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For all the therapists, practitioners, root workers, space holders and
healers who have contributed to creating spaces of safety, impacting
generations to come. For those who guide us on our journey back home …
back to the Root of our Collective Tree. I see you.
For the Spirit of PEP and my Peppers: We are the abolitionists of
traditional therapy and the rooted raging descendants of our ancestral
healing. Thank you for trusting me and pushing me to decolonize western
therapy. I am you.
For all the past versions of myself, especially young Jenny from around the
way. I adore you.
Thank you to all Ancestors who helped bring this book to fruition. I honor
you.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PA R T 1 : T H E ROOT S: WHERE IT BEGAN
CHAPTER 1 Your (Our) Therapy Is Colonial
CHAPTER 2 Emotional–Decolonial Work
CHAPTER 3 From Lobotomies to Liberation
CHAPTER 4 Diagnostic Enslavement
PA R T 2 : T H E TRUN K: WHERE WE ARE
CHAPTER 5 From Historical Trauma to Healing the Collective Soul Wound
CHAPTER 6 Intergenerational Trauma Transmission: Ancestral Trauma and Wisdom
Exist Together Within Us
CHAPTER 7 Ancestral Roots in Mental Health “From Root to Bone”
CHAPTER 8 Collective Grief and Sacred Rage As Expressions of Colonization
PA R T 3 : T H E LEAV ES: GROWI NG A
D E C OLONIA L FUTURE
CHAPTER 9 From the Inside Out: Energetic Boundaries
CHAPTER 10 Politicizing Your Practice (Is How We Begin to Decolonize Therapy)
CONCLUSION Call to Action
Practitioner Resources
Glossary/Terms to Chew On
References
Index
IREIONA IPONRI ATIWO ORUN
IFA SAYS: MAY THE JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY
BRING YOU THE BLESSINGS OF SPIRIT.
DECOLONIZING THERAPY
Introduction
This book is wrapped in deep love and compassion. Its use is not just
limited to therapists, but also to body workers, social workers, teachers,
nurses, and others. We were trained within and for the System. No matter
the oppressive system—we are Gatekeepers (and decently paid ones) in
those systems. So, let us begin …
My dear fellow colonized therapists,
We need to not just understand and be aware, but also take activated
action.
It is time that we recognize the historical roots of the disability rights
movement, and how mental and emotional health are firmly in the center of
this movement. We need to remember that the disability rights movement
was founded by queer people, in particular queer, trans, black, brown, and
indigenous racialized people.
May we honor the beauty and necessity of mutual aid in all of its
forms, and be willing to recognize the fluidity of human experiences.
Many of us began this career path with a deep calling to help others,
but what we really needed was to help ourselves … to locate the root of our
need to give and help and triage almost everyone everywhere despite
ourselves.
Many of us began this process of learning, interning, and performing in
order to help people. What we were really doing was making ourselves feel
better by cyclically caregiving and educating others.
Many of us began this process honored that so many people trusted us
with their stories and pain, yet rarely did we make the space to tend to our
own excruciating stories of abandonment, neglect, and low-key
codependency. May we value our various roles, and the abilities of each of
us, while we learn from one another. May we find the beauty and necessity
in conscious peer support.
My dear fellow colonized therapists,
May we place a high value on the healing power of simply having
choices.
May we vow to never again support or participate in coercion or forced
treatment.
May we transform together, the mental and emotional health care
system.
May we understand that for change and healing to be sustainable and
real, it must happen throughout our communities and systems.
May we remember that “I” am not solely the responsibility of each
individual seeking help, that engaging at an individual level is unsustainable
and inhumane.
May we share power and value reciprocal relationships between people
with lived experience and those who are working to support us.
May we engage from a decolonial and anti-oppression framework,
meaning that we understand that structural ableism both informs and
reinforces other structures of oppression (i.e., racism, sexism, classism).
May we seek to dismantle all forms of oppression, recognizing that our
freedom, rights, and liberation must be collective and, therefore, include the
most vulnerable among us.
May we learn from the Land, from the Indigenous people of the Land,
and engage in reciprocal right relationship with the Land, as well as one
another.
