On Healing in an Oppressive Society

Abolition refers to the real world work of finally freeing ourselves from the cruel constructs sewn into our very way of life after hundreds of years of colonial perpetration. From racism to ableism, gender/sex/orientation oppression, classism, body shame, ethnic persecution, or others… all are the vicious impacts of a history where white supremacists used capitalism and propaganda to violently dominate world health.

This has formed a painful hierarchy, where only a few have tremendous socioeconomic power while literally all other people (and our planet) are endlessly hurt, limited, traumatized, and abandoned. These constructs were imposed by violent global colonization, and so all healing must orient toward helping release oppressive shame and self-distrust, emerge into radical self-love, own what is yours, and release what has been cruelly imposed onto you, your culture, and your relationships.

I believe that abolition, decolonization, anticapitalism, anti-neofeudalism and anti-hierarchy should serve as the foundational layers for a therapist’s work on themselves first—an anarchy grounded in truly radical self-compassion and love for one another.

This means taking on a mindset of life-long learning for myself and my community of colleagues. Any therapist practicing from this perspective practices revolutionary advocacy from a clear-eyed intersectional lens. And our self-work is endless.

I respect my clients and community by co-growing in depth and mutual respect. I heal with you in solidarity, knowing that together we’re making the world safer, healthier, and free.

Intersectionality and Healing

The healer Kimberlé Crenshaw focused most critically on how white supremacist structural power fuses racism and patriarchy to dominate people in a huge range of real-world traumatic ways. Therapy informed by intersectionality involves discussing how you live, grow, and heal at the intersection of discriminations imposed onto your identity. These include the oppressions of classism, ableism, gender, sexuality, ageism, religious persecution, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, language, and many others.

All people have very personal relationships between themselves and culturally-reinforced oppressions, no matter their economic or social power. In the clinical space, I find it critical to understand our lives in this context to provide the greatest combined level of empathy, radical compassion, and intention forward. Trauma recovery for example would always include a discussion of how differently each person experiences and recovers through sociocultural and economic oppression. This is all about finding the greatest supports for your emergence.

I believe therapists only do a disservice when they don’t understand the impacts of western colonization, and the integrated nature of how its constructs domineer a multiply-marginalized person. True healing helps us see what is our work to do in recovery while freeing us of any unjust burdens imposed by climate capitalists. The discriminations you experience are never your fault—ever—yet have brutal impacts. Understanding intersectionally then also means emerging into your fullness.

 

Somatic Healing in an Colonial World

Transforming away from oppression involves the body-felt work of feeling out racism and classism in each of us, to build a freer, more present culture. The healer Resmaa Menakem says that this pain “lives in our bodies.” No one is exempt from feelings, thoughts, and sensations on the topics of race, patriarchy, ableism, and classism. Given our culture, processing these in concert is necessary… and only safe with a caring practitioner that undergoes their own process to confront and abolish oppression within.

Our society is constructed on a firmly-bedded foundation of violent racism and worker domination. It’s critical to understand that everyone internalizes and interacts with white cultural supremacy and entitlement because they are the most normalized features of our culture. This may also be the imperial nature of all societies, given the history of global colonization and media cultural hegemony. Regardless of a white person’s commitment to racial justice or their own racial identity, white-bodied people (myself included) only benefit from structural oppression and incidentally perform entitlement as a normal, daily act. This means that therapy itself and our counseling models must also be seen through the lens of oppression by therapists (these were after all designed by the west). By doing this therapists (1) properly own our positions of power in the one-to-one therapeutic relationship, and (2) understand our positions of privilege relative to our social location, identities and memberships in greater society. This the way that we can advocate as anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-classist, anti-violence advocates.

Going forward in your own work, consider a therapist that can lean into their own feelings around topics of race, class oppression, and healing somatically, even if those feelings are uncomfortable for them. I’m committed to transforming social pains in our very bodies, inside and outside the therapy room. And I know many other great practitioners who are as well.

 

Ecology & Solidarity in Therapy 

Global warming is the largest existential condition we’ve ever faced as a species, an outright apocalypse that is the direct result of exploitative imperial feudalism masked sold to us as “corporate capitalism.” This is the “final boss” of our global liberation: saving all life on this planet from perpetrators. Below is a video regarding approaches I take in the face of processing global warming, climate change, and living in community through this vast transformation.

Clinician Bias, and Myself

I am not an expert. I have done years of trainings, readings, and work in community to heal and grow as well. But I’ve always cared about our empowerment. I grew up volunteering in Los Angeles supporting our unsheltered friends and immigrants from Latino and Asian countries. 20 years ago I was radicalized by the writings of Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, Murray Bookchin, bell hooks, and Naomi Klein, and studied oppression and bias in media organizations while running a non-profit affordable housing advocacy. Today, I’ve been directly trained by one of founders of the CAMFT diversity board Ms. Janaki Neptune, and receive ongoing training with the somatic abolitionist healer Resmaa Menakem and the healers Dr. Manuel and Sra. Tlazoltiani Zamarripa at the Institute for Chicano/a/x Psychology. I’ve written about capitalist trauma on Inclusive Therapist. I am an anarchist, and often employ indigenous and Chicano workers rights praxis into my work.

