Decolonising Therapy
“You cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.”
Audre Lorde
I am a white, privileged male. I grew up in apartheid South Africa, a society explicitly based on racial violence and segregation. My education and social standing have given me many opportunities, and much of my life has been lived within systems designed to benefit people like me. So, who am I to write about decolonising therapy?
That question lies at the heart of this piece. I write not as an expert, but as someone who is in the process of unlearning. I have spent most of my adult life working to ‘decolonise’ myself by peeling back the layers of inherited scripts: what counts as success, how to behave, what to believe, how to think, and who to trust. It is a long and humbling journey to recognise how deeply those colonial logics live within the nervous system, shaping not only what I see but also what I fail to notice.
Decolonising therapy does not mean claiming purity. It involves being more honest about the frameworks we inherit, the harm we may unconsciously continue, and the ways even our most well-meaning practices can bear the mark of dominance. It is about prioritising the voices of those most affected by colonisation, racism, and intergenerational trauma, and following their lead.
This is not a definitive guide. It is a gesture of responsibility, a practice of listening, and a commitment to being changed by what I come to see.
The call to decolonise is resonating across disciplines, including education, the arts, and, increasingly, psychotherapy. What does it mean to decolonise therapy, a practice already linked with healing and care? Can something that seems harmless still cause harm?
The truth is that therapy does not exist separately from history. It is intertwined with it. It has inherited the assumptions of empire, the logic of capitalism, the moralism of Christianity, and the individualism of the West. To decolonise therapy is not to reject it, but to hold it accountable, to question where it originated, who it benefits, and what it excludes.
Therapy as an Inheritor of Empire
“The coloniser constructs the colonised as a wounded creature, needing rescue and reformation — never recognition.”
Frantz Fanon
Modern psychotherapy originated in Europe, characterised by its white, male, Christian, and educated origins. Its key figures were influenced by colonial perspectives, even as they studied the mind. Freud, for example, compared “primitive” cultures with the unconscious, both viewed as irrational, childlike, and requiring containment. This hierarchy of knowing reflected the colonial hierarchy of peoples.
Today, we inherit models that often assume a Western, liberal, individualistic self, a self defined by autonomy, rationality, and verbal insight. Yet for many, particularly those marginalised by race, class, gender, or migration, this is not the lived experience. The consulting room can feel like another site of erasure, a place where the dominant culture is once again centred.
The Unspoken Inheritance: Generational Trauma and Predictive Minds
“Trauma decontextualised in a person over time can look like personality. Trauma decontextualised in a people over time can look like culture.”
Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands
Therapy often begins with the question: what happened to you? Trauma doesn’t always begin in one’s own life. It can stretch back across generations, through colonisation, displacement, enslavement, and silence. This is especially true for Black and Brown people living in white-majority cultures like Britain, where historical trauma is not only remembered, it is relived.
Such histories shape the predictive brain. We do not experience the world as it is; we perceive it through the lens of expectation, formed by past experiences. If a nervous system has learned that the world is unsafe, hostile, or dehumanising, as many Black Britons have, then the body will brace for danger even in spaces that claim to be “safe.”
“The body, especially the Black body, is not just where trauma lives. It is also where resilience lives. Where song lives. Where the ancestors still speak.”
Resmaa Menakem
In this way, generational trauma is not just psychological; it is neurological. Passed through tone, posture, hypervigilance, silence, and the quiet grief of what was never allowed to be named.
Christianity, Morality, and the Fixing Gaze
“Healing begins where the wound was made. And the wound was made in the rupture from land, from lineage, and the truth of our beauty.”
Bayo Akomolafe
Much of therapy upholds a Christian moral framework, even when it appears secularised. The idea that we are broken and in need of healing, that pain is a flaw rather than a signal, that insight will lead to salvation, all reflect older religious patterns.
Historically, Christianity regarded non-Christian cultures as “heathen,” closer to nature and lacking a moral compass. Colonisation often followed, justified by a belief in spiritual and civilisational superiority. Therapy has sometimes echoed this, positioning itself as the enlightened way to become “well,” while dismissing or appropriating the very traditions it once labelled as primitive.
