Understanding a Decolonizing approach to Therapy and Mental Health Care
Updated: Sep 30
What Is Decolonized Healing and Care?
Decolonized healing and care asks us to look at mental health within a much bigger context.
Many of the approaches that have shaped mainstream mental health care in the United States come from Western and Eurocentric traditions. These approaches have given us valuable ways of understanding mental health, relationships, behavior, trauma, and emotional wellbeing. At the same time, they haven't always reflected or adequately served many of the people and communities who use, or need to be able to use, mental health care.
When one way of understanding mental health is treated as universal, we can miss important parts of people's experiences, including culture, community, history, spirituality, identity, disability, and the systems they're living within. This has contributed to stigma and mistrust, disparities in access and treatment, and gaps in culturally relevant mental health education and resources, particularly within communities that have historically been excluded or underserved by mental health systems, including communities of color, immigrant communities, disabled people, and LGBTQ+ folx.
A decolonizing approach asks us to question some of those assumptions.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan, also called, The Rage Doctor, has been influential in bringing these conversations into mental health care and was an important influence on our foundational values at TCC. Her work invites us to consider how colonialism, systemic oppression, intergenerational trauma, and cultural disconnection can shape our experiences of mental health.
This can mean asking:
Whose definition of wellness are we using? Who decided what is healthy or unhealthy? When someone is struggling, are we looking only at what's happening within that person? Or are we also paying attention to their relationships, culture, community, workplace, economic conditions, history, and the systems around them?
Decolonized healing can include reconnecting with cultural traditions and ancestral knowledge, but it doesn't mean everyone needs to return to a particular practice or identity. Not everyone has access to ancestral traditions, and not every cultural practice is going to feel meaningful to every person. It's really about making more room for the different ways people understand wellness, distress, connection, care, and healing.
Decolonizing isn't necessarily a therapy modality or a particular set of interventions. It's a lens that can shape how we understand mental health, how we practice therapy, and how we provide and structure care.
Therapy Doesn't Happen Outside of Context
Mental health care can sometimes say the problem lies primarily within the individual.
Someone is anxious. Someone is depressed. Someone is burned out. Someone is having difficulty coping.
Those experiences are real, and individual support can be incredibly valuable. A decolonizing lens asks us to also look at what else might be happening.
What happens when someone's anxiety exists alongside discrimination or financial instability?
What if burnout is happening in a workplace that repeatedly asks more of someone than they have the capacity or resources to give?
What if hypervigilance developed in an environment where being vigilant was actually protective?
What if someone's difficulty setting boundaries exists within a family or culture where responsibility, caregiving, and interdependence carry significant meaning?
The point isn't to explain every mental health concern through oppression or systems. It's to resist reducing complicated human experiences to something happening only within the person.
Consider the use of diagnosis. A diagnosis can give us language and understanding, help guide treatment, and provide access to services or accommodations. We can use those tools while still being curious about what someone's experiences mean within the context of their actual life.
Sometimes an important question in therapy isn't only "What's wrong"?
It might also be:
What happened?
What are you responding to?
What has helped you survive?
What matters to you?
And what conditions are you living within?
Power, Knowledge, and the Therapeutic Relationship
A decolonizing lens also asks us to pay attention to power in therapy. Therapists carry particular kinds of power. We have professional authority and clinical knowledge, and we may have the ability to diagnose, document, recommend levels of care, or influence someone's access to other systems and resources. But clients aren't without power either.
Clients bring agency, choices, lived experience, cultural knowledge, relationships, resources, identities, values, and expertise about their own lives. Both therapist and client may also hold different kinds of social power connected to race, gender, class, education, disability, age, professional status, citizenship, and other parts of who we are.
None of that disappears when we walk into a therapy room. It can influence what gets talked about, what doesn't, whose interpretation carries more weight, whether disagreement feels safe, which goals get prioritized, and ultimately how the therapeutic process unfolds.
A decolonizing approach doesn't pretend the therapist and client have the same role. Therapists bring clinical training and particular responsibilities. Clients bring something the therapist can never have: the experience of being that person in their body, relationships, family, culture, and community.
Therapy becomes more collaborative when both kinds of knowledge matter and when we're willing to notice how power might be influencing the work.
Culture, Community, and Different Ways of Healing
A lot of mainstream mental health care emphasizes independence, individual achievement, self sufficiency, and personal responsibility. Those things may matter to someone, but they aren't universal definitions of wellness. For many, wellbeing is also connected to family, chosen family, community, spirituality, collective responsibility, cultural identity, and relationships across generations. Independence doesn't always have to be the goal, but Interdependence can be wellness too.
A decolonizing approach can also expand what we imagine therapy can look like.
Therapy is often depicted as sitting in a room and talking about our problems. And sometimes that's what therapy is. But talking doesn't have to be the only way we process, understand, connect, or heal.
There can be room for music, movement, art, creativity, storytelling, meaning making, symbols, spirituality, prayer, ritual, nature, embodied practices, and cultural traditions. What belongs in therapy depends on the person, what feels meaningful to them, and what they want their therapy to include. That doesn't mean therapists should simply collect cultural practices and turn them into interventions. Cultural practices have histories, meaning, and ownership. We still need to think about competence, context, consent, and appropriation.
Sometimes our role is simply to recognize and make room for the forms of healing, knowledge, spirituality, creativity, and connection that are already part of someone's life.
And therapists need to start these conversations.
Clients can't know something is welcome in therapy if we've never presented it as an option.
