Between Belonging and Becoming: Reflections on Coaching Second-Generation Black African Clients in France
By Jessamy Holland
What happens when your cultural roots and your social reality don’t fully align — when you’re raised in one world while carrying the invisible weight of another?
As a therapist and coach based in Paris, I’ve had the privilege of working with second-generation Black African clients who navigate this very question. Born in France to immigrant parents, these clients live at the intersection of contrasting worldviews: the collective values of their family heritage, and the individualist ethos of French society.
This tension — between collectivism and individualism, between external expectation and internal truth — forms the backdrop of much of our work together. It shows up in subtle ways: in questions of identity, boundaries, loyalty, and the cost of choosing oneself.
The Myth of “Sameness” in French Culture
France prides itself on universalism: a national value system that emphasizes equality, secularism, and neutrality. But this supposed sameness often erases cultural difference rather than honoring it. For many Black French citizens, particularly those of African descent, this erasure can feel like a silencing.
France’s resistance to ethnic or religious “separatism” has created a social climate in which immigrants are expected to assimilate without acknowledgement of their unique heritage. This can be especially difficult for second-generation clients, who don’t fully belong to their parents’ cultural world, but aren’t fully accepted by the dominant French narrative either.
They are not immigrants themselves, but they carry the psychic and social legacy of migration — and are often left to negotiate its contradictions on their own.
What Comes Into the Room
In therapy, these clients often bring deep questions:
Can I honor my family without betraying myself?
What does it mean to have choice, when so much has already been chosen for me?
How do I show up authentically in a culture that doesn’t see all of me?
These are existential questions — questions about meaning, freedom, and being. They are not easily answered, but they deserve to be heard.
One client, Anne (psuedoname) helped me understand this more deeply. A second-generation West African woman navigating life in Paris, Anne brought into therapy her own reckoning with otherness. After her breakup with a white partner, she continued seeing me individually to explore her attachment style, family dynamics, and sense of identity. Early on, I named our visible difference: her Blackness and my whiteness. I told her I could not fully understand her experience — but that I was committed to holding space for it. She later said that this act of naming allowed her to feel more seen.
Coaching from a Position of Privilege
As a white therapist raised in Hawaii — a place where racial dynamics are different from continental Europe — I grew up largely unaware of how whiteness shaped my worldview. I didn’t grow up talking about racism. I didn’t have to consider my skin color as a defining part of my identity. This, I now realize, is privilege.
Moving to France, living in a multicultural city, and partnering with a second-generation West African man has cracked open my awareness. I see more clearly the structural and psychological toll of being seen as “other.” And I recognize how easy it is, as a white therapist, to bypass conversations about race and culture in the name of neutrality or “universality.”
But neutrality can be a form of denial. And denial has no place in work that seeks to honor the full person.
Existential Freedom and the Weight of Choice
Existential therapy places great value on personal choice. But choice isn’t always liberating — especially when it comes at a cost.
For Anne, choosing to set boundaries with her family — asserting her individuality in a context rooted in collectivist values — brought her clarity and pain. Her decision to say "no," to center her emotional well-being, strained her relationships with her mother and sister. The freedom to choose came with a price: isolation.
As therapists, this raises a difficult question: How do we support clients in becoming more themselves, while also honoring the cultural systems they come from? What happens when empowerment disrupts connection? How do we sit with the grief that can accompany growth?
Holding Difference, Creating Space
In my work with second-generation clients, I’ve learned that acknowledging difference is not divisive — it’s connective. Naming race, culture, and the limits of my own experience opens the door for deeper authenticity and trust.
This is not about centering myself or offering performative allyship. It’s about creating a therapeutic container where complexity is allowed. Where a client does not have to translate or explain their world in order to be understood.
Existential coaching is uniquely suited for this work. It doesn’t impose a framework, but invites clients to define meaning on their own terms. It honors ambiguity, tension, and the full scope of human experience — including the messy, beautiful contradictions of identity.
In Closing
Working with second-generation Black African clients in France has stretched me — personally and professionally. It has shown me how much I still have to learn, and how important it is to keep unlearning.
These clients are not “caught between two worlds” — they are crafting new ones. My role is not to resolve their questions, but to walk beside them as they ask them, again and again.
Because in that space of questioning, something sacred unfolds: the freedom to belong to oneself, without erasing where one comes from.