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Decolonizing Therapy

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Decolonizing Therapy

Understanding Colonial Trauma As Root Cause

Colonization As Ongoing Trauma

Colonization is not merely a historical event but an ongoing psychological, spiritual, and historical trauma that systematically removes land, culture, trust, family, history, freedom, and Spirit. The effects manifest as forced assimilation, hypervigilance, identity crises, depersonalization, disconnection from culture and homeland, racism, discrimination, exploitation, and institutional violence. For marginalized communities, colonization continues through gentrification, resource extraction, forced migration, and daily white supremacy.

Most presenting Therapy issues—sleeplessness, rage, Depression, family conflict, inability to focus, feeling unseen—mask deeper core wounds of separation from Home. This separation includes loss of connection to ancestral land, culture, people, and spiritual practices. Western Therapy fails when it treats these symptoms as individual deficits rather than rational responses to ongoing dehumanization.

The Core Wound of Disconnection

The central wound of colonization is disconnection—from:

  • Ancestral lands and the knowledge embedded in specific places
  • Cultural practices and rituals that sustained communities
  • Language and ways of understanding the world
  • Family systems and community structures
  • Spiritual traditions and relationships with the divine
  • Traditional foods and healing practices
  • Collective memory and historical continuity

A client’s Anxiety is not generalized Anxiety disorder; it may reflect fear rooted in a parent’s deportation Anxiety, family displacement, or racial profiling. Rage is not intermittent explosive disorder; it is ancestral fury at injustice. Disconnection from one’s body is not dissociation disorder; it is a survival mechanism developed when that body experienced violence and violation.

Colonization’s Direct Consequences

Forced migration represents colonization’s ongoing impact. When colonization changes laws, policies, and cultural customs; enables resource extraction; builds military bases; forces land seizure; causes crop failure and famine; demonizes language and spiritual practices; and makes survival in homeland impossible, people are forced to migrate. They leave children, partners, and families for years—not because they want to but because survival demands it.

This creates profound attachment disruption, family separation trauma, and identity fragmentation across generations. Therapists rarely ask about migration stories—a critical oversight. When practitioners ask “What does Home mean/feel like for you?” “When have you felt displaced?” and “What is your migration story?” pathways open to understanding how land loss, family separation, and cultural disconnection manifest as psychological symptoms.

Intergenerational Trauma Transmission

Six Mechanisms of Transmission

Intergenerational trauma transmits across generations through interconnected mechanisms:

  1. Epigenetic transmission: Chemical methylation marks from extreme stress alter gene expression across generations
  2. Intrapsychic transmission: Projective identification where parents unconsciously project disavowed trauma onto children
  3. Attachment-based transmission: Insecure attachment from gaslighting and hypervigilance
  4. Family systems transmission: Invisible loyalties and entitlements compelling children to heal parents
  5. Behavioral/social learning: Children modeling traumatized parents’ coping strategies
  6. Direct/indirect communication: Overt or covert messages about trauma

Research on Holocaust survivors, Japanese internment camp survivors, and descendants of enslaved Africans demonstrates cumulative effects: unresolved trauma becomes more severe with each generation. Moderate stress during pregnancy has heightened, cumulative effects; parents with PTSD significantly increase children’s trauma transmission risk by creating anxious, unpredictable environments.

The Body Remembers

The body holds trauma that the mind doesn’t consciously know. A Haitian woman’s nightly nosebleeds and screaming matched her grandmother’s broken nose during forced migration—trauma encoded in the body across generations without conscious knowledge. An Irish descendant’s internalized hunger from the Potato Famine (colonially-enforced, not natural disaster) became a survival mechanism passed through generations, manifesting as current aggressive outbursts.

Practitioners must ask about migration stories, family history with colonization, and unexplained somatic symptoms—the body remembers what the mind doesn’t consciously know.