I believe therapists should be expected to always learn, always process, always advocate, and audit their privilege each session, no matter who they are.

Research shows that when therapists had competence in intersectionality, they became capable of applying social justice practices aimed at community engagement for sexual and gender minority persons predisposed to chronic illnesses and disabilities. (Dispenza, Varney & Golubovic, 2017) And because they understood how oppression impacted gender, disability, and minority status independently and collectively, these clinicians also became able to understand why differences existed between populations with the same DSM diagnoses. Further, these therapists could also properly explore variations between clients with greater lucidity, and identify new or more nuanced personality and cultural features as well. (Sabik, 2016) A recent study found that when clinical staff approached culture and life stressors from an intersectional perspective, there was greater client trust in caregivers, their advice, and their treatments. Further, the approach was seen by staff and management as more holistic, and in this way much more helpful and healing. (Churchwell, 2020)

All that said, by building our own capacity as psychotherapists to understand the intersection of our own identities, we finally find the humility we need to support clients’ experiences with prejudice and discrimination.

Seeing ourselves plainly in the landscape of healers is critical to global health. Therapists are NOT experts in healing, there is no real hierarchy for who is and who isn’t a healer. We are your siblings in healing.

 

As a psychotherapist and social researcher myself, I understand that the bias I bring into client relationships may come from anywhere, and so no matter who we are as therapists, we are always called to carefully audit ourselves in an ongoing way. To do this I employ intersectional frameworks informed by the works of the lawyer Kimberle Crenshaw, psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner’s ecology of identity, sociologist Arjun Appadurai’s scapes of globalization, therapist Resmaa Menakem’s process of somatic abolition, the underlying critical framework of the feminist Voltairine de Cleyre, and the spiritual, ecological, political and cultural vision of the Navajo activist Klee Benally.

Therapists can have imperialistic presumptions about how people psychologically recover. In a study that worked with human rights victims in developing countries, therapy took on a traditional person-based or patient-based perspective. This of course diminished the inherent humanity of these clients, and in some cases infantilized them. By utterly dismissed their cultural strengths, therapists in fact stole their deep resources needed for true healing.

We do not heal the same way. Clinicians must all be called to separate our growth experiences from others in community. Doing this provides us the understanding that there are sociocultural structures in place that bear on everyone’s recovery in deeply personal ways.

I’m unsure if you have faced a clinician who does not have cultural competence though. Without doing work first on themselves, the oppression of pro-racism, pro-classism therapeutic structures may in fact further damage clients.

Studies have shown that mandatory reporting laws for example may at times reduce help-seeking for more than a third of survivors. Provider warnings about mandatory reporting can also reduce survivors’ abilities to get the support they need, and the reports themselves often make the situation worse for victims. What makes mandatory reporting so oppressive to these survivors? The answer of course is built-in structural discriminations against gender minorities, race/ethnicity minorities, survivors of poverty, all of which are subject to the pro-racism backdrop of all economic institutions, which many times traumatizes them instead of providing aid. (Lippy, Jumarali, Nnawulzi, Williams & Burk, 2020). Unfortunately, therapy as a field faces these complex legal, ethical, and interpersonal issues on a constant basis.

Abolishing these oppressions once and for all means holds this tension with grace and understanding in therapy. Healing means emerging into vast respect. And you deserve both endlessly: healing and respect.

This is my conviction.

 
 

Supporting Materials

Non-Fiction Books

My Grandmother’s Hands
by Resmaa Menekem LCSW

Culture and Imperialism
by Edward Said

Curandero Hispanic Ethno-psychotherapy & Curanderismo: Treating Hispanic Mental Health in the 21st Century
by Antonio Noe Zavaleta

The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy
by Murray Bookchin

Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)
by Rebecca Solnit

Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff

Shock Doctrine
by Naomi Klein

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
by Charles C. Mann

A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
by bell hooks

Homecoming
by John Bradshaw

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
by Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Fiction Books

There There: a novel
by Tommy Orange

Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe

Bless Me Ultima
by Rodolfo Anaya

The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamid

The Old Drift
by Namwali Serpell

The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy

Sandman
by Neil Gaiman

Light Years
by James Salter

Interior Chinatown
by Charles Yu

Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood

The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño

The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro

A Tale for the Time Being
by Ruth Ozeki

Films

East Side Sushi (2014)

Pom Poko (1994)

In the Heat of the Night (1967)

Romero (1989)

Rashomon (1950)

A Bug’s Life (1998)

Project Nim (2011)

American Me (1992)

The Dance of Reality (2013) & Endless Poetry (2016)

Sicario (2015)

The Point (1971)

Away From Her (2006)

Trading Places (1983)

Coco (2017)

Fences (2016)

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise (1972) 

The Iron Giant (1999) 

The Purge Film Franchise (2013-2021)

Harlan County USA (1976)

Loving (2016) 

A Costume for Nicholas (2020)