Dr Aileen Alleyne is a UKCP-registered psychodynamic psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, and organisational consultant in private practice. She is a visiting lecturer at several psychotherapy training institutions and a specialist consultant on race and cultural diversity across major public-sector organisations, including the National Health Service, social services, education, and police services. Her first book, The Burden of Heritage: Hauntings of Generational Trauma on Black Lives (Karnac, 2022), was nominated for the 2023 Gradiva Award and has become an invaluable teaching and research resource within the counselling and psychotherapy community. Aileen’s clinical research examines the lived experiences of Black workers across the NHS, education, and social care sectors, offering a significant contribution to understanding racism as an enduring psychological trauma. Central to her work is the concept of the internal oppressor, a framework that deepens insight into the complex psychological responses to racial wounding.She is the author of numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed papers on Black–White relational dynamics, shame and identity injury, and the challenges of diversity in organisational life. While she now engages more selectively in public speaking, she continues to shape contemporary discourse through her writing, teaching, and carefully chosen contributions to professional and academic spaces.

‘Aileen Alleyne writes from the wound. She doesn't write about it or around it. Her insider–outsider stance is not a methodology but a way of being: the body that is simultaneously inside the therapeutic institution and beside it, reading the accommodation from within its own sedimentation. What she calls “listening in colour” is a refusal of the greyscale neutrality that modern care demands of its practitioners. And her unflinching examination of “you make me whole” – the phrase that sounds like love and operates like governance – is one of the sharpest interrogations of the thesis of completion I have encountered. This book asks what it costs to navigate landscapes that were never drawn for your body. It does so with the fierce tenderness of someone who has been paying that cost for decades and has decided, at last, to name the invoice.’

• AcknowledgementsAbout the authorPreface and introduction1. Post-publication blues2. Why I’m tired of teaching white people about race3. Woke: From political awakening to cultural battleground4. Listening in colour5. “YOU make me WHOLE”—oppressive submission or liberating gratitude? (Read that again please) Epilogue—walking the landscape once more ReferencesIndex