Trauma Symptom Clusters

Intergenerational trauma produces specific patterns:

  • Imposter syndrome and perfectionism (internalized inferiority)
  • Difficulty trusting self and others
  • Elevated Anxiety and cortisol levels
  • Intense sensitivity and intuition
  • Neurodivergence (potentially extrasensory abilities)
  • Generational patterns of addiction and incarceration
  • Inability to grieve or safely express rage
  • Disconnection from cultural identity and homeland

Understanding these as adaptive responses to violence shifts the therapeutic lens from individual pathology to collective healing and rehumanization.

The Mental Health Industrial Complex (mhic)

Systemic Violence and Exploitation

The Mental Health Industrial Complex (MHIC) perpetuates violence through:

  • Arbitrary session limits tied to insurance billing rather than healing needs
  • Treatment plans excluding client input and omitting cultural/historical context
  • Diagnostic systems rooted in scientific racism
  • Forced treatments, dangerous contraceptives, and forced sterilization targeting marginalized populations
  • Demanding early-career clinicians (often BIPOC) work 40-80+ cases monthly at poverty wages (150–200/hour)
  • Limiting therapeutic modalities to CBT
  • Confining practitioners to narrow medicalized frameworks
  • Creating burnout and turnover that traumatizes both staff and clients

The system simultaneously exploits practitioners and forces them to inflict harm on communities they serve.

Burnout As Systemic Violence

Burnout affects 21-61% of mental health professionals and results from systemic oppression and capitalism fatigue, not personal failure. It is framed as a self-care problem, but no amount of spa days cures systemic exploitation. The solution requires structural change: reduced caseloads, living wages, peer Support, collective processing, and recognition that caretakers themselves require care.

Anonymous testimonies reveal practitioners with 89 cases, threat-based management, heart attacks in offices, and years of Depression after leaving the field. The MHIC is “designed so that practitioners with privilege escape by moving to private practice or coaching, further abandoning those most in need.”

Scientific Racism in Mental Health

Historical Pathologization of Resistance

Western mental health was built on scientific racism. Dr. Samuel Cartwright invented “Drapetomania” (the “disease” of enslaved Africans wanting freedom) and “Dysaesthesia Aethiopica” (alleged laziness), pathologizing resistance to enslavement and justifying brutal “treatments” including whipping and amputation. This logic persists:

  • In the 1960s, schizophrenia became racialized as “protest psychosis” to pathologize Black civil rights activists
  • Black children are diagnosed with ADHD, ODD, and conduct disorder at disproportionate rates
  • Anger at systemic oppression is medicalized rather than understood as healthy resistance

In 1974, Haldol advertisements showed an angry Black man with the caption “Angry and Belligerent? Cooperation often begins with Haldol”—treating justified rage at oppression as pathology requiring chemical control.

The Dsm As Colonial Tool

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) emerged from and continues to serve white supremacist, capitalist systems designed to maintain power and control. Historical examples include:

  • The 1882 Immigration Act barring “lunatics” and “idiots” from entry (targeting immigrants of color), leading to 80% of NYC asylums filled with immigrants by 1870
  • The Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane (1869) forcibly institutionalized Black people under the false belief that “freedom produced mania” and forced labor was treatment
  • Psychiatric Diagnosis has historically colluded with state institutions to suppress freedoms, particularly of Black people

The 2021 APA apology acknowledged psychology was “leveraged to wage war against Black communities,” yet structural change has not followed.

Contemporary Diagnostic Bias

All major psychological tests, intelligence assessments, and Diagnostic systems were developed primarily by white practitioners and standardized on middle-class white populations. Research shows BIPOC are excluded, underrepresented, or mismatched on vital demographic variables. People of color are inappropriately diagnosed due to clinicians’ lack of cultural understanding; the DSM provides no space for context, cultural considerations, language differences, or available options.

This creates systematic misdiagnosis: an immigrant woman with complex PTSD from forced migration, military trauma, parental loss, and displacement was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder for behaviors expressing historical colonization. Over 50% of Ellis Island deportations for “mental disease” were unjustified due to doctors’ inability to understand immigrants’ cultural norms.

Language As Tool of Oppression

Violent Terminology

Terminology used in mental health—“symptoms,” “noncompliant,” “difficult case,” “at-risk,” “marginalized communities”—is inherently violent and dehumanizing. These words create false narratives before meeting a client and reinforce hierarchies where clinicians position themselves as experts diagnosing deficiencies.

