Money problems aren’t just a headache. They can also be the source of more serious health issues, from crippling emotional stress to high blood pressure. And with almost two in three Black Americans worried about their financial situation, to some degree, coping in a tough economy is a major concern.
Clinical psychologist Dr. Thema Bryant recognizes financial stress as “a very important topic” that impacts people on many different levels. Money troubles can cause anxiety or depression, which lead to further problems when you don’t know how to handle them well. Some numb out by eating or drinking too much or using drugs, while others turn to “retail therapy” which only compounds the root cause.
Then there’s the sense of shame some struggle with when they look around, see others succeeding financially and providing well for their families and feel inadequate by comparison. Here Dr. Thema, as she is known, says “I want to name the reality of classism, meaning that it’s not just in your head. People treat people differently based on how much they perceive you have.” That’s one reason name brands can be so important to those with little money, she notes, “because the idea is, if I look rich, people will treat me better.”
All of this is true across the demographic board, but then many Black communities carry an additional weight because they are more likely to have experienced intergenerational poverty. “It’s one thing if we were stable and then someone got laid off, and it’s like a temporary stress,” Dr. Thema says. “But if you were raised by people who were struggling and they were raised by people who were struggling and they were raised by people who were struggling, that impact builds.”
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When everyone around you is having the same kind of hardship, you may not actually be aware of the financial stress you’re living under. One good indicator, Dr. Thema suggests, is the amount of time you have to devote to covering your basic needs—things like food, accommodation and clothing.
Global leadership
While Dr. Thema doesn’t specialize in addressing financial hardship, she brings wide-ranging insight and understanding to the mental health issues it can cause from her multifaceted work as a widely respected professor, psychologist, poet and pastor.
And she knows something about money-related stress personally. When she moved out to the West Coast from Princeton University early in her career, it was the first time she didn’t have a job lined up. As the months went by without finding a good situation, she was “anxious and despairing,” she remembers. “But now, I always say that if I knew then what I know now, I would have enjoyed that year,” she admits. “It was the last time in my life when I had a whole year off.”
Dr. Thema’s busyness since then is evidenced in the impact she has made. Darrell K. Williams, President of Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia, describes Dr. Thema as “a changemaker and leader who has advanced progress in the world of psychology and brings a wealth of knowledge to this space regarding the impact of overall mental wellness on gender as well as people of color.”
As professor of psychology at Pepperdine University in Encino, California, Dr. Thema directs its Culture and Trauma Research Laboratory, which focuses on the cultural context of interpersonal trauma recovery for those impacted by sexual assault, human trafficking, genocide and racism. Prior to joining the school in 2007, she was an assistant professor at California State University in Long Beach, and before that coordinator of the SHARE program coordinating sexual assault and harassment prevention and intervention programs at Princeton University in New Jersey.
Only the fourth Black woman to be named president of the 146,000-member American Psychological Association (in 2023), Dr. Thema has represented the organization at the United Nations and has been honored for her work in Africa and the African Diaspora. Her 2022 TEDx Talk, “You Can Heal Intergenerational Trauma” has been viewed more than 66,000 times. In 2023, she received the Charles Silverstein Lifetime Achievement Award in Social Justice from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies for her “courageous and outstanding contributions” to the study of trauma and oppression.
Dr. Thema’s contributions are not just academic but artistic. An ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, she incorporates sacred dance and spoken word in her work and served as an adviser to Oprah Winfrey for the remaking of The Color Purple in 2024. Her book Matters of the Heart: Healing Your Relationship With Yourself and Those You Love, which released in February, has been described as “a must-read for anyone going through a transition in life or seeking to learn more about themselves” by therapist and New York Times bestselling author Nedra Glover Tawwab.
Personal empowerment
Basic financial literacy is an important factor in addressing money-related stress, says Dr. Thema: “You may not have grown up being told certain things, but you can be teachable, you can be open to information.” By way of example, she tells of doing home visits while interning as a trainee psychologist when she met a teenage girl applying for a job at her local supermarket. Dr. Thema asked to see the young person’s paperwork, and was concerned to discover it had been filled out in green ink.
“No, ma’am, you can’t turn in a job application with a green pen,” Dr. Thema says. “She didn’t know that; no one had told her. Initially, she wanted to push back, but then she understood, ‘Tomorrow you’ve just got to go get another form and fill it out again. The answers you have here are fine, but it’s just these are the rules.’ Some of us were never told the rules, but if we’re teachable, we can learn them.”
“Stress shows up in the body, [but] it also can sow up in our self-worth.”