The White Gaze in the Consulting Room
“Whiteness is not a skin colour, it’s a way of seeing, of not seeing.”
bell hooks
For clients of colour, the therapy room can reflect the broader society. White therapists, even with the best intentions, might not recognise the effects of systemic racism, cultural dislocation, or historical trauma. The silence surrounding race can itself be retraumatising.
Decolonising therapy involves challenging the notion of the neutral observer. The therapist is not outside history; our gaze is never entirely neutral. We all carry biases influenced by whiteness, class, and aspects we have never had to reflect on. In Britain, whiteness remains the unmarked norm, and those who do not conform to it must constantly adapt, translate, and defend their experience.
“We cannot individually ‘get over’ trauma rooted in systems of violence. We heal in community, by resisting what hurt us.”
Prentis Hemphill
Individualism and the False Promise of Wholeness
“I am because we are.”
African proverb (Ubuntu)
Much of therapy focuses on the individual. The unspoken message is: if I understand myself better, I will be free. But what if the suffering is not personal? What if the pain is political, ecological, or historical?
Black clients, for example, may carry not only their trauma but also the exhaustion of surviving within a system not designed for them and asking them to “work on themselves” without recognising that the system can feel like gaslighting.
“This healing work is not about getting over it. It is about living inside it with grace and dignity, while changing the world that caused it.”
Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter
Trauma theory and predictive mind theory show that adaptation is often mistaken for illness. What appears as mistrust, hypervigilance, or low mood may be intelligent responses to a persistently unsafe environment.
Therapy’s Disconnection from Land and Ancestry
“The land is not just where we live. The land lives in us.”
Bayo Akomolafe
Western models often see the mind as separate from the body and disconnected from land or ancestry. However, for many cultures, healing is not just internal but also relational, ecological, and rooted in ancestors.
Colonialism not only seized land but also cut the bond between people and place, between healing and the natural world. Therapy, too, has often lost this connection. To decolonise therapy is to remember we are not brains in jars. We are bodies on Earth, woven into landscapes, lineages, and elemental rhythms.
“When we discuss ancestral healing, we’re referring to recalling ways of being that capitalism, slavery, and empire attempted to erase, not only from our minds but also from our nervous systems.”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
The Wellness Industry and the Myth of Neutrality
“We live in a world where wellness is marketed as consumption, where therapy is about coping, and healing is divorced from justice. This is not healing. This is compliance.”
Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry
Modern therapy risks becoming part of the wellness industry, helping individuals optimise, adjust, and become more functional. However, this also mirrors a colonial logic: making the subject more productive, more self-managing, and more aligned with the needs of capital.
But what if therapy was not about adaptation but about resistance? What if the therapist was not a technician of the self but a companion in grief, in rage, in remembering?
Decolonising therapy urges us to question the notion of neutrality. It encourages us to adopt a stance to recognise the context we’re in and to listen for voices that were previously silenced.
Language, Power, and Whose Knowledge Counts
“Even when we are silent, we are still speaking. Our silence is not the absence of voice, but the weight of memory.”
Saidiya Hartman
Even the language we use in therapy matters. Psychobabble and diagnostic labels often obscure more than they reveal. They can become another form of colonisation, categorising people according to norms they had no say in shaping.
Decolonising therapy involves broadening our understanding of knowledge. It means listening to stories, metaphors, silence, and prayer. It involves creating space for ancestral wisdom and for languages that hold truths our theories cannot yet comprehend.
“I am not an individual. I am a chorus of those who came before me, those who didn’t survive, and those who dream through me.”
Toni Cade Bambara
A Practice, Not a Destination
“Decolonisation is not a metaphor.”
Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang
Decolonising therapy is not a checklist or a branding strategy. It is a practice, a commitment to unlearning, listening, and accountability. It involves restoring complexity, not assuming every person wants to be “better,” but allowing them to be whole, messy, plural, and free.
It asks us to see the consulting room not as a retreat from the world, but as a place where the world enters. Through skin, through silence, through tears that are not just personal but historical.
To decolonise therapy is not merely about seeking healing, it is about reimagining what healing truly signifies. Rather than asking ‘How can I function better?’, it asks instead: ‘How can I live in an attuned relationship?’
With myself.
With others.
With the land beneath me.
With the ancestors behind me.
And with the world not yet born.
By Rory Singer
You can also read this post on our Substack journal, Unfolding.