Born to Navigate the Unknown: How My I/O PhD Taught Me to See Domination

When I first started my doctorate program, I wasn't sure if I should be in it.

I was a first-generation PhD on US soil, a mixed-race Dominican-American woman on a campus that was majorly white in the early 2000s. Afro-Latinidad wasn't a thing yet.

We didn't talk about race the way we do now.

I felt like I had to blend into whiteness to survive the curriculum I was in.

It was challenging to share with my family what I was going through because I hardly understood it myself.

I would go to class, get assignments to read journal articles, and struggle through understanding the jargon that filled every page.

Even though I was intellectually capable, nothing felt emotionally connected to who I was or what I cared about.

I never entered the field with clarity about why I was there, what my purpose was, or whether I had any major contributions to make.

I knew I wanted to work in corporate settings, build programs, and help people be happy at work—but secretly, it was because I wanted to be happy at work myself.

Arc One: Floating Through Without Purpose

My father transitioned after my first year, which shifted everything.

Suddenly, completing the doctorate became this competition with myself—needing to prove I could make it out because my father had been a doctor.

But I still didn't know what my calling was or how to carve my own path in the field.

Although the work was intellectually interesting, it didn't connect with me emotionally.

I felt like I was floating by while my colleagues and classmates were getting promoted into higher-level positions. I was literally looking for jobs every three months, anytime I landed somewhere.

The conferences were revealing in ways I couldn't articulate at the time.

When I heard the topics people in my field were talking about, I finally felt like Industrial-Organizational Psychology was a field where I could anchor—but when I looked around at the teams hiring people like me, they were rarely diverse.

Where was I represented among these people? Why did it feel so isolating to be so highly educated, so interested in psychology, but completely disinterested in the paradigms I was working within?

Even though I was in a research-oriented university, I was always applied. I wanted to change the world, but I didn't understand why everything felt so cognitively dissonant.

Arc Two: The Healing Journey and Awakening

The shift began when I started my healing journey and began wondering out loud: What creativity would be unleashed in the world if we were all free of oppression?

If we never grew up thinking there was anything wrong with who we were, what we were, or where we were from—what would we say to the world?

I started to deconstruct within myself what my identities were and how they interrelated to each other.

That's when I first discovered the word "intersectionality." Instead of feeling "woe is me" about having all these oppressed identities, I started to see the gifts in them.

This allowed me to pay attention to what I was seeing in the world that people weren't talking about, what wasn't being written about.

At conferences and interviews, I started noticing the patterns—the lack of diversity, the isolation, the sense that highly educated people like me were somehow still invisible in our own fields.

Queen Mindset Leadership® initially emerged from this awakening, starting with self-care.

But as I deconstructed what self-care actually meant, I started seeing how systems were designed to keep people from practicing presence and mindfulness.

Long hours, back-to-back meetings, no gaps in schedules, no time to strategize—people working late hours, weekends, traveling constantly.

Although work environments have roots in the industrial revolution and widget-making, we kept the same patterns even as we transitioned into professional work.

No matter how much technology advanced, we still did as much work or more, just with better tools to do more heavy lifting.

Arc Three: From Self-Oppression to Liberation Framework

When I left my job and started going into the community, I noticed that most people didn't realize what their intersections were. They didn't know what DEI was, had maybe heard about it and assumed they were part of it, but didn't understand how they related to their own intersections or other people's intersections.

They didn't know how to perceive others so they could expand their lens of what others might be going through.

The breakthrough came when I started to shift out of my own self-oppression.

By throwing compassion at my inner critic, integrating my past, dreaming about my future out loud, and doing practices in the present that allowed me to see how I felt and thought, I realized something crucial:

The key to anti-oppression isn't just about policies and programs.

It's about teaching people how to stop oppressing themselves first—how to see themselves as multidimensional beings and then see beyond their own perspective to understand what other people might experience based on their intersections.

Queen Mindset Leadership® became powerful because it creates an awareness of self that allows you to pivot your perspective outside of yourself. You start to recognize the domination patterns in how you treat yourself, which reveals how you unconsciously oppress others—and how they oppress you.

The Integration: Spiritual Meets Material

Now, on the other side of this journey, I can see why both my spiritual awakening and my leadership and coaching experiences had to combine to create this paradigm.

I'm able to work from both spiritual and material perspectives—areas that are typically deeply divided.

My doctorate gave me credibility and analytical tools.

My recently discovered autoethnographic skills allow me to evaluate my experiences and observations of the world in ways that bridge personal and systemic understanding.

The purpose of all this training, all this struggle, was to anchor DEI work in a deeper truth: we need to make space for all of who we are and belong to ourselves first and foremost.

We can't create equitable systems if we're still oppressing ourselves. We can't build inclusive communities if we haven't learned to include all parts of our own complexity.

 Looking back, every aspect of my formal education and professional struggle was preparing me to see domination systems operating not just in institutions, but in our daily relationships—in how we treat ourselves, how we interact with others, how we perpetuate oppression without awareness because we haven't addressed the oppression within ourselves.

My Industrial-Organizational Psychology training taught me to analyze systems, but my spiritual awakening taught me that the most important system to transform is the one between your ears.

My academic credentials gave me access to corporate and institutional spaces, but my healing journey gave me the frameworks to facilitate transformation in those spaces.

The field I couldn't find my place in became the foundation for creating an entirely new approach to leadership—one that doesn't separate professional development from spiritual development, individual healing from systemic change, or personal liberation from collective liberation.

Reflection for You

Take a moment with these questions:

• Where in your life have you felt like you were floating without clear purpose, even when you were intellectually capable and professionally successful?
• What intersections of your identity have you learned to see as gifts rather than obstacles? How has that shift changed your perspective on your unique contributions?
• How do you currently oppress yourself through self-criticism, perfectionism, or trying to fit into spaces that weren't designed for your full humanity?
• What would it look like to approach anti-oppression work by first addressing the ways you limit, judge, or fragment yourself?

Sometimes our greatest professional preparation comes disguised as confusion, struggle, and the feeling that we don't quite fit anywhere.

The very experiences that make us question our path may be preparing us for work that doesn't yet exist—work that only we can create because of the unique combination of our training, healing, and lived experience.

The doctorate taught me to analyze. The spiritual awakening taught me to transform.

Queen Mindset Leadership® emerged from the recognition that both are necessary for true liberation.