Decolonizing Therapy & Re-Membering Healing
As a therapist I continuously think about healing. What does it mean to heal? What is required for healing? Where can healing be found?
As I sit with this question year in and year out, my idea of healing as a practice expands, getting richer with details and more rooted in my own deeply held values as a human oriented toward collective liberation and anti-oppressive practices.
Today I would like to share with you some of the values I hold as a human and as a therapist, and elucidate why I believe these values need to be a part of the overall practice of therapy.
A very brief history of therapy
Before psychotherapy became what it is known as today, healing the mind and the soul was done with the help of indigenous practices administered by those chosen for healing - be they medicine women/men, shamans or other spiritual leaders in the community.
It wasn’t until the early 20th century that psychotherapy, or “the talking cure” as it was labeled, began taking the shape of what it is known as today. More importantly, it was actively shifted from the realm of the spirit and the soul into the realm of medicine.
Making psychotherapy a science took dedication and work from prominent psychoanalysts and researchers, including developing pharmaceuticals to treat mental health conditions and providing treatment that was known as “evidence-based.”
And while the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the human mind, body and spirit is a worthy endeavor, the practice of psychotherapy started evolving to become binary - there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to do it, inaccessible to most (only the affluent individuals were able to use it), and covert, reserving the “secrets” of the practice to psychotherapists and withholding knowledge from the rest.
Ideas of what it means to be a psychotherapist materialized in full force, demanding the therapist become a “blank slate” onto which clients project their fears and insecurities. The therapist was not to have a persona, but only serve as the expert in the room to “treat” the “sick”.
What I continue wondering is - when did suffering become a sickness? How did feeling deeply become pathologized? At what point did having experiences that differ from others’ became “crazy”, out of control and in need of being dominated and subdued?
Decolonizing therapy
It is impossible to talk about therapy in a vacuum without naming the larger systemic issues at hand, mainly the deep colonial and oppressive roots of therapy.
Psychotherapy as a practice was largely “created” by white European men, exported to America and eventually to the rest of the world. As the practice of therapy was developing, many co-occurring events were shaping the discourse, ranging from multiple world wars to eugenics to the creation of race and consequent affirmation of white supremacy.
Indigenous practices of healing started becoming relegated to the “witch doctors” and the campaign to discredit ancestral healing practices began. Like with most oppressive tactics, diving people into “us” and “them”, or “good” and “bad” made it easy to cast one group as dominant, preferred and knowledgeable, while actively labeling the “other” as subpar, primitive and uncivilized.
This colonial culture demanded “evidence” for treatments, as well as research and study in favor of thousand-year-old tradition, practice and wisdom that came from indigenous people. Said evidence, even when provided, continued to exclude historically and systematically oppressed people and many studies were only normed on white, cisgender, heterosexual men.
And now we arrive to the state of therapeutic practice today - largely colonial, oppressive and steeped in white supremacy. While movement is being made toward decolonization and anti-oppressive approaches, much more is to be done and our work of decolonization must continue.
What do we let go of as we move toward decolonizing therapy?
So how do we continue to decolonize therapy, whether we are seeking it or providing it? Here are a few steps I am working on and invite you into considering and implementing for yourself as well.
1. The language we use
In her book Decolonizing Therapy, Dr. Mullan invites us into reconsidering the language we use in therapeutic spaces. Words like ‘patient’, ‘treatment’, ‘intake’, ‘diagnosis’, ‘disorder’, etc. need to be examined for their relevance to the therapeutic process. Is our language reinforcing the power divide between therapists and clients? Is it inclusive? Are we aware of the implication of the language we use, even if we still use it?
The answers to those questions are likely to be mixed. Yet it is our job as therapists to educate clients on the terminology and its usage, and to name how the words we utilize can skew the power dynamic in favor of the therapist even more. Even if the language needs to be used to continue accessing services, the therapist and the client must become more aware of the systems they are working within and process whatever feelings may come up around these dichotomies.
2. Labeling therapists as experts
While therapists undoubtedly have expertise, knowledge and practice in their respective field, the only expert on your experience is you. No matter how much your therapist knows you, they are not you. They don’t know the intricacies of your internal world and what it truly feels like to be you and experience what you experience.