As we slowly awaken, undo, and decolonize our mental and emotional
behavioral care systems, may we allow for room to not know and to learn
from the people we serve.
May we stop calling the people who participate in therapeutic work
with us “patients” and “clients.” It is so capitalistic and pathologizing.
May we find new language rooted in healing justice and possibility.
May we have fun cocreating new ways of relating and calling in.
My dear fellow colonized therapists,
May we stop medicalizing and pathologizing race and ethnicity while
using “multiculturalism” and “diversity” training as a cure-all elixir.
May we continuously learn about the differences between gender
identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.
May we please stop calling the end of therapy sessions “termination
sessions”?
May we please have large-sized-fat-affirming chairs that are
comfortable for every body in our offices? These are basic accessibility
requests.
May we begin to unpack and teach people to live with their trauma
more and “treat it” less.
May we ask about folks’ migration stories.
May we create genograms and timelines for trauma, abuse, IPV, dis-
eases,1 and so forth and begin to unpack intergenerational trauma—not just
staunch the bleeding.
May we stop insinuating that people under the poverty line need to
work harder. Poor people are some of the hardest-working folks I know.
May we talk about colorism, race-based trauma, anti-Black racism, and
neoliberalism.
May we work on our own emotional and ancestral shame, guilt, and
grief.
May we realize how illness is written on our bodies and the bodies of
our therapy participants—through relationships, rituals, and their stories.
May we realize that this process is full of dichotomies and paradoxes.
A personal, yet collective journey; a lonely, yet supported journey; a
political and healing journey; an abolishing and merging journey; and a
practical and scientific, yet ancestral and fluid healing journey.
May we honor that the very nature of the decolonial process is one that
seeks to change how we see the world, while living within the world
sustainably. Decolonization cannot be intellectualized as it is historical and
constantly evolving, within and outside of us.
May we remember that colonial capitalism banks on our obsession with
money and “making it,” as it has been programmed generationally into us
and our lineages. The heart and brain of oppression is class warfare.
May we work on our own grief and honor our righteous sacred rage.
May we make space for big feelings, old teachings, and new ways of
implementing our elders’ medicines.
My dear fellow colonized therapists,
May we democratize medical knowledge, in particular, the often-
exclusive forms of “professionalized” therapeutic knowledge, and
recognize that the mental health industrial complex (MHIC) does not have a
monopoly on mental and emotional wellness.
May we continue to engage and think globally, and act locally.
May we build on a national level; believe in building strong, grassroots
community-based systems of care, while forming international partnerships
to undermine imperialistic practices; and support economic justice for
previously colonized nations.
May we engage in models of care that shifts tasks and work, and may
we be conscious that the work of listening, healing, supporting, and so forth
is not limited to those with a particular license or degree.
May we recognize in ourselves the ways that dominant ideas about
what type of person is seen as a potential caregiver or healer or professional
simply replicates oppressive hierarchy.
May we stand firm in our beliefs that we do not heal or treat; we
merely have the privilege of offering support and help.
May we innately know and believe that everyone is capable of healing
themselves.
May we seek to resist colonial and commodifying practices of
divorcing global indigenous, religious, spiritual, and holistic healing
practices from their roots, in particular the roots of emotional and mental
health modern-day practices.
May we recognize the power of our ancestors’ practices with respect to
their historical context and reject cultural appropriation of healing
traditions.
In evolution,
Dr. Jenn
The damage the MIC [medical industrial complex] has inflicted on our planet
should be enough for us all to dream and invest in building alternatives.… What
could true wellness and care look like for our communities?
—Mia Mingus (2015)
Transformation has to be politicized, viewed ecologically, and pursued
interdependently.
—Gabes Torres (2022)
Becoming aware of our stories leads to grief, but it also leads to validation.
—Lisa Olivera, Already Enough: A Path to Self-Acceptance (2022)
When you are living in a garbage dump, you don’t breathe too deeply. This is how
it is living in a society polluted with hateful supremacy. Which is why everyone
suffocates, and even newborns breathe with a shallowness. We need fresh new
air.
