What Does It Mean to Decolonize Therapy?

Jennifer Mullan, PsyD, is more than a clinical psychologist. She’s a scholar-activist, an ancestral channel, and a paradigm crusher. She views much of contemporary psychotherapy as part of an outdated and broken system, rooted in Eurocentric values and methodologies. In her work to decolonize therapy, she encourages practitioners and support seekers alike to break free from these constraints, which can be not only unhelpful but also retraumatizing for people from marginalized communities.

This involves moving toward an entirely new model that considers how the ancestral, collective, political, and psychological aspects of our daily lives intersect and impact us, as she explains in her 2023 book, Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice. She also addresses the subject in her podcast, From Root to Bone With Dr. Jenn Mullan.

As a multiracial, Black-identified cisgender woman of Panamanian, Irish, Italian, and Indigenous descents, Mullan has endeavored to do this hard work in her own life, too. She spoke with us about the act of decolonizing therapy, developing a relationship with rage, and adopting a more collective approach to mental health. 

Experience Life | From your perspective, what does it mean to decolonize therapy?

Jennifer Mullan | Decolonizing therapy is about uprooting and disconnecting from colonial harm. And identifying how we as healers, helpers, and space holders may engage in that kind of structural, emotional, political harm — even when we are “well-intentioned.” That goes for the practitioner as well as the client.

Decolonizing therapy looks at how colonization deeply impacts how we think, how we engage, and how we seek healing. As Angela Davis says, “‘radical’ means ‘grasping things at the root.’” That is what we are doing in decolonizing therapy — ensuring folks are helped and learn to heal from the root.

Whether we’re looking at the transatlantic slave trade, residential schools, or Japanese internment camps in what’s now known as the United States, these various forms of colonization have impacted how a people and a culture have learned to do relationships with our bodies, with each other, and with the land around us.

My invitation is for therapists to look at how the colonial wound leads to inflammation in the body. As we know, trauma, stress, and inflammation are besties. Decolonizing therapy focuses on political access — how our people responded to historical trauma and how that shows up in us today.

EL | How has the mental health industry potentially caused harm, particularly to people of color?

JM | Therapists and clinicians operating from dominant Western psychological frameworks have historically aided in incarcerating people who did not fit within the margins of society. Anyone that pushed up against the dominant political structure or belief system was often seen as “manic” or “psychotic,” and research has shown that this happens at a higher rate with Black and Indigenous bodies.

So the question is, What is sane? And who gets to decide what sanity is in a world where many people don’t feel seen? People have lots of reasons to revolt, to rebel, to rage.

Oftentimes, we’ll see individuals who have alternate experiences or realities. Sometimes it’s for a period of time, like when dealing with grief. We often forget that leaving home, being forcibly removed from land, and watching genocides on TV or social media causes vicarious re-traumatization, as therapists call it. It may not actually be happening to someone, but it’s having an impact on their mind, body, and spirit. Therapists have been taught to diagnose anyone or anything that’s outside the norm of what we deem happy or content.

EL | Many of us have a complicated relationship with rage, but you explain that it is sacred and holds wisdom. Why is it important to connect with our rage?

JM | Historically, emotionality hasn’t been seen as a strength, and this impacts how we respond, if at all, to big emotions like rage. Rage wants to be seen, heard, and validated — because it is protecting us. We all experience rage. It doesn’t just show up out of nowhere; rage is the love child of ancestral trauma, shame, and suffocated grief. It desires to be seen and heard and for action to be taken — but that doesn’t mean violence. Sometimes we correlate violence with rage because we’ve seen unbridled rage harm people.

Also, we have been socialized to quiet and pathologize anything that is too much. Anything that is big, expansive, loud, a roar — our educational and mental/medical health systems have trained us to engage closer to whiteness. And the trick is, white people rage too. In fact white rage needs further studying and investigating, but instead our gaze as a society is on Black rage and people who feel too much having some sort of problem.

All people, but women in particular, have a right to look at what creates these moments of disconnect and in what areas of our life we’re pushing down and swallowing what we want to say, what we want to do, and what we need.