Decolonial Language Alternatives

Alternative language recenters humanity and acknowledges systemic responsibility:

  • “Expressions” instead of “symptoms”
  • “Intentionally exploited communities” instead of “marginalized communities”
  • “Food apartheid” instead of “food desert”

The DSM itself is constructed in jargon rooted in Latin and European medical models, alienating people without specific educational backgrounds. By using restrictive medical language rewarded by institutions, clinicians perpetuate white supremacy and keep poor and working-class people trapped in cycles where healing language is deemed “offensive.”

Grief and Rage As Decolonial Responses

Understanding Grief As Love

Grief is fundamentally love with nowhere to go—an expression of connection that survives loss. It impacts mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions, creating “Grief Brain” with foggy memory and unclear processing. Neurologist Lisa Shulman describes it as “an intense emotional state that knocks an individual off their feet and comes over them like a wave.”

Grieving has no fixed timeline; it is ongoing adaptation to absence. Cultures with grief rituals and conversations raise children who process loss effectively, normalizing lifelong grief rather than pathologizing “moving on.”

Suffocated and Disenfranchised Grief

Suffocated Grief occurs when normal grief reactions in marginalized populations are dismissed and punished. Dr. Tashel Bordere identifies this in Black youth experiencing homicide and gun violence, whose typical grief behaviors (distraction, sleepiness, anger bursts) are misinterpreted as behavioral problems or special education needs rather than normal responses to loss.

Disenfranchised Grief encompasses losses society refuses to acknowledge:

  • Non-death losses (dementia, mental illness)
  • Stigmatized relationships
  • Stigmatized deaths (suicide, overdose)
  • Unrecognized grievers
  • Stigmatized grief expressions

BIPOC experience disenfranchised grief: violence against ancestral lands, intergenerational trauma, and unhealed ancestral wounds requiring ceremonial healing.

Historical Unresolved Grief

Drs. Brave Heart and DeBruyn identified six phases of historical unresolved grief for Indigenous peoples:

  1. First contact—grief suppressed amid genocide
  2. Economic competition—sustenance loss
  3. Invasion/war—extermination and refugee trauma
  4. Subjugation/reservation—confinement and forced dependency
  5. Boarding school period—family separation and cultural erasure
  6. Forced relocation and termination—ongoing religious prohibition and systemic racism

Dr. DeGruy’s Posttraumatic Slave Syndrome framework explains how multigenerational trauma + absence of healing access = psychological symptoms manifesting as vacant esteem, hopelessness, extreme suspicion, violence, internalized racism, and what Western psychiatry labels Depression, PTSD, and Anxiety. These are expressions of unresolved collective grief and rage.

Rage As Ancestral Call for Justice

Rage is distinct from anger—it is accumulated, rooted in deeper personal/childhood shaming or chronic fear, and fundamentally serves to protect from reexperiencing intolerable shame. Ruth King’s framework identifies six Rage Disguises keeping people “safe” but holding them hostage:

  1. Dominance (control to avoid being controlled)
  2. Defiance (using anger to divert need for love)
  3. Distraction (avoiding emptiness through self-defeating diversions)
  4. Devotion (sacrificing well-being to avoid knowing what one deeply needs)
  5. Dependence (staying distressed to deny personal power)
  6. Depression (disappearing to avoid overwhelming grief and rage)

Sacred Rage is healthy and necessary—it is the child of trauma and shame and deserves veneration and space. Rage as response to injustice, boundary violation, and lack of safety is ancestral bellow for justice and freedom. When appropriately managed and activated, rage serves as barometer of repeatedly crossed boundaries.

Pathologizing Normal Emotional Responses

The DSM pathologizes normal grief and rage responses, particularly in Black youth and marginalized communities. Black Americans are five times more likely than white Americans to be labeled schizophrenic. Oppositional defiant disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, and conduct disorder are often healthy responses to oppression pathologized as individual deficits.

