Decolonizing Therapy hopes

Here are some quotes from Dr. Jennifer Mullan’s Decolonizing Therapy that move me speak to my own hopes for this journey I’ve embarked on:

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.

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 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.

May we democratize medical knowledge, in particular, the often-exclusive forms of “professionalized” therapeutic knowledge, and recog nize that the mental health industrial complex (MHIC) does not have a monopoly on mental and emotional wellness.

Transformation has to be politicized, viewed ecologically, and pursued interdependently.