COCA | Counsellor of Colour Aotearoa
COCA: A community I created from conversations that stayed with me
COCA grew from my work with culturally diverse communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While collaborating with a charity to facilitate a series of mental health webinars, I kept hearing something that stayed with me. People from migrant, refugee and culturally diverse communities wanted spaces where their experiences could be understood within the context of their culture, identity and ways of seeing the world. COCA grew from that need.
It is the community-facing part of my work: a space for conversations, resources, groups and gatherings around culture, identity, belonging and mental wellbeing. It also creates room for perspectives that can sometimes sit outside dominant Western understandings of psychological well-being.
My counselling practice remains personal and relational: you work with me, Dr Amira. COCA allows me to take some of the values that inform that work beyond the counselling room and into wider community conversations.
COCA is where I continue a conversation that began during the pandemic: how do we create spaces where people do not have to leave parts of themselves at the door in order to feel understood?
More Than Skin Colour
Being a counsellor of colour is about more than shared skin colour or ethnicity. Nor does sharing a cultural identity automatically mean that one person will understand another.
For me, it means practising with an awareness that culture matters.
It means being curious about the worlds people come from: migration and displacement, family and community, faith and spirituality, language, race, belonging, intergenerational expectations and the experience of living between cultures.
It also means recognising racism, discrimination and structural inequities when these are part of a person's experience, rather than asking them to separate these realities from their mental health.
A Space Where You Don't Have to Translate Yourself
COCA is a space for conversations about mental health and well-being that make room for different cultural ways of knowing, relating and understanding ourselves.
A space where Western ideas can sit alongside cultural knowledge and lived experience.
A space where difference does not need to be explained away.
And, perhaps most importantly, a space where people can encounter something many of us are increasingly searching for: the experience of being understood in context.
Let’s work together.
Groups and Community
COCA also creates opportunities for connection beyond individual counselling. Groups, conversations and workshops provide spaces to share experiences, learn from one another and strengthen connection within culturally diverse communities.
RECONNECT - A facilitated gathering centred on human connection, conversation and listening. RECONNECT offers a space to slow down, meet others and experience the value of being heard and hearing one another.
IDENTITY, CULTURE & BELONGING - An individual or group exploration of the many influences that shape who we are. We consider culture, family, ancestry, migration, relationships and lived experience, and explore how these intersect with identity, belonging and the person you are becoming.
INTERGENERATIONAL PATTERNS - A guided exploration of how experiences, beliefs, expectations and ways of relating can travel through families and generations.
Rather than assuming that everything difficult in the present originates in the past, we become curious about what has been carried forward: what has sustained us, what we value and want to preserve, and what may no longer serve us. The aim is not to blame previous generations, but to understand our inheritance with greater compassion and choice. We cannot rewrite what came before us. We can become more conscious of what we carry forward.
It is more than skin deep
Culture is woven through how we understand ourselves, our families, relationships, responsibilities, distress and even what it means to seek help. COCA recognises the intersection of culture, race, migration, faith, gender, family, language and other aspects of identity.
These experiences can be sources of strength and belonging, but they can also carry tension, particularly when we find ourselves negotiating different cultural worlds.
Our conversations make room for all of these parts of you. They also acknowledge the psychological impact of racism, discrimination, exclusion and other forms of inequity when these are part of your lived experience.
A space where you don't have to code-switch
Many of us learn to adjust how we speak, behave or express ourselves depending on the spaces we occupy. Sometimes this is adaptive. Sometimes, constantly monitoring which parts of ourselves are acceptable becomes exhausting.
Therapy should be somewhere you can notice those adaptations without having to perform another version of yourself. You can bring the different parts of who you are into the room, including parts that may seem contradictory. Together, we can explore questions of identity, belonging and authenticity, and what it might mean to feel more at home within yourself.
Your relationship with yourself.
Living across cultures, expectations and identities can sometimes leave us uncertain about which parts of ourselves belong to us and which have developed in response to what others expect.
Counselling can offer space to become curious about these patterns, reconnect with your values and develop a more compassionate relationship with yourself.
There is no single version of an “authentic self” waiting to be uncovered. We are complex and continually evolving. The work is about finding greater freedom to live in ways that feel congruent with who you are and what matters to you.
