Safe House Seven Offers a Culturally Rooted Alternative to Traditional Therapy
Housing projects, juvenile detention centers, Oakland’s public schools.
For over twenty-five years, mental health professional Urana Jackson has worked in community mental health and education. She began to formalize the concept for Safe House Seven after realizing that conventional therapy was not meeting the needs of her clients.
“Most of the people coming to see me were Black or BIPOC, and there were particular themes that kept surfacing in almost all of them,” Jackson says. “Part of that was ancestry, looking at these multigenerational patterns that were coming through. A lot of my clients would talk about ‘this part of me feels this way’ and ‘this other part feels that way’ – this intrapsychic conflict kept coming up over and over. Dreams would come up a lot, too. And almost every single one of them had this desire to connect spiritually but didn’t fully know what that really meant for them.”
From her own experience and conversations with other clinicians, Jackson knew that Western versions of therapy were not holistic or context-aware enough to provide mental and spiritual support to people of color seeking a deeper form of healing.
“The Western practice of therapy is just so limited,” she says. “If you only center the problem and the healing just within yourself, you’re missing huge pieces of one’s sense of identity and resourcing and being part of a larger context.”
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Jackson developed Safe House Seven as a healing approach that draws on West African spiritual traditions to address gaps in conventional therapy for Black and BIPOC communities, named after historic safe havens for enslaved Africans and African Americans in the US.
Roughly between 1790 and 1860, abolitionists established ‘safe houses’ throughout the Underground Railroad, offering protection, warmth, and nourishment to those escaping slavery. These were sacred spaces where stories and vital knowledge for the journey toward liberation were shared.
Research such as this 2023 article in Springer Nature shows that Black and BIPOC communities have experienced extensive histories of abuse in healthcare, causing transgenerational trauma. Mental health professionals routinely overdiagnose Black people with chronic psychiatric disorders while providing substandard care.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, these disparities worsened as BIPOC communities experienced higher burdens of housing instability, unemployment, and limited access to quality care. Existing mental health systems continue to pathologize appropriate reactions to trauma and oppression. At the same time, structural barriers, including a lack of culturally aware and holistic options, high costs, and underrepresentation of BIPOC providers, further hinder access to effective healing.
The Safe House Seven spiritually centered modalities apply a holistic approach to healing. “Most traditional models ask what’s wrong with you. Trauma-informed models ask what has happened to you. Culturally resonant models talk about historically what has taken place,” Jackson explains.
The difference becomes clearer when considering what conventional models neglect. Safe House Seven addresses not just an individual’s experience, but also systems of oppression that have impacted the here and now, with the understanding that improving our relationship with Spirit is fundamental to healing ourselves.
Christy Tadros, a psychotherapist who became both a client and collaborator in Safe House Seven, echoes this: “Traditional Western psychotherapy focuses so much on the individual, and the individual kind of carries the burden of everything. [In reality], we have our mind, we have our physical body, we have our spiritual body, we have our ancestors, we have our community… if we’re not bringing all those things in for healing, then the healing is so shallow.”
The consequences of this limitation are clear. “There are several occasions where people who have done therapy before got nothing from it; they sometimes got damaged by it,” Jackson shares. “They decided not to pursue therapy until years later, when there was a real urgency to get back into a process, but they just didn’t want to repeat that same kind of cerebral, one-dimensional aspect of therapy.”
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For Safe House Seven, Jackson drew from both clinical training and her deep engagement with Ifa/Isese, a Yoruba spiritual tradition that is thousands of years old.
“It’s an animist tradition, so it believes that everything is from a unified spiritual field, everything has life,” Jackson explains. “Everything is a part of Spirit. And there’s a deep reverence for ancestors and ancestral work.”
Safe House Seven creates healing through seven thresholds, each rooted in Yoruba concepts. The journey begins with “Oriki” (multigenerational narratives), exploring ancestral stories and patterns across three generations that connect to current challenges. In “Itan” (personal narrative), participants share their own life stories to identify thematic sources of present issues. “Iye, Emi, Ori” introduces parts work, a variation of Internal Family Systems theory that helps bring intrapsychic parts into harmony.
The fourth threshold, “Olokun” (unconscious deep dive), accesses deeper wisdom through dreamwork, earth-centered practices, and sometimes plant medicine integration. “Ebo” (integration) incorporates insights into daily practices and communal offerings, followed by “Ile Elofun” (circle of care), which invites loved ones into the healing process. The journey concludes with “Ebo Da” (closure and appreciation), reflecting on the entire process and solidifying new practices.
What distinguishes this approach is its recognition that people heal in community, not in isolation. “If you’re holding that alone, it’s just your story,” Jackson observes. “But once all of the stories have been told [in a group], you really can feel the impact, the strength of a people.”
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While growing up in Los Angeles, Jackson had to navigate and develop an understanding of her own multiracial background: Black, Eastern Band Cherokee, and White. When speaking about the importance of centering community in her work, she says, “I also think about my own healing. It was always done in community, where I felt reflected back by people, having them talk and sit with me, and just bear witness to me and my pain. I also had this sense that the natural world and the spiritual world were holding me. That’s what healed me – I think of myself as the guinea pig [for this practice].”
