Francesca Walker, MHC-LP

Associate Mind-Body-Soul Clinician

Treatment Focus

I offer psychotherapy for individuals and couples working through anxiety, depression, stress, life transitions, racial and gender identity concerns, cross-cultural tension, workplace challenges, family dynamics, and interpersonal/intergenerational trauma. Using an integrated mind-body-soul approach, I accompany clients on the journey of meeting their shadow self with compassion, leveraging their ancestral and somatic wisdom to find their center, and manifesting their most elevated and actualized vision of self. With this heightened attunement to self, clients then have a deeper capacity to turn toward partners, family of origin, or chosen family and move toward energetic alignment.

I have a passion for helping couples and I have completed the Gottman Institute’s level I training and am in the process of completing level II.

What sessions with me will look like

I view psychotherapy as an opportunity for individuals to center themselves and their true nature within their personal healing and growth. This is the starting point to be able to move through perceived blocks, release imposed identities and inauthentic versions of self, so my clients can realize the life of their dreams. As a Panamanian-American woman of Caribbean descent, my Blackness and womanhood are inextricably linked, providing a cultural frame of reference that calls forth the divine feminine energy force within me as a healing companion for my clients. I channel the energy of Black women ancestors who offer themselves as my muses and mirror the goddess within all Black women to cradle them in their healing process. This offers me the vantage point to assist other Black women as well as men and people of all races, gender identities, and cultural backgrounds to release the confines that colonialism has created and the turmoil that has been waged upon the bodies, hearts, and minds of all those who have been touched by it. Through co-creating an intentional container where each client can be held in their fullness, I support individuals and couples in reconnecting with their intuition and honoring the somatic and spiritual communications that emerge as indicators of their personal truths. While I serve as a collaborative partner in the therapeutic process, I create space for my clients to be the primary driver in their healing journey—every person is inherently imbued with the inner resources they need to support their wellbeing and to flourish. Our work is just to find these and put them into practice.

How my integrated approach wove together with the threads of many lineages 

I began my professional journey over ten years ago, while completing a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and American Literature at New York University, as a social justice educator, facilitating intersectional programming and workshops while supporting college students through their identity exploration process. While completing a Master of Education degree in Higher Education Administration with a specialization in learning, diversity, and urban studies at Vanderbilt University, I continued supporting BIPOC and LGBTQ+ college students’ identity development and their experience of belonging within academic institutions, while providing crisis counseling in community settings to young people experiencing homelessness. It was in this community space that I adopted a strengths-based, restorative justice approach to supporting individuals experiencing trauma. After witnessing the impact of interpersonal and intergenerational trauma on the marginalized communities I worked with as well as within my own community, I decided to acquire the clinical skills necessary to become a more effective healing companion to myself and others and completed a Master of Arts degree in Counseling for Mental Health and Wellness at New York University. During this graduate program, I completed a clinical internship with Therapy Brooklyn, where I learned the value of bringing my social identities into the therapy space with me in authenticity. The result has been clients connecting with a deep feeling of safety which offers them the possibility to bring their full humanity into our sessions. My vision for my therapeutic work is to fully embrace an integrated mind-body-soul approach to restore psychological safety, bodily integrity, and spiritual sovereignty to marginalized communities and all individuals moving toward collective liberation.