ABOUT LATONYA SUMMERS, PHD
Dr. LaTonya Summers is an award-winning assistant professor of clinical mental health counseling at Jacksonville University. There, she brings 24 years of clinical mental health and addiction counseling experience and conducts research on multicultural issues in counseling and supervision. Her work is featured in scholarly journals and at international and national professional conferences. Summers founded the national annual Black Mental Health Symposium, a conference aimed to equip mental health professionals with culturally-specific skills to improve mental wellness in Black communities. She serves as the president of the Florida Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development. Dr. Summers has been featured in O Magazine.
ACCOLADES
Founder, Black Mental Health Symposium
President, Florida Association of Multicultural Counseling and Development
2019 SACES Cortland Lee Social Justice Award Recipient
2018 CSI Internation Outstanding Practitioner-Supervisor Award Recipient
2017 CSI MTB Outstanding Contribution to Social Justice and Advocacy Award Recipient
2016 NBCC Minority Fellow
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Dr. Summers began her life in foster care and knew she wanted to learn, grow, and become better. By the time she was about 10, she had experienced homelessness, sleeping in cars, and changing schools frequently. She even survived sexual abuse and kidnapping. Her biological mother took her illegally twice, at 7 and 17 years old. It was her own sense of self that led her to call social services to be removed from her mother at only 10 years old. Her first DSS report was her own!
Everywhere she went she was told she was smart. One foster mother flipped her lid by telling her that her past and her circumstances didn’t have to determine her future. She told LaTonya that she had the power to determine that the odds that were stacked against her were wrong. Not long after that foster mother spoke life and hope over LaTonya, she was adopted at 12 years old, defying statistics around foster care and domestic adoption.
Before her adolescent years, she knew God and believed that her life would be different. At just 4 years old she knew her present pain would not be her always. She remembers always being self-sufficient, she purchased a book that told her what she needed for her first year of college and worked a job to pay for everything she needed to move into the dorm.
When her biological mother kidnapped her for a second time at 17 years old, after she had been adopted. Her name had been changed so her parents couldn’t find her and LaTonya remained with her mother until she applied for college as an escape from her biological mother. She chose Appalachain State University because she knew her mother wouldn’t come to the mountains to find her.
After watching an episode of Oprah, she realized that she had experienced horrific childhood trauma and needed to heal. She met with a white psychologist at her student counseling center who overwhelmed her with inner-child work and she never went back. Instead, she changed her major to psychology so that she could heal herself. She never even thought she would do this work!
In the mid-90s, Dr. Summers was recruited into the counseling program as the college moved toward diversity. She hadn’t planned on pursuing advanced degrees, but she found that counseling came very naturally to her.
Years later, she was hosting a major counseling event and was surprised to find that one of the servers for the event catering service was her biological mother! Falling apart, she had to go out to speak and present an award honoring her grandmother and her adopted parents were in the audience. She said that God gave her the words to help everyone be okay in one space. She feared that her biological mom would cause a scene, but she found that by honoring her from the stage she could meet her where she was and help her remain calm and focused on her pride in what LaTonya had accomplished.
In 2005, LaTonya published her first Christian fiction book and quit her job in hopes of a career in publishing. She quickly found that she was not in a financially stable position so she began looking for work, but couldn’t find a job. It was then that she approached a friend about space at a church where she could host an event on cultural competence. Several events later, her passion for multi-culturalism in counseling and mental health evolved into the Black Mental Health Symposium in 2016.
Noting that the leading voices in psychology are all white men and women, she couldn’t imagine counseling black and brown clients on concepts like inferiority complexes without addressing oppression, privilege, and racism. How could she teach attachment theory without looking at forced detachment through slavery and human trafficking?
Dr. Summers is encouraged that concepts like generational trauma and poverty are now named. She is the first in her family to not lose her children to DSS, foster care, or jail. She was the first to graduate high school. She explains that post-slavery syndrome is something that black ancestors passed down as a means of survival. They taught subsequent generations to always dress nice, never buck authority, and take what’s given with appreciation. All of these things are great, but these behaviors, which Kim notes can mimic a fawning response to trauma, have now become exhausting for black women in particular. Another behavior of post-slavery syndrome comes out when a person of color receives a compliment about their child. A learned response is to highlight deficits as slaves did because they wanted to take attention away from a child’s positive traits so they would not be taken from them. She says it’s so important for parents to praise their children and not put them down.
Kim shares how easy it is for us to believe in generational trauma for populations like the Jewish community post-holocaust and that society becomes defensive about the effects of slavery and children being born with signs of PTSD generations later. Dr. Summer responds by highlighting the contrast between the response to drug crises in the black and white communities. Black people were locked up and little was done to combat the perception that people of color deserved to be on drugs and were generalized as criminals, yet now that white people are hooked on heroin and opioids, we have Narcan kits and physicians being indicted for over-prescribing.
Kim asks LaTonya how she deals with people believing she is less than, inferior, incompetent, or incapable. Dr. Summers shares that she says she is 4 years black. She spent much of her life trying to be white and dress, talk, and act, like a white person so she could be accepted. She is far freer now that she has become comfortable in her own skin.
Kim and LaTonya also discuss the different ways that prejudices surface with regard to names and voices, both in the workplace and in therapy. Kim notes that she has great honor for a person of color choosing her as a therapist. LaTonya echos this by mentioning that working with people who are culturally different from us is beneficial.
Dr. Summers shares her experience of racism. A couple of examples include a white man not wanting her to touch him as she gave him his change at a fast-food restaurant and another time when a man followed her to her house and interrogated her about her University sticker on her car and interrogated her in her driveway. She found herself trying to please and accommodate the man who followed her even though she was afraid he might hurt her. She called campus security to inquire about his behavior and eventually found that he is an overt racist who was known to be hateful and intimidating. The powerlessness of the second scenario brought back past trauma from her childhood.
She is now many years separated from her biological mother and the threats of her childhood. She’s well educated and employed, but sadly she can’t let her guard down. Kim and LaTonya explore the differences in how this scenario would have played out for a white woman with a black man in her driveway.
LaTonya’s advice for white therapists serving minority clients:
1- Look at a client with cultural differences with honor and recognize the blessing that it is to be chosen and trusted.
2- Recognize that a minority client who chooses a white therapist already knows and expects you to be less empathetic, less congruent, and less respectful. There is a reason they chose you and keep coming back, so honor that.
3- Talk about the things that are visible so you can get to things that are invisible.
WATCH
Also on the topic of overcoming painful childhood trauma:
But Your Mother Loves You is the witty and candid tale of how a renowned psychotherapist moved from “not good enough” to “the right person” despite childhood neglect and a toxic relationship with her mother.
Everyone knows at least one person who demonstrates toxic love, someone who consistently jabs a straw in others and sucks the life right out of them. Without an in-depth understanding of how to navigate these relationships, most people continue to emotionally regress and remain paralyzed in familiar, pain-soaked patterns. But Your Mother Loves You helps readers overcome this cycle of toxicity.
Kim Honeycutt shares the real-life experience of how a shame-based, self-destructive little girl grew up to be a recovered alcoholic, entered the world of psychology as a professional, and created her own strategies to address and conquer toxicity.
This story, both witty and practical, is told through the lens of personal life experience and expert psychological strategies combined with Godly intervention. Readers learn how to either walk away from or walk with a toxic loved one without losing themselves. Covered in both vulnerability and clinical information, But Your Mother Loves You provides a step-by-step approach on how to stop toxic love and the subsequent self-abuse.