Decolonising Therapy

4 Aug

Unlearning Empire in the Consulting Room

I remember my father taking us to school each morning. He was an impatient, angry man, and if we were slow to get ready, he would shout and insult us. One morning, after a particularly harsh outburst, I sat in the back seat feeling bruised and small as we stopped for petrol.

In South Africa, you stayed in your car while several Black men bustled around it — one filling the tank, another checking the oil, a third cleaning the windscreen. That morning, as always, there was laughter among them, easy banter, broad smiles. I remember thinking, even as a child, these men knew joy in a way we did not.

We were a wealthy, English-speaking, white family, yet a sense of uninhibited joy seemed to be missing from our lives. Everything felt performative; achievement, leisure, even fun had to be done in the “right” way. I never saw in my own world the kind of spontaneous laughter I witnessed that day.

I don’t wish to romanticise their lives; even then, I was aware they came from backgrounds of hardship and systemic oppression. Even so, Maya Angelou’s words, “the luck to be Black on a Saturday night,” ring true — they knew how to party, how to be alive.

Even as a boy, I sensed something about my own “tribe” that felt deeply off-kilter. We lived in a world that claimed to be privileged and free, yet it seemed psychologically restrictive and joyless, as if our own expectations imprisoned us. The oppression I observed around me was obvious; what I didn’t realise then was that we, the colonisers, were also colonising ourselves.

I've always felt slightly detached, as if observing my own culture from a distance. That stance — partly outsider, partly observer — has become a recurring theme in my life. It led me, in my twenties, to Buddhist monasticism, where I learned a different way of being: simplicity, silence, and interdependence over ambition or achievement.

Later, it guided me to psychotherapy, where I aimed to understand the layers of pain and conditioning that shape us. In both paths, I questioned the stories of progress and success that influenced my upbringing. That sense of standing just outside the centre allowed me to see my own structures of colonial thought — and how they entrap not only those they oppress but also those they claim to privilege.

Centuries of empire-building not only oppressed others but also held us back, shaping our minds in unseen ways. Looking back, that memory marked the start of a process—somewhat unconscious at the time—to decolonise myself, to lift the heavy, unspoken depression that flowed like a current through my family and the system we lived in.

Audre Lorde’s words — “you cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools” — now serve as a quiet reminder and challenge that keeps me honest. I write not as an expert but as someone tracing the marks of empire within myself, learning to listen to stories I was never taught to hear.

Decolonisation is not about “us” and “them.” It is not about guilt or reversing power. It is a process that belongs to all of us — Black, white, brown, Indigenous, immigrant — because we are all shaped by the same histories, the same violent hierarchies, and the same forgetting. Oppressors and the oppressed are connected in the same web, although the burden falls far heavier on those who are not the privileged few.

Colonisation was not just the theft of land and culture; it also involved the theft of intimacy within ourselves, with others, and with the earth. To decolonise is to soften the hardened stories of separation, to slow down, to listen, to remember the earth beneath our feet, the air in our lungs, and the waters that connect us all.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind helps me see this more clearly. He recounts his schooling in Kenya, where speaking his mother tongue resulted in punishment and shame, while speaking English was rewarded. That experience was not only about language but also about identity: it was a deliberate effort to make him distrust his own culture and imagination.

Ngũgĩ describes this as “the colony of the mind”; a hierarchy so deeply rooted that even after independence, it continues to influence how people see themselves. That same colony exists within all of us, in various ways, whispering that success requires separation, that belonging is conditional, and that safety is earned through conformity.

Therapy, as it is usually practised, can unintentionally reinforce this hierarchy. Rooted in European intellectual traditions, it has inherited a Christian framework: the consulting room often resembles a confessional, a private space where the “expert” guides the suffering individual towards redemption.

The very idea that healing only happens in a paid, one-hour conversation or through medication reflects Western individualism and capitalist thinking. We accept these norms as if they are universal truths, but they are not. For many cultures, health and healing are connected to ritual, community, land, and lineage — not isolated self-reflection.

Writers like bell hooks remind us that whiteness is not just a skin colour but a way of seeing, and of not seeing. In Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon demonstrates how colonialism causes profound self-alienation, teaching people to view themselves through the eyes of their oppressors. If therapy does not acknowledge this history, it risks becoming assimilation dressed up as healing.

In my own practice, I’ve met survivors of racism, slavery’s legacy, displacement, and generational violence. They may arrive carrying grief and vigilance that Western therapy might too quickly label as “disorder.”

Resmaa Menakem’s “My Grandmother’s Hands” helps us understand racial trauma as something stored in the body, passed down through posture, breath, and the nervous system. Joy DeGruy’s work on Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome shows how behaviours shaped by centuries of oppression are often misunderstood as dysfunction. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies warns us that research and therapy usually act like colonisers: extracting stories and knowledge while erasing the communities they come from.

Ngũgĩ’s vision of a “network” rather than a hierarchy of languages provides a powerful image for the future of therapy. Psychotherapy is not a universal truth but one branch of human wisdom. It can sit alongside Indigenous healing, somatic traditions, storytelling, and ecological practices, not above them. To decolonise therapy is to meet all clients in their own languages — both literal and symbolic — rather than translating them into ours.

At New Road Psychotherapy (NRP), these questions feel very alive. They prompt us to examine the very foundations of our practice: the way we speak, the models we employ, and the spaces we create. Even words like “disorder” or “acting-out” can subtly overwrite a client’s understanding of their own suffering, replacing their story with ours.

To decolonise therapy is to replace the illusion of impartiality with a commitment to accountability. It means being willing to be changed by all our clients, listening deeply to their ancestral wisdom, and holding psychotherapy lightly — as a tool, not a truth.

This vision cannot belong only to therapists. Decolonisation is not a project for one group; it is a shared act of remembering. It asks us all to become students of the world again, to listen more deeply than we speak, and to root ourselves in the soil of interdependence. In this sense, therapy is not just about treating the individual; it can become a space where collective healing begins.

I see NRP as a gathering hub for many ways of knowing. This might involve rethinking training, welcoming practitioners from diverse cultural traditions, strengthening connections with grassroots organisations, and exploring formats beyond individual therapy sessions, such as circles, rituals, and conversations that challenge the isolation fostered by capitalist culture. These changes are not radical because they are new, but because they are ancient: a return to collective healing, rooted in relationships and land.

This is slow work. Bayo Akomolafe says, “The times are urgent; let us slow down.” Decolonisation is not a marketing trend or a reversal of power dynamics; it is a practice of humility and imagination. It is about remembering our shared humanity and interdependence, recognising that no one is outside of colonisation’s reach and therefore no one is outside of its healing.

It could mean becoming a centre that openly names therapy’s colonial inheritance while committing to dismantling it, creating spaces where no one needs to leave parts of themselves at the door. Healing would not be measured by assimilation but by belonging.

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind us, “decolonisation is not a metaphor.” It is not a concept to discuss but a rhythm to live by: a slowing down, a softening, a return. For me, as a white therapist, this has meant confronting my own complicity and letting my work be reshaped by traditions once silenced.

It is not only white work. It is work for all of us — Black, brown, white — a shared practice of remembering what the empire tried to erase. If we take this seriously, the consulting room can become something radical: not a sterile, neutral space, but a place of quiet resistance. Not assimilation, but reclamation. A place where all ways of being are welcome, and no psyche or culture must grow on the graveyard of another.

By Rory Singer

You can also read this post on our Substack journal, Unfolding.

Decolonising Therapy

Unlearning Empire in the Consulting Room

Further Reading

Balancing Together

The Delight of Imperfection