Life With Kelly Khumalo Season 3: How Anele Siswana approaches Kelly’s healing journey  

One thing we appreciate about Life with Kelly Khumalo Season 3 is that it’s not just about entertainment. From the first season, Kelly Khumalo made sure that she would show viewers every single part of herself and that has contributed to her show being the hit that it has become. Opening yourself up to the world is not an easy thing to do, and fortunately for Kelly, she has a clinical pyschologist and spiritual healer who understands her and is intentional about giving her the help she needs.

If you’ve ever wondered about how Kelly Khumalo and Anele Siswana’s relationship started, we’ve got you. We recently had a chat with the psychologist in an attempt to understand how he’s been able to get Kelly to get to such a vulnerable and open space. Explaining how their relationship started, Anele described it as a “typical doctor/client, in my case, psychologist and a client perspective.”

An organic relationship

He continued: “Any relationship is based on the solidness of a therapeutic alliance and the level of trust that the client has with the psychologist. And obviously, clients do their research before they come and see a psychologist.”

Anele said Kelly found him at a time when she was looking for a therapist for her personal healing journey, which coincided with the launch of her reality show. “So, on season one it was predominantly based on the idea of her coming for therapy for her own journey like any other person. An opportunity then came for me to assimilate myself into that role where it became a TV thing,” he shared.

Being part of the show feels organic for Anele because it’s unscripted. Anele also understands and respects the fact that the work he does, although it appears on TV, has a lot of sacredness and privacy.

“I’m holding intention that, as much as this is her own process, I’m also wary of realising how from season one people were inspired by Kelly’s vulnerability and the particular kind of psychologist she went to see,” he said.

Healing old wounds

Anele’s intention has always been to use therapy as a healing, teaching and transformative space. That was evident during one of Kelly and her mother Ntombi’s intense therapy session. A lot of issues had to be revisited, which resulted in old wounds being open. For Anele, it was important to nurture Ntombi’s side of things because she’s also been through her own trauma.

“Those sessions have helped me to be a very grounded therapist,” Anele shared, adding that he goes through a process of ukuphahla and prayer before every therapy session to ask for guidance for the day.

“I needed to let it go to those deeper places in the way of how we’re going to field it. So, how I maintain trust in that regard, it’s a family therapy session, and my approach is that when you work with any family, the goal is ukwelapha (to heal).”

Anele believes that when you heal anything you don’t “other” or single out narratives as privileged to the other narratives. “I knew the source of Kelly’s pain is the relationship with her mother. So, to make it work I can’t individualise her story without the one who is supposedly bigger in the story, and that is the mother,” he said.

Being comfortable with discomfort

Anele had to relate to Ntombi in a way that wouldn’t be threatening to her as a black mother. He approached her with grace and empathy in order to navigate the trauma that she (Ntombi) received from her mother’s pain as well.

“I had to hold space for both of them… I always say with them ‘go and sit with the discomfort of being uncomfortable about your relationship’ because it is that very same discomfort that’s going to be a holding space for what needs to happen,” Anele shared.

Kelly has mentioned that she and her mother are in a happier space and are still working on healing their relationship.

You can watch Life With Kelly Khumalo Season 3 on Showmax. New episodes drop every Tuesday.