Kier Gaines with his wife Noèmie and their daughters (Courtesy of noemiegaines.com)

“You need permission sometimes to access parts of yourself that maybe the environment you grew up in said you shouldn’t be.” Growing up in Southeast Washington D.C., licensed therapist and girl dad of two, Kier Gaines never experienced deep empathy and came up in a community that tried to limit what and who someone could be or was capable of.

Kier Gaines is a mental health advocate, father, and community leader who gained a huge following on social media after people fell in love with his authenticity. After going viral with a video sharing the importance of therapy before having children, Gaines soon became one of the leading wellness influencers online. He keeps it real on his own personal mental health journey, gives tips on finding balance in the chaos, and reflects on how fatherhood has been for him. Kier recently sat down with Karega and Felicia Bailey, hosts of the podcast SOL Affirmations Podcast. SOL Affirmations (available on the Black Love+ app) serves as a healing space through various forms of grief with the reminder that grief is love; it is just love after a loss. Karega and Felicia Bailey are artists, educators, and community builders. After they became Angel Parents to their daughter, Kamaiu SOL in 2019, they found a radical tenderness and gentleness afforded them concerning their grief, unlike anything they have seen or experienced in their work surrounding social justice and gun violence in our communities. 

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Courtesy of: Kier Gaines/Facebook

Kier and Karega have a lot in common. They’re both “Black Love” alums, former educators and have experienced immense grief and loss while holding space for underserved communities. In fact, they both worked in the District of Columbia’s Public School system, serving in the same building at one point, one year apart from each other! The school that they worked at was aimed towards putting those who are overage and under-credited on an accelerated track to graduate and also had students with profound behavioral and emotional challenges. Students from all over the city with a wide range of ages and issues and even from rival neighborhoods were all thrown together in the same classes. For Kier, that was the first time in his life that he’d ever felt hopeless. “You spend all day pouring into this vessel that just does not get poured into, and you build them up, and they leave the building to the neighborhood and to they mama and to they friends, and they just get broken right back down to what they were before they walked into the building” Gaines shared. A lot of the kids they were helping every day were going back to communities and homes that lacked empathy. Not because they didn’t want to, but because they don’t have the capacity. “How am I gonna teach you all these things about loving yourself, and you go to love on your mama, and she just does not have the capacity?” Kier questioned. 

Kier with his oldest daughter (Courtesy of @kiergaines/Instagram)

Karega, with compassion notes, “it’s not that the mom is a bad person; it’s the circumstances she is called to have to mother in that makes it incredibly difficult.” Eventually, after re-evaluating his impact, Kier left education. “I realized that I was tryna spit into the Grand Canyon and fill it up and that’s just not a realistic goal. And sometimes working with the students it feels like you’re planting seeds into the soil into a pot and you nurture the seed for weeks, and then you put that beautiful seed into a dark room and shut the door, and you have no idea what happens after. Did it bloom? Did it die? You don’t know. That’s just not the way I’m built.” Kier began getting more involved in mental health advocacy and began posting about it on his social media. Every month, Kier does a new affirmation on Instagram, offering wisdom and motivation to his followers. However, a year ago, he didn’t even believe in affirmations. “I thought they were just words to make you feel better about yourself because you have a deficit somewhere that you’re just trying to fill with words,” Kier admits. He started doing the affirmations for the benefit of the general public and before he knew it, he discovered meaning in the affirmations and found himself leaning on the affirmation to “propel (him) forward.”

Since becoming a licensed therapist, Kier has helped more than just students, now people worldwide to earn to take a more proactive approach when it comes to their mental health and to understand therapy is not one-size fits all. In a lot of cases, Gaines has seen people who go into therapy thinking, “ ‘I got a leaky pipe; when I come to therapy, my goal is to get this leaky pipe fixed’.” But with therapy, you can’t just slap a bandaid on the issue and think it’s automatically gonna heal. Kier tells people, “sometimes that leaky pipe, you gotta bust down some concrete, take away some walls, rearrange some stuff. My job as the therapist isn’t always to fix the pipe, my job sometimes is to let you know you gotta bust that first wall down.”

For more on grief, parenting, and fatherhood, listen to the full interview on Black Love’s Podcast SOL Affirmations with Karega and Felicia.