Before anything else: I am not a therapist, and I do not provide therapy. If that is what you need, I will help you find it before you leave this page.
You typed those words into a search bar for a reason. Maybe you are tired of explaining the context before anyone can help you — tired of translating yourself. Maybe something has been sitting on your chest for a long time and today felt like the day. Maybe it is late, and the house is quiet, and this was easier than saying it out loud to someone you know.
Whatever brought you here, you deserve the truth about what you are looking at, and you deserve it first — before I tell you a single thing about myself.
If Today Is Heavy, Start Here
If you are thinking about harming yourself, or you simply cannot carry it right now, you do not have to sort out therapy versus coaching tonight. Reach a trained crisis counselor, free and confidential, any hour:
Call or text 988 — the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Or chat at 988lifeline.org. Someone is there, 24 hours a day, and it costs nothing.
I earn nothing from telling you that. I am telling you because it is the most important thing on this page, and I wanted it near the top where you would actually see it.
How To Find a Licensed Black Therapist
If what you need is treatment — a licensed clinician who can diagnose, who takes insurance, who is trained for trauma, depression, anxiety, or grief — these are real doors, and I do not profit from any of them:
- Therapy for Black Girls — therapyforblackgirls.com — a directory of culturally competent therapists for Black women and girls.
- The Loveland Foundation — thelovelandfoundation.org — funds therapy for Black women and girls; it has covered nearly 150,000 hours.
- Psychology Today — psychologytoday.com/us/therapists — filter by ethnicity, specialty, insurance, and location.
- Open Path Collective — openpathcollective.org — therapy at reduced cost when insurance is the barrier.
If you look at that list and feel relief rather than disappointment that I was not the answer — that tells you something worth knowing about what you actually came for.
Why I Took the Word Off My Website
For a long time, the word “therapist” sat on my site. It was there because people search for it, and I wanted to be found. That was an honest impulse and the wrong reason.
A person searching those words at two in the morning is not a keyword. They are a human being at the edge of something, and the most therapeutic thing I can offer in that moment is not a clever funnel. It is the truth about what I am, and a real door to what they need.
So here is the truth.
What Therapy Is, and What Coaching Is
A licensed therapist is trained and licensed by the state to diagnose and treat. They work with trauma, depression, anxiety disorders, PTSD, grief, and crisis. If you cannot function, if you are managing a diagnosis, if something happened to you that you have never been able to look at directly — that is a therapist’s work, not a coach’s. Any coach who tells you otherwise is putting their income ahead of your safety, and you should walk away from them.
Coaching is something else. It does not diagnose. It does not treat. It works forward — with people who are already functioning, often at a high level, who have arrived at a question they cannot think their way out of alone. Who am I becoming? What am I carrying that was never mine? Why does the life I built no longer fit the person I became while building it?
Every part of the work I do is therapeutic. None of it is therapy. That is not a technicality. It is the whole difference, and it decides whether you get what you came for.
Many people need both, in sequence — the therapist first, to heal what happened; the coach after, to build what is next. There is no shame in either. There is only harm in choosing the wrong one because someone wanted your business.
If It Is Coaching You Are Looking For
Then, and only then, does it matter who I am.
I am Dr. D. Ivan Young — an ICF Master Certified Coach, a National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach, and a Professional Fellow of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. I have spent decades sitting with people who look composed on the outside and are quietly coming apart, and I know the difference between a wound that needs a clinician and a question that needs a partner.
If you have done the healing and now you want to build — I am here, and I would be glad to talk.
Dr. D. Ivan Young, MCC, NBC-HWC, CPDC, CPQC, practices in Houston, Texas. He is not a licensed mental health professional and does not provide psychotherapy, counseling, or clinical treatment of any kind. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.
Dr. D. Ivan Young creates the science. Young Ethical Intelligence stewards the system. URIEL scales the transformation.