Decolonizing Therapy
Decolonizing therapy is the practice of doing mental health care with a clear-eyed understanding of where psychology came from, who it was built for, and what it has historically done to people who fell outside its original frame.
The field of psychology developed in a particular time and worldview, one that privileged whiteness, individualism, productivity, rationality, and the suppression of strong emotion as evidence of being “well-adjusted.” Many of the diagnostic categories, treatment models, and ideas about what mental health looks like came out of institutions that excluded, pathologized, surveilled, or experimented on the very communities that most of our clients come from. Decolonizing therapy is the ongoing practice of noticing when those frameworks are operating, naming them, and choosing something else.
What this actually means
Decolonizing refers to the dismantling of colonial systems and the recovery of what those systems tried to destroy. When the word is applied to therapy, it carries that weight. It is not the same as “culturally sensitive” or “inclusive.” Those terms can describe a practice that has added some diversity while leaving its underlying assumptions untouched. Decolonizing therapy asks the deeper question: what assumptions about being human, being well, being a family, being in pain, are baked into the methods themselves, and where did those assumptions come from?
Some examples of what this looks like in practice. The assumption that independence is the goal of healthy development is not universal, it is a particular cultural value, and one that has been used to pathologize the interdependence that many cultures consider central to a good life. The assumption that “evidence-based” treatments developed in research settings dominated by white, Western, middle-class populations will work equally well for everyone is not universal.
Why this matters
The conditions that bring people to therapy are rarely contained in the therapy room. They include the way racism organizes a workday, the way capitalism organizes time, the way immigration policy organizes a family’s sense of safety, the way religious trauma organizes a person’s relationship to their own intuition, the way ableism organizes what counts as a functional body. The pain people carry is shaped by these forces, and the meaning they have made of that pain has often been made through cultural, spiritual, and community resources that long predate any clinical framework.
Decolonizing therapy holds these things as central, not peripheral. Culture, lineage, spirituality, community, and the historical and political conditions shaping a person’s life are not background notes filed before the “real work” begins. They are the ground the work happens on. When the framework holds all of this, ancestral practice can be drawn from. Grief about systemic harm can be grieved as grief. Rage about injustice can be metabolized as a response to real conditions.
This matters because pain that is shaped by structure cannot be resolved by individual strategy alone. People carrying the cumulative weight of racism, transphobia, immigration violence, religious harm, or chronic systemic stress need more than tools for managing how they feel about it. They need a space where what is happening is named honestly, where their lineage is recognized as a resource, where their community is part of the picture, and where healing is allowed to include rest, rage, joy, and reconnection, not just symptom reduction.
What this work looks like at MLC
At MLC, decolonizing therapy is the foundation our entire practice is built on. It is not a single technique or a specialty area we offer alongside others, it is the orientation that shapes how all of our clinicians approach the work. In practice, this means:
- We do not ask you to flatten your pain into symptoms when your pain is a predictable response to racism, capitalism, immigration violence, ableism, transphobia, gender-based harm, religious trauma, or any of the other systems that shape what people live inside. We name what is happening.
- We hold the modalities we use, including EMDR, IFS, somatic work, attachment-based work, and mindfulness, inside this frame, adapting them where they need adapting and being honest about their limits.
- We treat ancestral, indigenous, spiritual, and culturally specific healing practices as legitimate. If those practices are part of your life, they are welcome here. If you are reconnecting with them after generations of disconnection, we can support that work.
- We do our own ongoing unlearning. Our clinicians participate in training, supervision, and consultation that goes beyond what licensure requires. We examine the field we were trained in, including its history of harm, and we hold ourselves accountable for not replicating it.
The therapists at MLC do this work because they understand that mental health does not exist separate from the world we live in. We cannot meaningfully talk about anxiety, depression, trauma, relationships, identity, or belonging without also acknowledging the systems, histories, and cultural contexts that shape people’s lives.
Many of our clinicians bring lived experience as members of the communities they serve. Others have spent years examining their own identities, privileges, biases, and relationships to systems of power and oppression. For all of us, decolonizing therapy is an ongoing practice of learning, unlearning, humility, accountability, and growth.
We do this work because we believe therapy should honor the full complexity of who people are and what they carry. Too often, traditional mental health frameworks have asked people to leave parts of themselves at the door or have treated their suffering as though it exists in a vacuum. We strive to create a space where people do not have to shrink, translate, or disconnect from their lived realities in order to heal.
