What Psychospiritual Counseling Actually Is (Why I Had to Create It Myself)
How My Own Grief, Cultural Displacement, and Spiritual Awakening Became a Framework And Why BIPOC/BBIA Women Needed It to Exist
It’s not a term I made up, but it is a term that I have created a part of my clinical identity. Psychospiritual counseling holds the psychological and the spiritual in one clinical container simultaneously, treating them as inseparable dimensions of the same human experience rather than as separate domains requiring separate practitioners at separate times in separate spaces. Heavy on the separate spaces.
That definition sounds simple, but simplicity is deceptive, because the actual practice of doing this work with integrity requires a kind of double fluency that clinical training and spiritual development alone doesn’t produce. Most practitioners end up choosing one language over the other because holding both fluently is genuinely demanding, and the clinical field historically has never held such space before.
I didn’t arrive at this work by theoretical interest. I arrived at it the way most BIPOC/BBIA women arrive at anything that actually fits them, which is naturally exhausting every available option that was supposed to fit and finally being forced to build something that did (insert deep sigh here).
What the Field Was Missing When I Showed Up to It
Clinical psychology, as it was handed to me in my training, operated on assumptions about what grief is, where it lives, and how it moves. The problem with this is that it hasn’t been tested against the experience of Black/Brown/ Indigenous/Asian women or ancestral grief/ the kind of loss that doesn’t have a clean narrative origin, and the limitations of those assumptions don’t always announce themselves in theory, but they show up consistently in sessions. I noticed a gap in treatment.
The spiritual dimension of grief was the gap I kept encountering, or the lack of spirituality in treatment. I’ve had women who had experienced the presence of their deceased loved one, not as a complication of their bereavement but as a continuing relationship that was helping them grieve. Although current grief frameworks ask Clinicians to place spiritual experiences/encounters aside so that the psychological aspect of grief could be worked with as if spiritual experiences were bypassing grief completely.
This wasn’t clinically adequate, and I knew it. I also knew that naming that inadequacy openly inside professional clinical culture required a kind of foundation that I had to build. Liberation Psychology is similar to what I created, which you can read more here on this about this specific framework. I created a framework that was missing in the grief clinical space, a space I’ve found myself in throughout many chapters in my life. Which I’ll speak more to in a bit.
The Disenfranchised Grief of Cultural and Spiritual Practices
There’s a specific kind of grief that doesn’t have formal recognition in most clinical contexts and the field names it disenfranchised grief, meaning grief that the culture or the institution around the grieving person doesn’t recognize as legitimate, regardless how significant the loss was which then goes largely unsupported because the systems designed to support grief were designed with a different kind of loss in mind.
For BIPOC/BBIA women, disenfranchisement runs through both the cultural and spiritual dimensions of their experience in ways that impact each other, because the spiritual practices that their lineages carried were frequently dismissed, criminalized, or simply treated as non-existent by the same Western institutions that then offered clinical support for grief without any framework or understanding for their cultural and spiritual practices.
A Black woman entering in therapy who had a grandmother who communicated with ancestors and or practiced Hoodoo or even Voodoo and she grew up watching that communication and/or ritual practice as a real and living relationship with the dead, do you think she would feel guilty in bringing this aspect of her life experience into the clinical space? Especially for grief work… probably not based upon current frameworks outside of a psychospiritual framework. Or what about the Latina/Latinx woman who practices Santeria or the Indigenous woman who is a shaman or medicine woman who hides that significant aspect of themselves in the clinical space?
These are reasons I wanted the Psychospiritual Grief Method to address directly, because the disenfranchisement of ancestral spiritual practices isn’t a minor cultural sensitivity issue but a structural absence in the field that has been producing real harm to the populations who are in most need of adequate grief support.
My Own Journey Was the Research
This is where the Psychospiritual Grief Method originates...
I am a Soulann woman from a Louisiana lineage. My grandmother practiced Hoodoo without calling it that, passing down a particular quality of knowing. She was my first supporter in connecting to Spirit before I understood what being psychic or a medium meant. She ventured through different religions and took what resonated with her and gave me permission to search for truth within myself. She read the bible daily and never said my experiences were demonic. She was my safe space to communicate my experiences with before I found it in the clinical field. I spend years managing and compartmentalizing who I am while I building my clinical identity because it felt safer and more legible to the institutions I was moving through.
The grief of that compartmentalization was its own form of disenfranchised grief. I was unconsciously grieving a form of myself that I felt like I couldn’t fully be present with because I didn’t feel safe to bring it into the many sessions of multiple grief episodes throughout my life.
My spiritual awakening occurred the night before I experienced a car accident with my grandfather. We were on route to the hospital where my grandfather transitioned shortly after. The prophetic feeling left me with a deep curiosity to learn more about my abilities which included the developing mediumship and training with The Morris Pratt Institute, The University of Metaphysics where I’m on the PhD track, and the Arthur Findlay College. Yet, the shift in perspective occurred earlier this year when I decided that I was no longer willing to compartmentalize myself because I knew that they are women who were just like me who need to feel safe in the clinical space. Spiritual individuals are human and need mental health treatment too. They need a place to be safe enough to bring their entire selves into the therapeutic environment for holistic healing. Theres’s an increasingly undeniable reality that the clinical and the spiritual aren’t separate domains of my identity but one continuous knowing.
The Psychospiritual Grief Method didn’t emerge from a literature review, although literature definitely supports it. The framework emerged from lived integration, sitting with my own grief, my gifts, my own ancestral inheritance, and refusing to allow any of them be more legitimate than the others. This is what needs to be taught.
What Psychospiritual Counseling Actually Offers BIPOC/BBIA Women
When a BIPOC/BBIA woman enters a psychospiritual counseling relationship, she is entering a space that was built with her experience as the central design consideration rather than as a demographic variable to be accommodated and that difference is palpable from the first session, because the questions the practitioner knows to ask are the questions that locate her grief at its actual level rather than at the level the standard framework can reach.
Grief that is ancestral gets addressed as ancestral grief, with frameworks and practices suited to inherited loss rather than only personal loss. The spiritual experiences that are part of how she is processing the death of someone she loved gets addressed as real dimensions of the grieving process, with a practitioner who has the fluency to meet them rather than the training to redirect them. The cultural practices and beliefs that shape her relationship to death and to what continues after death get treated as clinically significant context rather than as interesting background information that falls outside the scope of the session.
This is what psychospiritual counseling makes possible, and it is also what the training on October 17th is designed to produce in the practitioners who attend it, because the women who need this kind of care need more practitioners who can offer it, and the training is how that supply increases.
For the Clinician Who Recognizes This Gap
If you have been improvising through the gap I described earlier, reaching toward something more adequate than what your training gave you without yet having the language or the framework to name what you were reaching toward, the Psychospiritual Grief Method Training on October 17th is where that improvisation becomes a methodology.
🎓 Psychospiritual Grief Method Training: October 17th, 2026, six CEUs, small cohort by design, built for clinicians who are ready to hold the full complexity of BIPOC women's grief with the clinical and spiritual rigor it actually requires.
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary is for women who want ongoing community and monthly psychospiritual practices that hold the cultural, spiritual, and ancestral dimensions of grief the clinical field has historically ignored.
✨ The Inner Circle is for women who are ready for deeper, more personalized ongoing support and direct access to Amber as the work continues to deepen.
With care and intention,
Amber Choisella