This represents historical weaponization of psychiatry to pathologize resistance and justice-seeking. Following George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s murders, understandable intensified emotional responses (insomnia, irritability, deep hopelessness) in BIPOC communities were met with demands for more mental health labor from Black professionals rather than collective rest and grieving space—corporate and political gaslighting.

Indigenous Healing and Spiritual Traditions

Soul Loss and Spiritual Injury

While Western psychology pathologizes trauma as disorder, Indigenous healers globally use “spiritual injury,” “soul sickness,” “soul wounding,” and “ancestral hurt.” The DSM acknowledges “soul loss” in its culture-bound syndromes appendix, relating it to major Depression and PTSD—yet dismisses it as exotic rather than legitimate.

In neo-shamanic and Indigenous traditions, soul loss occurs when trauma causes “a part of our vital essence [to separate] from us in order to survive the experience by escaping the full impact of the pain.” The biggest difference between Indigenous and Western approaches is that Indigenous healing seeks to integrate mind, body, nature, and spirit rather than dissociate them.

For Indigenous practitioners, “holistic” is centuries-old practice rooted in ceremony, ritual, safety, trauma consciousness, and rawness. Spirit and ancestors are never dismissed in diagnostics of individual, family, or community wellness.

Historical Healing Traditions

Prior to the DSM, there were clergy, curanderas, shamans, santeros, dervish/a, hajah, papaloas, and healers. They still exist and have held space for emotional suffering for thousands of years. Many ancestors held supernatural views of abnormal behavior (evil spirits, demons, gods, witches) as response to behavior contradicting religious teachings.

Trephination (6500 BC) involved drilling skull holes to release “evil spirits,” attempting to understand mind-spirit-behavior causality. Until the early 19th century, psychiatry and religion were closely connected; religious institutions cared for the mentally ill. Charcot and Freud associated religion with hysteria and neurosis, creating a split perpetuated until recently.

Cultural Appropriation of Healing Practices

The mental health field has systematically appropriated and diluted Indigenous healing without compensation, credit, or reverence:

EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) tapping originates in ancient Chinese medicine/acupuncture on energy meridians; Indigenous Peruvian ancestors used “tapping with rocks” on meridian points for psychological, spiritual, and physical ailments. Energy psychology doesn’t credit or compensate originating communities.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was directly influenced by Ryan Heavy Head and Narcisse Blood’s Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation during Maslow’s 1938 six-week stay. Maslow restructured self-actualization theory based on Blackfoot communal practices ensuring everyone thrives together—yet American psychology emphasizes individualistic solitary actualization, erasing Blackfoot intellectual property.

African-Derived Spiritual Practices

The mental health industrial complex is “deeply discomforted by African-derived practices, in particular root work (Ifa, Santeria, Vodou, Candomble).” Anti-Blackness renders people of African descent “categorically unacceptable as human beings, irrespective of their intelligence, character, competence, creativity, or achievements” (W.E.B. Du Bois).

Du Bois argued this white supremacist gaze damages Black psyche, causing it to “turn on itself” as internalized Euro-American racism creates Anxiety destroying Black confidence in African ways of knowing. Vodou is not harm-work—it’s a healthcare system including disease prevention, health/wellbeing promotion. Health = harmony with spirits, environment, others. Vodou gods were protective and powerful; Loas are responsible for mental health aspects.

Ceremony and Collective Healing

Ceremony has been integral to global healing, particularly for Indigenous peoples, bringing community, prayer, acknowledgment of issues/elders, and activation of ancestral/spiritual knowing. Practitioners don’t need to participate in ceremonies if uncomfortable; however, agencies/practices/schools/hospitals have ethical responsibility to provide access for those who do.

The seven-generation healing principle reflects belief that when we heal ourselves, we heal harmful ancestral legacies and benefit “seven generations before and after us.” Intergenerational boundaries become crucial: What is mine? What belongs to my family? My ancestry? My culture?

Energetic Boundaries As Decolonial Practice

Energy As Political Practice

Energetic boundaries extend energetically from the physical body and communicate nonverbally, always bumping against others’ boundaries, raising or lowering them through contact. Energy is political; energy work is decolonial; energy patterns are intergenerational and ancestral.

