Family therapist and mental health expert Dr. Jay Barnett says Black wellness starts with the one thing most of us were never handed: permission to be fully human. Baller Alert spoke with Barnett for National Wellness Month, and his answer to what wellness actually requires had far less to do with routines and rituals than with the emotions we have been trained to swallow.
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For generations we have been taught how to survive. Push through. Pray harder. Show up. Stay strong even when life feels anything but manageable. Barnett’s point is that surviving and healing are not the same skill, and that strength held long enough without release becomes suppression.
For many of us, holding on to God has been the root of that survival, and Barnett is not asking anyone to trade it. He is asking that it stop standing in for the work of processing real emotion. Working with churches and faith leaders, he has watched people feel pressured to hide what they are carrying in the name of being faithful. “We often feel that it would be an indictment on God’s character,” he told Baller Alert. “Maybe I’m not saved enough, and maybe I need to read more scriptures, or maybe I need to pray more.”
His position is that faith and mental health care belong side by side. “Prayer is a great tool, but therapy is a great strategy,” he said. Someone can hold on to their belief and still need help navigating grief, anxiety, or disappointment. “I love God, but I also need to talk to my therapist,” he said. “Those are real feelings.”
The problem starts when faith gets used to skip the feeling entirely. “We do a lot of spiritual bypassing, where we’ll put a scripture in place of real emotion and real issues,” Barnett said. Spiritual bypassing is the habit of reaching for a verse to shut down a hard conversation before it starts, including the ones we need to have with ourselves. Black wellness does not require choosing between the church and the therapist’s office. Some seasons call for prayer. Some seasons call for a professional. Most call for both.
The second piece of Black wellness Barnett wants people to look at is the phone in their hand. The endless scroll has become a normal part of the day, and the algorithm drops us somewhere strange most nights. Breaking news, political fights, viral arguments, and carefully curated lives all arrive in the same thumb swipe, which is more information than the brain was built to sort. Barnett calls us overly informed. “It’s a constant loop. It’s the constant scrolling, it’s the constant swiping.”
He is not dismissing what the platforms have built for business, connection, and education. He is naming what they cost. “There’s no way that you can be everywhere and be present,” he said. “I don’t think that’s good for the brain.”
“You are what you eat,” Barnett said, and sometimes the diet that needs changing is a mental one. That means logging off, even when logging off costs you something. Feeding on whatever lands on the timeline instead of building a system that protects your peace will show up in your mental health eventually. Barnett takes breaks that last weeks, deleting the apps and stepping away from the pressure to post. When people ask whether he worries about losing his audience, his answer is short. “I’m worried about me.”
The hardest part of Black wellness may be the quiet. Slowing down long enough to hear yourself. Feeling the uncomfortable thing instead of scheduling around it. Barnett said we have become skilled at getting over things without ever dealing with them, and the bill comes due later in unspoken hurt, resentment, and emotions that eventually demand to be felt. “We’ve gotten over a lot of things, but we haven’t really dealt with it,” he said.
That avoidance shows up in relationships, in friendships, and in the way we set boundaries. Protecting other people’s feelings at the expense of your own becomes a form of self-betrayal, and in his Baller Alert interview Barnett had a name for the habit: babysitting people’s feelings. “When we don’t [express ourselves], we commit self-betrayal, and we rob ourselves of the human experience,” he said.
Sitting with yourself does not require having the answers. It requires enough quiet to recognize what you are carrying and to give yourself permission to set it down. That can happen with a therapist, with trusted people, or alone. What matters to Barnett is that the space exists at all, somewhere you do not have to perform strength or dress it up for anybody. “You’ve got to have a space where you can unearth what it really is and deal with it and put it on the table,” he said. As everything else speeds up, stillness becomes one of the more radical options available. “Take a break,” Barnett said. “Give your mind a break, and let your soul catch up.”
Black wellness is not spa days, green juice, or another box checked off a self care list. It is freedom. The freedom to feel, to say what is true, to ask for help, and to rest without apologizing for it. Healing tends to start the moment we stop demanding strength from ourselves and let ourselves be human instead. Barnett takes that further in his forthcoming book, “Pursuing Pace,” which looks at how an exhausted mind wears on the body, with a foreword by his friend, actress and mental health advocate Taraji P. Henson.