Christy Tadros met Jackson through another Safe House Seven collaborator. She held onto her card for six months before reaching out again. She was experiencing a difficult time in her life, including multiple miscarriages and a professional dilemma as a practitioner. She began working with Jackson one-on-one after resonating with her approach.
“I can say that that was one of the most life-changing things I’ve ever done,” Tadros recalls. “It was incredibly healing, and it really shifted my way of thinking about healing, about my spirituality.”
Tadros was raised in a Coptic Christian family that migrated to the US from Egypt, where Copts are a minority. She had attended church growing up, but “didn’t feel spiritually connected.” Through Safe House Seven, she developed a daily practice of meditation and spiritual study. “It supported my ability to move through the day, feeling trust and calm that I was being held by something outside of myself,” she explains.
As Safe House Seven evolved from individual to group work, it revealed another crucial dimension of healing. Tadros, who joined the first group cohort, describes the profound impact of witnessing others in an intentional healing space and how this shared vulnerability creates rare safety.
“In our day-to-day life, we have these programmed default-mode interactions that happen,” Tadros reflects. “When you get in an intentional space with folks and set the intention to do this work, to be vulnerable, to connect with Spirit, and to create this space of safety where a lot of times people of color do not have safety in the world, there’s something that almost breaks open in you. It cracks your heart open deeper in compassion for others and for yourself.”
For Jackson, facilitating this process was itself vulnerable. “This was my baby, and to put it forward felt really vulnerable,” she admits about the first group cohort. Yet after the first ten minutes, she felt “the group was so open and receptive and excited by what I was proposing.”
These group experiences are not solely focused on suffering. “We would start the group with collaborative singing,” Tadros remembers. “There was always laughter, even amongst the darkest moments of sharing. I honestly would often walk away from that group feeling a sort of joy.”
Jackson has witnessed similar moments: “We’ve all gotten together, had dinners together, or circles afterwards. The sharing still happens. It’s like we’re almost still in group when we all get together…and we speak about Spirit.”
This ability to openly center Spirit has been particularly meaningful for Jackson. “Since I was a child, I just had this connection and understanding of a spiritual world, but I felt that I had to be in hiding. To be an adult and be just open with it, it feels so good, and it’s the world I want to live in.”
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Reports show that the lack of cultural sensitivity by health care professionals can lead to Black Americans feeling marginalized and less willing to seek mental health support. That many rely instead on family, community, and spiritual support instead of medical or psychiatric treatment is often framed as contradictory to professional recommendations. Jackson’s experience suggests that the need to turn to community and religion may stem from different cultural and spiritual needs.
“We are very relational people,” Jackson explains. “I feel like, at some level, all humans are relational, but that relationship with others got cut off early in many European traditions. There has been a preservation in Indigenous, Black, and BIPOC cultures around communities.”
Looking to the future, Jackson envisions Safe House Seven expanding to meet the growing need for this approach towards healing.
“We’re in a polycrisis right now, and I really believe it’s going to heat up even more,” she says. “We need modalities that are financially accessible, culturally relevant, and really can take in a good, big cohort at a time.” And we need solutions that offer Sacred foundations to support the healing of the Spirit.
Jackson envisions cohorts in the Bay Area, New York, and Albuquerque, with larger groups of about 20 participants each, including ritual practitioners from different indigenous traditions.
For Tadros, the impact of Safe House Seven has extended far beyond the formal therapy space. In the months following her individual work with Urana, she had a healthy pregnancy and was pregnant throughout the group sessions, giving birth right at the end of the cohort. Despite a challenging birth and postpartum experience, the spiritual foundation she developed helped her persevere, and the community connections continue to nourish her.
Tadros describes a joyful evening when she ran into fellow group members at a party, and she and her daughter danced with people she had formed such close bonds with. “I just went to something in my community and saw them, and there was joy together. I think that helps in these times, to reclaim that joy.”
For Black and BIPOC communities long denied culturally relevant spiritual and mental healing, Safe House Seven provides what many Western systems are not able to: healing that acknowledges historical trauma, honors sacred ancestral wisdom, and rebuilds transcendent communal bonds systematically targeted by racism.
Urana shares that on several occasions, she is approached by people who have been disappointed or even damaged by their experiences with conventional therapy, or therapy that focuses more on a single aspect.
They are eager to try an approach that addresses them in a larger context, and to explore what’s at the connective root underlying these different methods of healing and therapy.
“I think what we’re doing here is learning how to be in the right relationship with ourselves, with other people, and with the world around us,” says Jackson. “If you only center the healing or isolate the problem just within yourself, you are missing huge pieces of one’s sense of identity, healing, and resourcing and just being part of a larger context.” Beyond a new method of therapy, Safe House Seven exemplifies the sacred acts of reclamation, healing in community, and seeing the self as sacred.
The limitations within conventional systems of therapy, which may address a clinical issue but neglect the Spirit, have led to a need for a more holistic intervention, especially for people who have deep-rooted generational trauma, cultural connections with and veneration for their ancestors, and a need for community-based healing. In centering the Sacred, the Safe House Seven approach challenges us to consider not just what methods we use, but what essential parts of ourselves we honor or abandon in the process of healing.
By Wajeeha Malik