Presenter's Bio
Mayowa Obasaju, PhD (she/her), is a Black, Nigerian born, American raised clinical and community, trauma and healing focused womanist and liberation psychologist, trainer, and educator. Mayowa brings over 15 years of clinical, organizing, teaching, and training experience centering the intersectional and complex experiences of Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. In her teaching, training, and private practice, she works at the nexus of trauma and healing work, self-in-community care practices, systemic and intersectional analysis, critical consciousness raising, anti-oppressive and liberatory practice.
Mayowa works with birthing people, supporting folks with infertility and those who experience postpartum mental health difficulties, making connections across institutional racism, cisexism, and sexism, reproductive justice and the preconception, pregnancy, birthing, and post postpartum and parenting stages.
Mayowa is an educator in higher education settings with a focus on integrating cultural, systemic and liberation psychology perspectives and analyses in teaching. She is an Adjunct faculty member at John Jay College of Criminal Justice where she teaches undergraduate students and sits on the psychology department’s Anti-Racism Task Force.
Mayowa has led numerous healing spaces for women of color and survivors of gender-based violence. She has been involved in curriculum creation, leadership development and strategic coaching, and supervising multiracial, mixed-class, multi-generational staff, interns, and externs.
She owns Connected Roots Counseling and Consulting and co-owns a social impact firm, Barrow & Obasaju Consulting.
Affirming the wisdom, agency, and healing of Black mamas and birthing folks
Session Summary
Black mamas and birthing people have historically and currently engaged in radical healing practices. However, they can be better supported and affirmed by mental health spaces as Black mamas and birthing people across a range of intersectional social identities experience trauma and oppression (Wycoff et al., 2024). These traumas can lead to the development of and/or exacerbate mental health difficulties (Estriplet et al., 2022; Greenfield & Darwin, 2020; Hoang et al., 2023). That racism is a devastating factor in Black birthing people’s experiences is now well-documented (Jeffers et al., 2023). In the context of these oppressive dynamics, Black mamas and birthing people experience higher rates of perinatal mood disorders such as postpartum depression and anxiety, in comparison to national estimates in United States (Estriplet et al., 2022). Inadequate mental health has been found to be a significant contributor to negative birth outcomes, with untreated perinatal mood and anxiety disorders leading to increased mortality and morbidity risks for Black birthing people and their infants (Yehudah & Tadros, 2022). While mental health support can be essential in supporting Black mamas and birthing people, often times, Black mamas and birthing people interact with mental health spaces that do not address their lived experiences with oppression and do not align with their cultural values and practices (Morris & Barrera, 2024). Additionally, Black mamas and birthing people often face social, economic, and structural barriers that decrease their opportunity to seek and engage with interventions that center the root causes of their perinatal mental health difficulties. At the same time, Black mamas and birthing people have strengths, historical wisdom, and insight that can be invaluable to mental health spaces. This presentation will highlight radical clinical practices to affirm the mental health, healing, and agency of Black mamas and birthing people across multiple forms of trauma and intersectional social identities. Through utilization of frameworks of radical healing (Leath et al, 2023; McNeal-Young et al., 2023), liberation psychology (Bryant-Davis & Moore-Lobba, 2020; Williams, 2019), decolonizing therapy (Mullan, 2023; Murray-Brown, 2023; Morris & Barrera, 2024), somatic/embodied awareness (Morgan et al., 2025), and Internal Family Systems (IFS) connected ancestral wisdom (Floyd, 2024), this presentation will support clinicians in radically addressing the experiences of generational, institutional, medical, and interpersonal trauma and support the healing, wisdom, and agency of Black mamas and birthing people in therapeutic spaces. This workshop offers participants a framework, specific interventions, and greater clarity on working with Black mamas and birthing people.
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