While recognizing the need for practical help, Dr. Thema emphasizes the importance of also providing inspiration for those struggling to make ends meet, let alone think about getting ahead. “Stress shows up in the body, [but] it also can show up in our self-worth,” she tells WayMaker Journal. “So, one of the things I would say to start with is to have compassion for yourself and to give yourself grace. Because the truth is we didn’t all start on a level playing field. It’s not that everybody who has more than you just worked harder than you or they’re just smarter than you.” Indeed, any kind of trauma—and Dr. Thema includes growing up in poverty—can make it hard for people to focus, diminishing their capacity to “achieve.”
Action Steps for the Anxious
Take care. Don’t just buckle down and try harder. Instead, reach out for some help. Maybe you can use your insurance to meet with a therapist. If that’s not an option, check out local organizations that may offer help charged on a sliding income scale. Or, cheaper still, buy a self-help book that speaks to your situation (“but don’t just let it sit on your shelf”). Bottom line, do something to look out for yourself.
Take action. Don’t ignore your money problems thinking (or hoping) they will just go away, because they won’t. Open that bill so that you know what you are dealing with. Try to live within your means “and make decisions that decrease your stress instead of increasing it.”
Take stock. Don’t allow yourself to believe you’re stuck where you are. Look up and look ahead to where you’d like to be a year from now or five years from now and think about what realizing that dream might involve. Recognize that “to get a different result, I’m going to have to do something different.”
“We started at different places and also had faced different challenges,” she says. “So, we start with giving ourselves grace and compassion for where we are on the journey, how we landed here.” Then you need to push back against the idea that your net worth is your value, “as opposed to saying, ‘Once I’m rich, once I have this, then I’m going to be somebody.’”
Despite what you feel your current bank balance may tell you, “You already are somebody,” Dr. Thema emphasizes. “If it’s not my account that gives me my worth or my value, [then] we think about our integrity, we think about our character, we think about our soul life, we think about how we treat people—all of those things [that really] make up who we are.”
“You need to push back against the idea that your net worth is your value.”
Community support
Dr. Thema’s wisdom draws from a deep well of personal as well as academic experience. She came to the United States with her parents as refugees from civil war-torn Liberia and credits them with providing the loving environment she needed to flourish.
When she and her brother were young, their mom would buy them journals and set them assignments. “She would say, ‘Go into your room and write about what we would need to fix the world,’” Dr. Thema recalls. “And she would look at me seriously, like I knew the answer. So because she gave the assignment and believed I knew the answer, I went in my room and I started writing about what we would need to fix the world.”
Knowing someone believes in you like that gives you confidence, she says. Plus, growing up in the Black church gave her opportunities to stretch and grow, such as preparing for the annual Easter speeches. When she arrived at college, she wasn’t fazed by the prospect of having to make a public presentation as some other students were. “These opportunities and experiences, I feel, trained me for leadership.”
For some people, parental and other elders’ expectations can be more of a pressure than an inspiration, Dr. Thema acknowledges. That may be because it’s belief without backup. Dr. Thema didn’t feel like she was being thrown out there on her own, she says. “I felt like I had the support of my community and my family; they were in it with me. It wasn’t just, ‘You can do it; go figure it out.’”
Rather, those who urged her on also helped however they could. “I didn’t get everything I went after, and they didn’t change up on me,” she says. “They still loved me, they still believed in me, they still encouraged me. So, we teach young people that they’re not in it by themselves and also that our love is not flaky or conditional.”
What would Dr. Thema say to those who track her success in multiple areas and ask how she has managed to excel in them? She attributes her achievements to “not feeling like I had to choose anymore or have these separate cells,” she says. “Meaning I had church Thema, I had poetry Thema, I had psychologist Thema, and when I was in these different spaces I would be that part of myself. And what has allowed me to bloom is to be all of those things at once. Our best self, our greatness, is when we are living authentically the fullness of who we are, and that authenticity frees up other people in our presence to be authentic.”
During her year as president of the American Psychological Association, she was asked how she code-switched in her role. Her answer: she didn’t. “I gave people of the source.” She decided, “I’m going to be me, I’m going to talk like me, I’m going to dream like me, and people can experience that.”
Dr. Thema Bryant: My WayMaker
When I became President of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 2023, I was the fourth Black woman in that role. I didn’t get there by accident: the person who was the first Black woman in that role, Dr. Jessica Henderson Daniel [2018], was my mentor. She saw it for me before I saw it. I wanted to become president of the [APA division] Society for the Psychology of Women before I was 35 and at 34, I was elected their youngest president. A number of people, including Jessica, started saying, “You need to run for president of the whole thing.” I was, “Oh no, thank you,” because it wasn’t the time for me to do it then. But over the years, Jessica just kept checking in with me and saying, “Are you ready to run yet?” She just continued to attend that fire, telling me about her presidency, about the challenges she faced, about how she navigated certain waters and all of that helped me to not only get there, but then to not be intimidated by the role or by the responsibility.
From an interview with Louis Carr