Western colonization categorized ancient energy medicine—used for thousands of years in Indigenous, African, Asian, and other cultures—as “alternative” or “woo-woo,” when energetic practices predate Western biomedicine. Energy work includes:

  • Chakra systems in Indian yoga tradition
  • Dantian in Traditional Chinese Medicine
  • Communal healing ceremonies across African and Indigenous cultures restoring “inner equilibrium” after trauma

Highly Sensitive People and Pathologization

More than 20% of the population is highly sensitive, yet many are pathologized rather than honored as energetically or intuitively sensitive. For BIPOC and People of Global Majority, colonization has impacted energetic, physical, emotional, and financial boundaries through:

  1. Internal/external responsibility for community betterment at expense of personal health
  2. Absorbing Anxiety of white and privileged people during discord
  3. Minimizing needs for fear of threatening safety
  4. Fearful of “taking up space”
  5. Energy becoming weak and dim

For white people:

  1. Unconsciously taking excessive energetic space
  2. Expecting exceptions for distress regardless of impact
  3. Expecting others can set boundaries easily without understanding consequences for non-privileged identities
  4. Placing emotional labor on non-white peoples

Establishing Embodied Boundaries

Practitioners can help clients establish embodied boundaries through three core techniques:

  1. Feeling the 360-degree space around the body (extending 1-3 feet)
  2. Physically marking boundaries with string, yarn, or fabric
  3. Clearing intrusive thoughts/feelings by placing hands at chest and pushing them outside the boundary while exhaling

Specific grounding techniques include:

  • Naming grounding words
  • Identifying differences between self and others
  • Saying one’s name aloud
  • Discerning whether an emotion is one’s own
  • Naming what happened
  • Gentle body patting
  • Breathing through feelings for 45 seconds
  • EFT tapping
  • Breathwork
  • Meditation

Setting and maintaining energetic boundaries—knowing one’s 360-degree energetic field, clearing space from others’ feelings, honoring one’s intuition—is decolonial self-preservation that paradoxically improves therapeutic relationships because clients witness practitioners modeling healthy boundaries.

Boundary-Setting As Complex Survival Work

Boundary-setting for colonized people is neurobiologically tied to survival and people-pleasing fears—more complex than for white people. Code words like “professionalism” and “boundaries” often mean “be unassuming, white, articulate, and unemotional.”

When conflict occurs, cortisol levels spike, the amygdala is hijacked, and the prefrontal cortex shuts down, preventing coherent information intake. For colonized populations, living under constant threat develops internal barometer giving survival advantages (“hood-wise,” “street-smart,” “school of hard knocks”)—not glamorous, but wisdom: ability to read rooms quickly, think critically, react swiftly, or stay still until storms pass.

Decolonial Practice Framework

Four Arenas of Practice

Decolonizing Therapy emerged 15+ years ago as practice moving beyond individual healing toward systemic and structural change. It operates in four co-occurring arenas:

  1. POLITICAL (politicizing practice)
  2. SELF/PSYCHE (emotional evolution including body and spirit)
  3. COLLECTIVE (cocreating decolonial pathways)
  4. ANCESTRAL (communing with ancestry)

Therapy alone will not liberate BIPOC people—systemic and structural change is essential. Practitioners must engage in continuous self-inquiry: “How am I blocking access? Whose voice is not in the room? Who is harmed if we do not take action? How does my privilege show up here? How is whiteness showing itself right now?”

Emotional Decolonization

Emotional aspects of decolonization are often overlooked but essential; without emotional integration alongside structural change, movements risk remaining theoretical. Emo-decolonial work is not intellectual exercise or technique but methodical, intuitive collective paradigm shift requiring embodiment, not just understanding.

