Liberation-based therapist Tanisha Christie

Tanisha Christie, 53, founder of Liberation-Based Therapy and longtime wellness advocate, has provided mental health support and wraparound services in the New York metro area for those in need for years. 

“I started the practice for people who saw themselves at an intersection in a crossroads, and the other reason I started was for therapists of color,” said Christie. “In social work school, most of the clinical internships went to people of whiteness and mostly people of color get case management positions, so if they were interested in doing more clinical work, they didn’t get the training.”

Christie was born in Queens as a first-generation Panamanian-American. She moved around a lot as an adolescent, going to high school and college in Arizona. She pursued a career in arts for social justice, working with groups from all walks of life, after earning a master’s in media and documentary film from the New School.

“Everybody’s an artist and … the muscle of imagination needs to be exercised, and if you can dream it, you can be it. In that work, I was trained in anti-racism and anti-oppression,” said Christie. 

She realized that she wanted to engage with people more deeply on a therapeutic level and earned a master’s degree in social work from Hunter College. She is trained in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and diversity in social work through the Ackerman Institute for the Family, and has New York State Certified Divorce Mediator certification. She began her practice in 2021. 

Christie recently announced a move to partner with Globalizing Gender founder Natasha R. Johnson, 47, who runs a nonprofit that also focuses on culturally aware alternatives for gender-based violence survivors and has been operating in the city for the last decade. 

This partnership aims to combine their resources, funding, expertise, and networks to promote trauma-informed care for domestic violence (DV), gender-based violence, and intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors, as well as those who have experienced horrific cultural practices, such as female genital mutilation and cutting (FGM/C), child marriage, forced marriage, human trafficking, and breast ironing. Together, they plan to serve individuals, couples, and families (integrated and open) in New York and New Jersey, along with nationally focused wellness training and initiatives. 

“There are a host of hurdles that folks have to sort of jump through as they seek remedy to gaining any level of recourse for themselves as they think about what it means to extricate themselves from the cycles of violence,” said Johnson about their work. “We’ve created service and products to make it easier for folks to plug into what service could look like meaningfully. This is just another branch of what that looks like to harness the fact that we overlap in our business. There have been plenty of times I’ve tagged Tanisha in to be our clinical director and she’s tagged me in.”

For more information about accessing the services that Liberation-Based Therapy provides, email office@liberationbasedtherapy.com or visit www.liberationbasedtherapy.com. 
For Globalizing Gender, email natasha@globalizinggender.org or visit www.globalizinggender.org.

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