One of my mentors, Ruth King, who wrote Healing Rage, discusses the six disguises of rage. Rage isn’t just fighting; it can show up as distraction and devotion (flight types), dominance and defiance (fight types), and depression and dependence (freeze types). These are masks and lifelong coping mechanisms that kept us alive. Rage is not an emotion to squash or remove — rather an energy that desires to be seen, heard, and loved. I believe it’s vital to form a relationship with rage and to figure out what our inner rage child needs.

EL | How can we start to develop a comfortable relationship with rage?

JM | The first thing is to form a practice that allows you to notice the energy of rage on a daily basis. All of us have a fire somewhere, and all it takes is the wrong poke to make it blow.

I suggest having a little sacred space with a picture of yourself as a child when you were unabashedly joyful or when you started to notice society, a parent, or a teacher trying to put you in a box or dim your light. Many of us have been socialized to get small, quiet, invisible — and this disconnects us from our inner flame. This is often new and uncomfortable for people because we have been trained and socialized to fear big, bad rage. Instead what if we turned around, really looked at it, and asked what it has to teach or tell us?

I journal every morning, and one of my freewriting questions is, What does my inner rage child or teen need today? That might look like letting yourself cry, taking a quiet meditation, or punching a bunch of pillows on the couch.

Or if you have access to a gym and your body has the physical ability to do so, you could try an activity like kickboxing. It’s about letting that younger aspect of yourself feel seen, heard, and fed.

Release is a very primal, normal protective response, so we don’t need to demonize it. I highly recommend a mental, emotional, and physical practice as a way to cope with rage. My only ask is that people get serious about rage-release aftercare. That is the specific set of rituals, practices, or habits one may need post-release. Whether [it’s] a planned or a reactive “oops-release.” Either way, rage can really feel shameful if we do not set up practices or care ecosystems after the physical release of some of our anger and rage.

EL | Can you talk through the process of emotional decolonization?

JM | The emotional decolonial process is for everybody, whether your ancestors have colonized or whether you have been a colonized people.

This emotional decolonial process is about getting curious about your ancestry and examining where exploitation is showing up in your life. Exploitation is a big word, but where is there not a fair-enough reciprocal exchange in how we’re living? That can be emotionally, financially, physically, or professionally. We need to take stock of what’s no longer working for us and why that might be.

The next part is understanding the ways in which our emotions started. The emotional decolonial process involves working through your own areas: the past (historical and ancestral trauma and wisdom), the political (who and what has and has no access), the psychological (mental emotional health), and the people (community care). It is our work as helpers to journey inward and down first — then we can begin to help people unlearn and remember that they are not a problem; they are living in violent systems and trying to survive.

Finally, there’s connecting with community. I’m a huge fan of group therapy, support groups, book clubs, and affinity spaces that allow us to have a mirror to learn about ourselves.

EL | What does a more just, collective approach to mental health look like?

JM | It’s where therapists are not the end all and be all expert; they’re just one person who collaborates like a web with other practitioners. It’s understanding that we as therapists have been taught to pathologize rather than look at culture, identity, ability, and the like.

It looks like many current practitioners of therapy divesting. It looks like practitioners coming out of their own closets and honoring their neurodivergence, other ways of knowing, and their “AI,” or “ancestral intelligence,” as my friend Jen Maramba states. It means divesting from Eurocentric talk therapy practices as the end all and be all, and instead reconvening with peer support, mad liberation, somatic and nervous system care, and our own cultural medicine.

A more collective form of this work is meeting people where they’re at, which might look like getting on a bus with them and talking, rather than expecting them to come into an office. It also involves more community spaces for peer support, because as a society we’re really struggling with loneliness and isolation.

Decolonizing Therapy [my book, courses, and website with resources] was formed for therapists to understand how our well-meaning intentions can be harmful if we’re not considering culture, environment, access, and more. It’s a loving call to action for all people to begin to unfurl colonialism’s grip around how we see and engage with each other.

My hope is that this brings more liberation and equity — that individuals find some solace in ancestral whispers and develop an understanding that colonialism is deeply intertwined with our mental, spiritual, and physical health.

Kate Nelson is an award-winning writer and editor in Minneapolis and an Alaska Native Tlingit tribal member.

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