It involves coming to consciousness, unlearning, grieving, raging, and slowly divesting from colonizer lies. It cannot be intellectualized because colonial conditioning is psychological and purposeful—it lives in bodies, relationships, and institutions. Emo-decolonial work requires:

  • Community and connection
  • Creativity and artistic expression
  • Ancestral engagement
  • Sensuality and embodiment
  • Energetic boundaries
  • Joy as antidote to colonial practices

Shadow Work and Collective Healing

Emo-decolonial work involves shadow work on collective and individual levels—examining how one has conformed to colonial consciousness regardless of race, ancestry, or identity. It shifts from pathology-centered engagement (symptom-focused, Diagnosis-based) to ancestral-healing engagement integrating:

  • Historical context
  • Cultural practices
  • Spiritual traditions
  • Family lineage work

Practical Strategies and Techniques

Somatic Soul Trauma Timelines (sstt)

Somatic Soul Trauma Timelines (SSTT) is an interactive, embodied therapeutic intervention that visualizes and processes intergenerational and historical trauma across political, collective, ancestral, and individual dimensions. By co-creating visual, artistic representations of trauma legacies embedded in family systems, communities, and broader colonial histories, individuals understand how systemic oppression and ancestral wounds manifest in contemporary experiences while identifying lifelines of resilience and hope.

Four Levels of Analysis

Participants lay histories into this “visual receptacle” using markers, cardboard, and artistic materials, creating space for narrative integration. The tool honors four interconnected levels:

  1. Political (Global) contextualizes individual and family trauma within world events—wars, migrations, genocides, policy changes
  2. Collective (Identity/Culture/Social) recognizes how race, economic status, class, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and religion create distinct experiences of oppression or privilege
  3. Ancestral/Intergenerational honors family history, including witnessed, whispered, or passed-down experiences
  4. Individual documents personal salient experiences, memories, and events from major losses to smaller traumas

Accuracy is not the focus—what matters is how the individual perceives the impact.

Lifelines and Resilience

Lifelines are critical counterpoint when overwhelmed by trauma narratives—moments, people, activities, or places providing resilience, hope, joy, and connection. Lifelines might include beloved pets, Support groups, gardening, bird-watching, mentors, music, or movement. Participants recall where the feeling arose in the body and how it felt somatically. This ensures timelines hold the full spectrum of lived experience, including survival and healing resources.

Case Study: Jarod’s Healing Journey

Jarod, a middle-class Black New Hampshire resident, developed bifurcated identity feeling “not Black enough.” At school, both Black and white peers rejected him as inauthentic; he cultivated aggressive “other side” called “Simon” making people fear him. He leveraged racism to “move up the ladder,” making white people feel safe while using Blackness strategically.

A workplace incident—when he advocated for equitable hiring and was told “we don’t need another African American when we have you”—shattered his mask. Through SSTT work, Jarod traced adaptive responses backward through family lineage: grandfather worked as butler for “nice white family” (likely plantation owner descendants), mother witnessed her father beaten by white men and faced workplace discrimination, father denied university admission based on race despite acceptance. Great-grandparents were enslaved.

Jarod’s “Simon” persona and race-based calculation were not individual pathology—they were intergenerational survival strategies responding to systemic anti-Blackness and colonization. This reframing proved liberatory. Jarod stopped psychiatric medications (with psychiatrist Support) and pursued embodied healing: martial arts, morning rituals, participation in Black Men’s Support Circle. He began authentic relationships, mentored youth, and reconnected with grandfather, learning family stories previously hidden.

Ancestral and Land Inquiry

Ancestral Investigation Questions

Practitioners are invited to Support clients investigating ancestral origins, family history with colonization, and relationship to land:

  • Where are your ancestors from?
  • What was their experience with colonization?
  • Have your people caused or experienced harm?
  • What rituals, spiritual practices, songs, dances, and healing modalities did your ancestors engage in?
  • How were people with differences treated?
  • Have your people experienced forced displacement?

Land Connection Inquiry

The land inquiry asks:

  • What is the original name of this land?
  • Has the land experienced trauma?
  • What is your people’s relationship to the land?
  • Has the land been disconnected from its people?
  • Do you feel connected to the land?

Indigenous cultures traditionally had reciprocal, intimate relationships with waterways, trees, animals, and weather. “In listening to the land, you are in turn listening to oneself, and the entire web of the world.”