What Can This Look Like in Therapy?
A decolonizing lens doesn't have to stay theoretical. It can change what actually happens in the therapy room. Here are so ways theraipsts may integrate a decolonizing aproach into therapy.
1. Make culture and identity discussable. A therapist practicing from a decolonizing lens can invite conversations about culture, race, identity, family, community, history, spirituality, values, and belonging rather than assuming a client will bring these things up on their own.
2. Expand what therapy can look like. Therapy doesn't always have to rely on talking. When it feels meaningful and appropriate, there can be opportunities to use music, movement, art, storytelling, ritual, symbolism, spirituality, creativity, nature, or other practices that resonate with the person.
3. Ask whose values are guiding the work. What does wellness actually mean to this person? Therapy goals should reflect the client's values and hopes for their life rather than automatically reflecting what a therapist, diagnosis, institution, or dominant culture considers healthy or successful.
4. Look beyond the individual. Thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and coping matter. So do relationships, community, discrimination, finances, work, caregiving, housing, access to resources, and the other conditions surrounding someone's life. A decolonizing therapist considers both.
5. Stay curious about bias and assumptions. A therapist practicing from a decolonizing lens has to keep examining what they're bringing into the room too. Our training, culture, identities, experiences, and ideas about what is "healthy" or "normal" can all influence how we understand another person. The goal isn't to somehow become completely free of bias. It's to be willing to notice it, question it, and adjust when it's shaping the work.
These aren't the only ways to practice from a decolonizing lens, but they're places to start.
This Work Doesn't Stop at the Therapy Room
There is a larger systems conversation that is part of decolonizing mental health care too.
A decolonizing lens can ask us to look at who has access to care, which kinds of knowledge and healing are valued, how mental health resources are distributed, and how we respond when people are in crisis. It can also ask us to notice how capitalism and productivity influence our ideas about wellness, and our well-being in general.
Are we helping someone create a life that feels meaningful and sustainable to them, or are we sometimes helping people become better able to tolerate conditions that are hurting them?
It can also mean questioning carceral approaches to mental health care and considering how safety can be supported while preserving as much dignity, autonomy, collaboration, and choice as possible. And the conditions under which care is provided matter too. Provider wellbeing and client care aren't completely separate conversations. Workloads, supervision, compensation, opportunities for consultation and rest, organizational culture, and productivity expectations can eventually affect what providers have available to bring into their work.
How we structure care influences the care people receive.
There is much more to explore in each of these areas. The larger point is that decolonizing mental health care can't begin and end with what happens during an individual therapy session.
How to Know if Decolonized Therapy is for You
Decolonized therapy may resonate with you if you find yourself navigating the complexities of identity, culture, systemic oppression, or simply wanting therapy that makes room for more of who you are.
Here are some signs that this approach could be a good fit:
Desire for Cultural Integration: You want a therapist who recognizes and values your cultural background. If you want to integrate cultural practices, beliefs, values, or traditions into your healing process, a decolonizing approach can make room for that.
Recognition of Systemic Barriers: You recognize that systemic injustices and colonialism can affect mental health and social wellbeing. If you want space to explore how these experiences and larger systems intersect with your own life, a decolonizing approach can support that exploration.
Focus on Authenticity: You value authenticity in the therapeutic relationship. You may want a therapist who can show up as a real person while still maintaining appropriate therapeutic boundaries. You may also be looking for affirming therapy where you can show up as you are, without feeling like you have to mask, code switch, or present yourself in a particular way to be understood or accepted.
Interest in Connection: You value community and relational
connection as part of healing. If family, chosen family, community, collective care, or interdependence are important to your wellbeing, a decolonizing perspective can make room for those relationships rather than assuming healing is solely individual.
Curiosity About Traditional and Embodied Ways of Healing: You are interested in integrating your culture's traditional healing practices, beliefs, ancestral knowledge, spirituality, mindfulness, movement, or other forms of embodied healing into therapy. A decolonizing approach can make room for these practices, support connection to existing strengths and traditions, and recognize that processing and healing can happen beyond words.
Willingness to Challenge Norms: You're open to questioning some of the mainstream practices and standards that have shaped psychology and mental health care. You may be interested in therapy that adapts psychological approaches to your specific needs rather than expecting you to adapt yourself to the approach.
Need for Culturally Responsive, Trauma Informed Care: You want a therapeutic environment that understands trauma within cultural, relational, historical, and systemic contexts. If your experiences include historical or intergenerational trauma, you may value an approach that makes room for those experiences alongside your individual story.
Decolonizing Is an Ongoing Practice
No therapist, practice, or organization reaches a point where this work is finished.
Decolonizing means continuing to question what we've inherited, whose knowledge we're centering, how power is operating, what biases we're bringing with us, whose values are shaping care, and whether the systems we've created are actually supporting the people within them. Sometimes that means reclaiming something that was lost or excluded. Sometimes it means expanding what therapy can look like. Sometimes it means changing how we understand someone's experience. And sometimes it means questioning the larger systems surrounding mental health care.
At TCC, we understand decolonizing care as an ongoing practice of questioning, learning, listening, expanding, and changing. There isn't one perfectly decolonized way to heal or provide care. There can be more room for people and communities to define what healing, wellness, connection, and care mean for themselves.
If you're interested in exploring how decolonized therapy can support your healing journey, we invite you to connect with us at The Connection Clinic (TCC). We are dedicated to providing a safe, authentic space for individuals seeking to intgerate their whole selves into their therapy.
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