Anti-Oppressive therapy
Anti-oppressive therapy is therapy that takes seriously the conditions people are living inside. It begins from the understanding that mental health does not exist apart from race, gender, sexuality, class, immigration status, religion, disability, body, and the systems that organize all of these. The pain people bring to therapy is shaped by these systems. The healing has to address them honestly, or it is not really healing.
What this orientation means: Anti-oppressive therapy is not a single technique. It is an orientation that informs everything else about how the work happens. It involves:
- Naming structural harm accurately. Racism is not bias. Transphobia is not perspective. Misogyny is not personality conflict. We use the names for what is actually happening.
- Refusing to relabel structural problems as individual coping issues. If your suffering is shaped by the conditions you are moving through, those conditions are part of the work.
- Attention to power, including the power dynamics in the therapy room itself. The relationship between therapist and client is not neutral, and we hold that honestly.
- Ongoing learning. The work requires that clinicians keep examining their own assumptions, training, biases, and locations within systems of power.
- Treating the systems people are living inside as part of the clinical picture, not as background information. The political moment is part of the picture.
- Honoring lineage, community, and cultural inheritance as resources, not as obstacles to clinical work
The history of mainstream Western therapy is partly a history of harm. Many of the diagnostic categories, treatment models, and ideas about what mental health looks like came from institutions that excluded, pathologized, surveilled, or experimented on the communities our clients come from. Therapy has been used to convert queer and trans folks, to pathologize Black resistance, to enforce gender conformity, to discredit women’s complaints, to pathologize cultures that did not match white middle-class norms.
The frameworks we inherited from it continue to operate, often invisibly. Anti-oppressive therapy is the ongoing practice of noticing when those frameworks are operating, naming them, and choosing something else.
It is also not a niche or specialty. It is what we believe therapy actually requires, given the conditions our clients are living inside.
What this can look like in practice
Anti-oppressive therapy at MLC is woven into everything we do. It is not a separate modality. In practice, this means:
- We name what is happening. If the suffering you are bringing in is shaped by racism, transphobia, immigration violence, ableism, religious trauma, gendered violence, or other forms of structural harm, we say so. We do not pretend these are personal stressors.
- We hold the modalities we use, including EMDR, IFS, somatic work, attachment-based work, and mindfulness, inside this larger frame. We adapt approaches where they need adapting and are honest about their limits.
- We do our own ongoing work. Our clinicians participate in training, supervision, consultation, and personal work that examines the field we were trained in, including its history of harm, and that holds us accountable for not replicating it.
- We treat ancestral, indigenous, spiritual, and culturally specific healing practices as legitimate. If these are part of your life, they are welcome here. If you are reconnecting with them, we can support that work.
- We hold power in the therapy room honestly, including the power difference between client and clinician, including the racial and cultural locations of the clinician, including the institutional dynamics that therapy is part of.
The therapists at MLC do this work because we believe therapy must be adequate to the lives we are doing it with. Many of our clinicians are members of the communities they serve. Others have done sustained work on their own positions in systems of power. For all of us, this is an ongoing practice of learning, accountability, and growth.
You do not have to flatten yourself in order to be helped here. We hold the whole picture, and we hold it with care.