Affirmations for Energetic Sovereignty

Affirmations meant to reclaim safety, dignity, and cultural connection include:

  • “I honor all treaties, promises, and agreements with myself”
  • “I am willing to breathe into where whiteness has closed me up”
  • “It is safe to grieve for a place I have never been”
  • “I am a child of my ancestors”
  • “I am willing to learn, and I am willing to unlearn”
  • “I trust my sovereignty and intuition”
  • “I let light in through my emotional cracks”
  • “My body is wise”
  • “I honor my energetic sovereignty”
  • “I can listen and not absorb”
  • “I honor my energy body and soul”
  • “I am allowed to release or put down what I cannot hold for the moment”
  • “It is safe to honor my culture’s views regarding energy AND practice Therapy”
  • “I am allowed to be a caregiver AND be loyal to myself”
  • “Lack of boundaries invites disrespect”
  • “You promote what you permit”

Plant Allies for Healing

Guidance from Dr. Jacqui Wilkins on traditional plant medicines (from Yakama, Irish, and Eastern European perspectives):

For Grief and Heart Healing

  • Hawthorn (comforting, protective around tender hearts)
  • Rose (especially for maternal lineage grief)
  • Linden (calming, moistening)

To Balance Excess Fire/prevent Burnout

  • Marshmallow (soothing, grounding)
  • Mullein (cooling, grief Support, ancestral connection)
  • Lemon Balm (calming, restorative)

To Move Stuck Anger

  • Mugwort (moving stagnant energy, visioning)
  • Vervain (uncovering hidden truths)
  • Ginger/Mints (warming/cooling movement)

For Embodiment

  • Flower essences like Shooting Star (embodiment, clarity of purpose) and California Poppy (helping repattern trauma and emotional patterns)

The text stresses respectful, sustainable relationship with plants, consulting elders/practitioners, and honoring bioregional plant connections and protocols.

Crisis Planning and Mutual Accountability

Create “Just in Case Shit Pops Off Escape Plans” with clients—concrete safety and Support plans based on capacity (mental, physical, financial, emotional, relational, energetic). This includes:

  1. Discussing worst-case scenarios early
  2. Identifying safe Support people and peer supporters
  3. Using Pod Mapping Worksheets (from Mia Mingus)
  4. Explicitly discussing involvement of police, paramedics, spiritual advisors, family, and psychiatric facilities
  5. Clarifying contact protocols for specific crises
  6. Setting mutual notification agreements about personal emergencies

Planning is framed as prevention and act of care, not punishment.

Building Alternatives to the Mhic

Peer Support and Collective Healing

Peer support—practiced through groups like “Peers Educating Peers” (PEP)—is deeply therapeutic and potentially more healing than individual Therapy. Peer Support creates consistent weekly spaces where each person has a role and expectation, regardless of attendance or capacity to contribute. Safety and accountability are paramount.

Former PEP participants describe transformative experiences: learning to trust for the first time, safely discussing family trauma, developing conflict resolution skills, experiencing unconditional love “despite imperfections,” feeling safe to be queer, Black, loud, and angry without rejection. “Healing does not happen in isolation” and “Recovery can only take place within the context of relationships.” Peer Support humanizes rather than pathologizes; people see others “doing the work” of healing, inspiring hope.

Multidisciplinary Support Pods

Rather than session-focused individual Therapy, multidisciplinary Support pods can include:

Emotional care workers should be present “everywhere”—in government offices, classrooms, transportation hubs, tourist attractions.

Accessibility and Inclusion

Practitioners are urged to:

  • Stop calling Therapy participants “patients” and “clients” (capitalistic, pathologizing language)
  • Stop using “termination” language
  • Create genuinely accessible spaces (fat-affirming seating, language-appropriate interpretation, trauma-informed practices)
  • Democratize medical and therapeutic knowledge
  • Recognize that listening, healing, and Support are not limited to licensed professionals

Neurodivergence As Ancestral Capacity

Reconsidering Pathology

Western mental health pathologizes neurodivergence (ADHD, Autism, psychosis-spectrum experiences) as brain dysregulation requiring medication. The book presents compelling alternative: neurodivergence may reflect ancestral transmission of healing capacities, extrasensory abilities, or intensified sensitivity.

