My name is Katerina and I’m the daughter of Anna and Russell, Eva and Constantine, Mandel and Ruby, and many more who’ve spanned the American South from Africa, and Greece. Mental health and therapy are two concepts that weren’t talked about much amongst my family. Not because people didn’t experience any psychological stressors or care about how others were doing, but more so because it wasn’t part of our cultures to explicitly talk about using words like “depression”, “anxiety”, “trauma”, or even the t-word “therapy”. It was more so talking about it without talking-talking about it.

My interest in psychology and the human condition stemmed from sheer curiosity and my parents, two very different though similar people. One is a daughter of Greek immigrants from Crete, who grew up trying to fit in with the kids with white bread sandwiches and rebel against traditional parenting from the motherland. The other is a son of Black migrants whose roots had been in the South, who grew up watching the Watts Riots from his roof as a boy and who later became a Los Angeles Fire Department paramedic and firefighter.