A Change-maker: Dr. Fanike-Kiara Young's Work as a Financial Trauma Therapist
The Master Healing Alchemist, Dr. Fanike-Kiara Olugbala Young, is an energy intuitive Doctor of Behavioral Health, Licensed Trauma Therapist, Financial and a Trauma Specialist, and a Master Reiki Practitioner. She leads women entrepreneurs on the path to removing mental, emotional, financial, physical, and spiritual blocks stopping them from living the lives they want and deserve. These blocks are usually rooted in hurtful experiences in childhood and are keeping the women in cycles of negative thinking, limiting beliefs, and unhappiness.
Dr. Fanike uses her own history of trauma to help others and empowers women to combat limiting beliefs, negative self-talk and to live the lives they want by providing them with real-life coping tools that can be used to help heal themselves. She is the author of What the F*ck is Your Problem?!: Becoming an Active Worker in Healing Your Trauma, recently released and available on drfanike.com and all major retailers. Dr. Fanike wrote this book after embarking on her own healing journey and discovering what tools were effective for her along the journey. Her goal is to help heal as many people around the world as she can with a special emphasis on women.
Ashley Wells, Co-founder & Chief Operations Officer of The Prosp(a)rity Project, had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Fanike-Kiara Young to discuss why she decided to become a financial trauma therapist, student loan debt, and what advice she would give to Black women experiencing trauma in their own lives. Dr. Fanike-Kiara Young does work that is directly in line with The Prosp(a)rity Project’s mission, which is to improve the financial and economic mobility of college educated Black women. She decided to delve into this work in order to begin overcoming her own trauma. She has a traumatic past that involves instances of domestic violence, murder, verbal abuse, and more. All of that coupled with working herself to death during her doctorate program caused her a lot of stress. Realized that investing in her healing and in her personal/professional development was key, and it was tied to releasing herself from the burden of the financial trauma from her childhood.
Dr. Fanike-Kiara Young was privileged to be able to take advantage of the loan forgiveness programs that the federal government has available. She admits that there is a lot about student loans that people do not know, especially Black people. She believes that the lack of education regarding the resources available in terms of forgiveness harkens back to the “hard working” mindset that many black people pass down to their children. “We need to set our future generations up for success”, she says. And in terms of advice that she would give to people (Black women in particular) who are dealing with any sort of trauma in their life, she says that individuals need to make the active choice to heal. Healing cannot happen if you are not ready. Once you decide to heal, it may not be easy, but it’s worth it to get on the other side of that pain.
When asked about the process of writing her book, she called it “therapeutic”. It was written in spurts - she cried a lot, came to terms with many things, and allowed herself to “go there”. It also allowed her to look at things from all different perspectives. Writing this book allowed her to look at things through her mom’s unique perspective - which she had never done before. Her parting words involved words of advice to those struggling with student debt. She urges all in student debt to really look into both income based repayment plans and into the loan forgiveness programs that are available. She also urges people to pay back your loans as aggressively as possible as early as possible if you can.