—Jaiya John, Freedom: Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution (2020)
This book is for those of us who tend to the root of things.
The Root Workers.
Those of you who tend to the deeply buried parts of human suffering,
society, and the global consciousness.
Those of you who truly embody space holding. The containers. The
“sin-eaters.” The hope holders. The medicine makers. The soldiers of
suffering. That is what I think really helpful mental health practitioners do.
We contain and metabolize suffering into possibility. We offer constant
shifts in perspective. We help those in pain, deep in their defenses, to
consider choosing to see it all differently. We provide options and create
connections for access. We push, sometimes shove. We hold the fort. We
worry. We make sure it’s safe, and we water. We water the roots. We prune
the leaves. Some of us excavate the bones. We are those who witness and
metabolize the pain in society, the shadow parts of the collective.
Historically our names were curandera/o, shaman, priestess, witch,
babalawo, iyanifa, santera/o, palera/o, ndi obi, szeptunka, kaiwhakaora,
íceach, Bengali Babas, and many other names across the globe that had
been reserved for people who help the healing process, outside of the
Anglo-Christian gaze. Of course, there are still many practicing, thriving,
traditional Indigenous healers listed above; however, the hook of
colonialism and white supremacy have created a curtain of silence, shame,
or secretiveness around many (not all) Indigenous healer identities.
This is due to safety, legal ramifications, acculturation, internalized
white supremacy, but mostly at the root is colonization.
Colonial consciousness has created rules that are not as client-centered
as they would have us believe. The medical industrial complex (MIC) has
turned healing practices into for-profit practices. Persons who once
“healed” now “treat.” Persons who once “scanned” now “assess.” Persons
who once “cleared energies’’ now “diagnose.” This lucrative pivot in
practices benefits those at the top of the power hierarchy of these
interlocking systems (not the people receiving the care, and sometimes not
the providers). So you see, the medical/mental health industries have
capitalized on and commodified healers and healing. This in turn has deeply
impacted everyone, including our Earth.
White supremacy informs and births white culture that is analogous
and difficult to pin down. It is everywhere and tangled within the roots of
many things. White culture leans toward individualistic, consumeristic,
time-oriented/results-oriented, “professional,” de-spiritualized, hierarchical,
monotheistic, dichotomous, content-over-process thinking and is quite
rageful and violent. This permeates therapy, our clinical education, and how
we engage in therapeutic practice. From our session limits, to the theories
most valued, to the ways in which supervision is more about accumulating
hours than processing super uncomfortable human interactions and natural
processes. We live in a society with a myriad of experiences, stories, and
perspectives. Our experiences are affected by the media, ancestral trauma,
our environment, our families and their stories, as well as by our lived
experiences, how we walk in the world, and how we are perceived.
The Root of Dis-Ease
This book is naming the root of disconnect from our bodies, minds,
emotions, one another, and Earth. We are affected on multiple levels, and
this book seeks to begin the process of reconvergence and reconnection—
Individually, Systemically, and Ancestrally:
Individually ➔ Internalized White Supremacy (can look like
internalized racial inferiority or internalized racial superiority
privilege). It disconnects us from one another, our culture, our
humanity, our Earth, global issues that we believe do not affect us,
among other things. We have internalized and been fed diets of colonial
consciousness throughout our lives, in conscious and unconscious
ways.
Systemically ➔ Medical/Mental Health Industrial Complex are
systems of profit over health, wellness, and care. Healing is almost
never mentioned. Fee services, pathologized treatments, denial of
services to poor and migrant communities, attempts to control
populations through forced sterilization, to dangerous contraceptives
and minimizing the prevalence of trafficked young women of color. To
the deep health crisis (including mental health) burrowing itself within
the tentacles of late-stage capitalism and imperialism.
Ancestrally/Historically ➔ Colonization has us collectively
disconnected, activated, and in deep grief all at once. There is a deep
disconnect between therapy services and our history. There is a lack of
culturally competent services; minimal discussion or context
throughout the educational process for other ways of knowing; minimal
awareness around forced migration, ableism, capitalism, and cultural