Zola’s “clairaudient and clairsentient abilities”—initially labeled psychosis during 13 involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations—were recognized as family healing tradition (davishas who read tea leaves, seeds, irises) when explored ancestrally. When framed as gifts rather than deficits, Zola’s institutionalizations ceased, and they obtained affirmed identity Support and community connection.

This reframing challenges the foundational assumption that Neurodivergent neurology is inherently problematic, suggesting instead that psychiatric systems may be pathologizing legitimate capacities that colonization has conditioned people to fear.

Dissociation As Bodily Wisdom

Western psychology labels dissociation—disconnection from physical body or emotional experience—as disorder requiring intervention. The book presents nuanced perspective: since colonized bodies experienced violence, hypervigilance, and violation, disconnecting from bodies is intelligent survival mechanism and bodily wisdom.

What practitioners diagnose as “dissociation” may be healthy bodily protection—spectrum where detachment from physical bodies (especially for colonized peoples) is coping mechanism and bodily intelligence/safety. Rather than pathologizing, practitioners might ask: “What is your body protecting you from? How has disconnection served your survival?”

Practitioner Accountability and Self-Care

Recognizing Complicity

Practitioners are not neutral; they either perpetuate or resist colonial violence through frameworks, diagnoses, and boundaries. The MHIC exploits early-career BIPOC clinicians while forcing them to harm the communities they serve. Awareness and action are non-negotiable.

Self-Care As Political Practice

Because decolonial work engages with deep historical and collective trauma, facilitators must practice rigorous self-care and energetic boundary maintenance. Specific grounding techniques include:

  • Hand-rubbing with intention to release energy
  • Clearing sprays or herbs
  • Visualization of protective light
  • Breathwork
  • Bilateral stimulation exercises

Practitioners must consciously disconnect from clients’ energy between sessions to avoid cumulative traumatic load and vicarious trauma.

Reciprocal Supervision Model

The text provides reciprocal intergenerational supervision model where early-career politicized helpers engage with experienced practitioners in rotating roles every other week. This prevents experienced practitioners from “checking out” or maintaining dangerous “I don’t need supervision” mindset—essential for decolonial evolution requiring constant humility.

Key Takeaways for Neurodivergent Individuals

  1. Your symptoms may be ancestral wisdom, not pathology: What Western medicine labels as ADHD, Autism, or other neurodivergence may reflect inherited sensitivities, capacities, or survival strategies developed through generations of colonization and resistance.

  2. Grief and rage are healthy responses to injustice: Your intense emotions about systemic oppression, cultural disconnection, or identity invalidation are not mental illness—they are appropriate responses to ongoing colonial violence.

  3. Dissociation may be bodily protection: If you disconnect from your body or emotions, this may be intelligent survival mechanism rather than disorder worth exploring with curiosity about what your body is protecting you from.

  4. Sensitivity is a gift, not a deficit: Being highly sensitive, intuitive, or empathic may reflect ancestral capacities for healing and connection rather than pathology requiring medication.

  5. Connection to land and ancestry is healing: Exploring your ancestral roots, cultural practices, and relationship to land can be more healing than individual Therapy focused on symptom management.

  6. Community healing is more powerful than individual Therapy: Peer Support groups, community circles, and collective rituals may provide more healing than one-on-one Therapy, especially when they honor cultural traditions and shared experiences.

  7. Energetic boundaries are essential for survival: Learning to feel and protect your energetic field is crucial, particularly if you’re absorbing others’ emotions or trauma due to high sensitivity.

  8. Your healing journey benefits generations: When you heal intergenerational trauma, you’re healing ancestral wounds and creating healthier legacies for future generations.

Resources and Support Networks

Community-Based Organizations

Healing Justice and Collective Care

Books and Further Reading

Online Communities and Support

Crisis Support

While this book critiques traditional mental health systems, crisis Support may be necessary:

  • National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
  • Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
  • Trans Lifeline: 877-565-8860
  • Trevor Project (LGBTQ+ youth): 866-488-7386

Remember that seeking help is valid, even while working to transform and decolonize mental health systems.