To label therapists as experts is to turn healing into a product that can be purchased. But a therapist is not an electrician who can replace your light fixtures and get paid for it. Because you are not a broken light bulb, you are a multifaceted, multilayered, complex being. To reduce you to a set of symptoms that need to be “fixed” or “treated” is to do you and your humanity a great disservice.
We do live in a capitalistic system and we are used to exchanging money for services. It would be trite for me to say that therapy does not participate in capitalism, because of course it does. But even as we wrestle with the confines of our systems, remembering that healing is not a commodity but a process, and one that is highly individualized to you and your experiences, can remind us to not seek an “expert” to fix us but a guide to accompany us into something that is our birthright.
3. Pretending therapy is not political
Therapy is political. It is a practice that is regulated by external bodies, be it the health department, insurance companies or the licensing board that oversees therapists. These external entities are not apolitical, they consist of members who bring their own agenda and biases into how they create laws, rules, charters, etc. and how they regulate therapy as a field.
Yet instead of working toward decreasing insurance companies’ ability to dictate people’s access to and participation in therapy, or reckoning with how to de-stigmatize the process of diagnosis, we as a field and as a society are facing extreme politicizing of therapy instead.
For example with the abundance of anti-trans and anti-abortion legislature in many states across the US, therapists have to consider how to navigate the line between client well-being, protection and confidentiality, and adhering to barbaric laws that dehumanize and demonize their clients. “Since January of 2023 alone, 549 anti-trans bills have been introduced in the US, more than any year prior. Many of these bills focus on limiting or preventing access to comprehensive, high-quality, safe psychotherapy and other health care, by making the care itself a crime” (you can read the full article here).
Based on the current political climate and what the field of therapy faces as a whole, taking on the work of collective liberation against the restrictions of insurance companies recedes deeper into the background as the imminence of the erasure of marginalized people becomes the legislature’s priority and a goal.
4. Maintaining neutrality
We all have differences in opinion, at times falling on the opposite sides of an issue compared to someone else. Diversity is what makes us as humans beautiful, and celebrating it is an important part of continued discourse and learning.
However, there is a difference between that and taking a stand against grave injustices. Sasha Heron, an ancestral healing practitioner and death doula, in one of her recent videos shared something I deeply resonated with. She said that when we are at the crossroads of wondering if we are doing the right thing, we have to ask ourselves the question: “Are my actions and beliefs affirming of life?”As in, deep, rich, sustaining life, happiness and liberation for all people. If the answer is yes, continue. If not, self-reflection and examination is needed.
This is particularly salient today as the genocide of Palestinian people continues. Yet even in the times of these horrors, many psychological associations stubbornly attempt to remain “neutral” and refuse to name the grave harm that is being done to the people of Gaza (to learn more, read this open letter to mental health organizations urging them to end complicity to genocide).
Too long psychotherapy has been a discipline in which neutrality was lauded above everything else. Yet neutrality in the times of atrocities is continuing to uphold the status quo. It is deeply harmful to those who are fighting to be alive, to be free, to be heard.
5. Forgetting intersectionality
As many therapists are trained on the “evidence-based” research and interventions that are normed on white, cisgender, heterosexual males, a major blind spot gets created where people coming to therapy who fall outside of that white, cisgender male identifiers are encountering therapy that is not only not tailored for them but in many cases harms them through its ignorance.
When a trans woman comes to therapy and shares the discrimination and microagressions she experiences on a daily basis, providing her with a generic mindfulness worksheet and sending her home will not only deeply ignore the reality of her lived experience, it will further her isolation, alienation and the experience of exclusion.
It is when we ignore our client’s intersectional identities that we are at the risk of doing the most harm as therapists. We must be aware and curious about our clients’ layers of identity, how they interplay and intersect, and how they shape their experience in order to even begin scratching the surface of understanding. We must name the impact of the oppressive systems we and our clients live under and understand that every experience we have is shaped by who we are in the world.
These invitations are just the beginning; we have a long way to go in our striving towards fairness, equity and collective liberation. Yet the more we talk about the things that are not working, the more we commit ourselves to change.
By beginning to name what we have lost as a result of oppressive systems, we can begin to bring back what is authentic, true and healing to us. We can begin to take the idea of healing that has been fragmented into marketable pieces and re-member what it looks and feels like.
We can begin to re-member the collective wisdom of our ancestors, gathered through centuries of observation, experience and practice, and through a deeply attuned relationship with the land and the life it supports.
We can begin to re-member and deeply honor our own humanity.