Meet Jarell Kwabena Ankomah Bempong Junior.

Before you knew my name.

I went into a counselling room looking for understanding. I hadn't expected to find myself explaining why I wasn't a threat.

My enthusiasm for psychology had been interpreted as aggression. I was there to be understood; suddenly I was confronting assumptions about how I was being perceived. And although I didn't fully understand it then, the feeling was familiar. To explain why, I need to take you somewhere else. Actually, several places. And a little further back in time.

First, let me introduce myself properly.

My full name is Jarell Kwabena Ankomah Bempong Junior. Jarell is pronounced jah-RELL; Ankomah is an-KO-mah. Junior, fortunately, tends not to present too many linguistic difficulties.

To my grandmother, my family and the friends who've known me since childhood, I'm Ju or Junior. Those names have travelled with me. They connect the child I was to the man I've become.

I'm British-Ghanaian. I'm Akan. My ancestral history reaches further back than the borders of modern Ghana, through the peoples, languages, kingdoms and traditions associated with Akanman. A map can tell us where a place is. It doesn't always tell us who drew the borders, what existed before them or what was carried across them.

People can be rather like maps, too. We're given identities, labels and expectations. Some we inherit, some we choose, and others are assigned before we've even introduced ourselves.

Between worlds.

I was born in London and spent much of my adolescence in Ghana. Two countries, different cultures and more than enough opinions about who I was supposed to become.

In Britain, I encountered one set of assumptions about my identity. In Ghana, another. Apparently crossing an international border could change how people understood me without changing a single thing about who I was. Quite an achievement for geography.

Growing up Black, gay and dyslexic, I was learning to navigate identities that weren't always understood or welcomed in the same way. Yet my story was never only about difficulty: it was also about language, connection, family, creativity and discovering the delight of looking at familiar things from another angle.

Learning to read the room.

Long before I studied psychology, I was observing people. Not through textbooks. Through family, different homes, relationships and rules that sometimes seemed to change depending on who was standing in the room.

I noticed who was allowed to question things and who was expected to accept them. How love and expectation could become tangled. How people could care about you and still misunderstand you.

I didn't yet have a name for everything I was noticing. But I had questions. Plenty of them. Those who know me will appreciate that this is not an unusual state of affairs.

The question that kept returning.

Years later, as I explored psychology, counselling and my own professional direction, I encountered new ways to understand human experience. I was fascinated. And increasingly curious about what the usual explanations sometimes missed.

This is where that counselling room belongs in the story. I had arrived as a Black man seeking support. The question in the room became how I expressed myself, not what I had come to say.

Something about that encounter felt familiar. It brought earlier experiences into focus. Why did we so often examine the person without also examining the circumstances around them? Why were certain responses treated as problems while the situations producing them escaped scrutiny?

The turn.

For years, I had encountered situations that invited me to ask what I needed to change about myself. Sometimes that was useful. I had things to learn, habits to reconsider and choices to take responsibility for. I still do.

But it wasn't the only question.

What if understanding the person also required understanding the conditions around them?

That didn't give me an instant answer. Life rarely delivers its deepest lessons with a dramatic orchestral soundtrack. Sometimes it begins with a question that won't go away, an old memory understood differently or a pattern you suddenly recognise somewhere unexpected.

I kept returning to childhood, Ghana and Britain, relationships, institutions and that counselling room. The past had not necessarily changed. My understanding of it was changing. And so was I.

Going back to move forward.

In Akan culture, Sankofa invites us to go back and retrieve what matters. Returning to my experiences has meant questioning inherited assumptions, reconsidering old explanations and recovering parts of myself that were never truly gone.

Sometimes what I retrieved was painful. Sometimes it was beautiful: a voice, an affectionate name, a story, a moment of connection. Sometimes the most important discovery was that something I once needed for protection no longer had to determine what came next.

The journey wasn't a straight line. I returned, reconsidered, practised, changed direction and returned again. Along the way I became a psychotherapist, counsellor, transformational coach, author, speaker and facilitator. I wrote White Talking Therapy Can't Think in Black! and developed original ways of exploring questions about identity, relationships, power and possibility.

Across personal and organisational work I kept seeing how people's choices and the conditions around those choices can shape one another. The settings and responsibilities differed. The curiosity kept returning.

What I brought back.

Over time, those different strands of my work began to converge. Turncurrent became their professional home: not the end of the story, but a return with something to contribute.

What would be the point of everything I'd learned if it remained only mine? I cannot give anyone my experiences or presume my answers will be theirs. I can bring my professional knowledge, perspective, creativity and willingness to ask a different question.

Through For You, Turncurrent offers a pathway into psychotherapy, counselling, transformational coaching and specialist personal support, subject to the published service arrangements and current availability. Through For Organisations, it offers leadership development, organisational coaching, facilitation, workshops and speaking. Each pathway has its own professional purpose.

Perhaps this is where our stories meet.

You may be here because something in your life no longer fits, or because a familiar challenge at work keeps returning despite everyone's efforts to move forward. Perhaps you're simply curious about what else might be possible.

Our experiences may be completely different.

I won't pretend to know your story before you've told it.

But I know the value of looking again. Of questioning an explanation we've inherited. Of recognising that the person and the circumstances around them both deserve attention.

My name is Jarell Kwabena Ankomah Bempong Junior. To those who've known me a long time, Ju. Welcome to Turncurrent.

Change the conditions. Change what's possible.