Liberation Focused Therapy
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The history of therapy is heavily based on a colonizing, patriarchal, and appropriative foundation. However, in my practice I root in the practices of liberation focused therapy. This includes my active advocacy with the Free Palestine, Land Back, Black Lives Matter, AANHPI justice, disability justice, immigration rights, abolitionism, HAES, and mental health decolonization movements, among others.
Psychology has a harmful legacy of violent oppression. It relies on white supremacist, patriarchal, and colonizing ideas of “health”, along with appropriated practices. Though the field has come a long way, this legacy of harm continues to affect things today.
Liberation Focused Therapy as a white Therapist
It is my job to continue to practice decolonizing myself and my practice. I embody this by working to identify and dismantle the values, privileges, and ways of being that I have internalized and experienced by growing up as a white person in a white supremacist society. I am then able to bring that growth and understanding into my self as a person and a therapist.
It is my commitment and practice to engage in ongoing dialogue, decolonizing-self work, training, community, and education outside of my services. I do this to be accountable to and unlearn the harms of white supremacy. To be accountable to the legacies of harm in my lineage and my field. I do this in order to challenge myself to heal and grow as a person and practitioner. To make a safer space for folx who seek my care. To challenge, deconstruct, and change the mental health field. Additionally I do this to be able to provide therapy that upholds, affirms, and celebrates the sacred gift of difference. Without colonizing it, stealing it, or pathologizing it. To honor and uplift the many ways of being in this world, while rejecting white colonizing worldviews as the ideal or “normal” way of being.
What does Liberation Focused Therapy Look Like
When you work with me, I will practice my commitment to hold space for the richness of your worldviews and cultural identities – as well as the ways you, your communities, and your ancestors have been/are impacted by colonization, white supremacy, and imperialism. We will consider your healing process in terms of not just yourself, but to your community, ancestors, and legacy.
It is important in the healing process to identify, deconstruct, and heal from the generational and ongoing impacts of oppression. To identify, challenge, confront, and unlearn the generational and ongoing impacts of embodying/internalizing the oppressor and the privileges of supremacy. It is important to identify and honor the survival skills that let you navigate this society, while building and resourcing yourself to healing, generative community and relationships where you can be free. To gently but actively work with the avoidance, appeasement, entitlement, and defense patterns inherent in oppressor embodiment, while re-learning healthy conflict skills, accountability, repair, and authentic paths of being. It is essential to find places where you don’t have to hide just to survive – where you can unmask, and rest. And to have tools to move easefully through the messiness of unlearning oppressor patterns, and creatw more just, loving, and life-affirming ways of being.
Liberation Focused Therapy and Cultural Legacies/Worldviews
We will explore how your cultural legacies and worldviews impact your self, community, ancestry, and life’s path. You may discover gifts and places of connection from your cultural legacies. At the same time, you may realize experiences of suffering related to your cultural expectations. You may also seek to reconcile places where your identity and needs do not align with your culture and ancestry. We will work together to find your voice and vision, how they relate to your legacies, and how to integrate those on your path.
Every culture has gifts and shadows. It is also my job to help you explore the shadows of your legacies. These may be places where you have experienced wounding from your culture and ancestry. You may fear losing connection to your family, ancestry, and culture through your healing journey. We will explore ways of aligning with your unique self and staying integrated with your culture. We will also create space to integrate all that you have reclaimed, and grieve and release that which does not serve.
This also means that in working with me, I will offering healing practices for the impact of living in a society that centers and idealizes white, patriarchal, colonizing worldviews and identity (through all the layers), and imposes abuses, harm, negativity, and invisibility on those who do not assimilate or embody those worldviews and identities.
Healing Practices for the Trauma of Oppression
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I practice from an understanding that experiences of oppression can be covert as well as overt. They can be shrouded in gaslighting and hard to describe. Or they can be clearly escalated in layers of harm and violence.
Additionally, I practice from a trauma-informed perspective. I can understand how oppression impacts your present day self, as well as the effects of generational legacies of oppression. How the trauma of oppression is all pervasive – and the affect of constantly carrying this within yourself and community is undeniable. The ways that the trauma of abuse and violence within your community can directly connect to the trauma of abuse and violence from oppressors against you and your community. The ways they intersect, and feed each other. And how this generates the ongoing cycles of harm. How addressing trauma and abuse within your community can feel like a betrayal. And how not addressing it can also feel like a betrayal.
At the same time, I practice from a belief in the healing power of centering and uplifting the incredible sacredness that you hold within you – from your own being and from all those who have come before you. This core is so much more than anything that has been done to you. It is the seeds of life-affirming hope, love, and liberation passed down through you. And it is from connecting to and centering in this place within, where we can find the support to heal even the most painful of places.
In this way, I hope to provide a space for you to experience your own path of healing and transformation. It is my hope to support you in discovering your unique, very necessary, and truly sacred way of being in this world.
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I offer a variety of services that can support you on your journey:
For solo journeyers, we will work together to build a sense of safety, connection, and embodiment so you may reclaim your joy, self-love, aliveness, and community.
For partners, I offer couples therapy. We will create a path of more clear and aligned communication. You’ll learn practices to deepen intimacy with each other and your own selves.
For groups, I offer Soul Sanctuary: LGBTQ Empaths. We will come together to explore how to incorporate creativity, spirituality, and healing on the path of activism.
I specialize in supporting LGBQA and TGNC folx. I also offer a variety of therapy modalities, including: spiritual therapy, somatic therapy, expressive arts therapy, and ecotherapy
