Book summary “Decolonizing Therapy”: summary

Introduction

You feel exhausted by modern life, yet traditional therapy tells you that your burnout is merely an individual flaw to fix with positive thinking. You sit on a couch while a practitioner pathologizes your reactions to systemic violence, racism, and economic pressure. This mismatch leaves you feeling isolated, broken, and misunderstood by the very systems meant to heal you.

Jennifer Mullan argues that standard Western therapy functions as an industrial complex rooted in colonial control. True healing requires emotional decolonization, a process that moves beyond symptom management to integrate political awareness, ancestral grief, and somatic liberation. You must learn to reconnect with your body and history to achieve collective well-being.

The book explores these themes through specific questions:

• How does colonial history shape your modern emotional pain?
• Why do standard diagnoses pathologize normal reactions to oppression?
• How do you reclaim ancestral wisdom for your daily healing?

1. Your Therapy Is Colonial

Jennifer Mullan argues that traditional mental health systems operate as an industrial complex that pathologizes marginalized people and ignores the root causes of global and generational trauma. Decolonizing therapy means shifting away from Eurocentric teachings and politicizing mental health practices.

Standard Western therapy is inherently colonial, requiring an evolution that integrates political, ancestral, and global well-being.

Colonization is a core psychological and spiritual wound causing forced separation from Home, which leads to depersonalization, identity crises, and chronic hypervigilance. The loss of primary connections and safety creates a long-term identity crisis and forces assimilation. It manifests in real-world effects like poverty, political oppression, structural racism, and a deep distrust of legal systems, keeping individuals and communities in ongoing grief and trauma.

Settler colonialism is not a single historical event, but an ongoing, continuous process of violence designed to replace Indigenous populations. Settler colonialism operates continuously to erase Indigenous people globally through physical, spiritual, and emotional violence for personal financial gain and the generation of wealth, treating everything including the Earth as something to be bought and sold.

The author notes historical examples of white affirmative action and structural displacement in the United States, such as the Indian Removal Act, the Homestead Act, and chattel slavery.

Global colonization and imperial resource extraction systematically impoverish native populations while enriching colonizing nations, leaving deep intergenerational scars. Global superpowers extract wealth and resources while disrupting traditional Indigenous relationships to the environment. Historical examples like the Irish Potato Famine demonstrate how British export policies caused mass starvation while crops were actively being shipped out.

The author details how Haiti was forced to pay 21 billion dollars in reparations to France for lost slave labor following the Haitian Revolution, with payments finishing in 1947, directly causing its current economic struggles. 13 million Africans were forcibly made to build society for white settlers, and 5 million Native Americans were forcibly displaced or subjected to violence.

Colonial control and dependent territories persist globally under modern imperial rule despite official international declarations of dissolution. Various world powers continue to maintain 61 colonies or territories currently in the world across 8 countries that maintain colonies or territories:

• 16 colonies maintained by France
• 15 colonies maintained by the United Kingdom
• 14 colonies maintained by the United States
• 6 colonies maintained by Australia
• 3 colonies maintained by New Zealand
• 3 colonies maintained by Norway
• 2 colonies maintained by Denmark
• 2 colonies maintained by the Netherlands

Forced migration is a direct product of colonization and imperialism that fractures family systems and disrupts human attachment. Changes in laws, resource extraction, and the building of foreign military bases force local populations off ancestral lands and into low-wage labor. This economic displacement separates parents from children for years, contorting early childhood attachment and collective cultural well-being.

Mental health practitioners must look beyond surface behaviors and connect client symptoms to historical and ancestral trauma. When therapists focus exclusively on individual behaviors without examining colonial and historical contexts, they pathologize normal survival responses. Practitioners must hold a conscious frame to explore how ancestral experiences mirror a client's present-day distress, rage, or hunger.

A day laborer client struggling with intense, unexplainable belly rage and poor eating habits discovers through guided therapy a direct connection to his great-grandfather's starvation during the Irish Potato Famine.

You can begin to heal by listening to your somatic responses:

• Ask your body what it wants.
• Roll your shoulders back, drink water, allow yourself to take deep breaths, and release sounds.
• Allow movements—small or large ones—to show up in your body.

2. Emotional Decolonization and the Mental Health Industrial Complex

Emotional decolonization requires bringing awareness to, unlearning, grieving, raging, and slowly divesting from the lies of a white-centered colonial lens.

Psychological enslavement now operates automatically through internalized racial inferiority and superiority, gatekeeping, colorism, and ableism. Healing requires politicizing therapy and moving past the demand to make colonial history palatable or comfortable for mainstream society.

• Be open to learning the history of the individuals, groups, and organizations you are serving.
• Consider how your history and personal experiences are/could be blocking, projecting, minimizing, magnifying, or gatekeeping.
• Consider the possibility that the root of a person's imbalance and unwellness may come from historical trauma.
• Be conscious of spaces and places of disconnection from feelings.

Ways Therapists Police People

Standard therapeutic and educational practices often function as tools that police and pathologize individuals through rigid institutional frameworks. Practices such as rigid treatment plans, strict session limits derived from managed care, demands for therapists to remain blank slates, forcing children to walk in straight lines in schools, and note-taking during sessions mimic carceral environments and ignore cultural and historical contexts.

Session limits historically emerged from managed care pricing and limitations rather than clinical research showing that 45 minutes a week is sufficient for complex psychological concerns. The 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders acts within the Mental Health Industrial Complex to decontextualize human pain.

Small Revolutions

Mental health practitioners and organizations must implement structural changes and healing-justice frameworks to stop exploiting clinicians and perpetuating colonial violence. Community mental health practices and nonprofits primarily employ recent graduates at a rate of 30 to 50 dollars per hour while charging clients 150 to 200 dollars an hour without paying for administrative tasks or adequate supervision. Overworked clinicians often manage 40 to 80 cases a month.

• Shift to a healing-justice frame
• Include community/clients/participants in all board meetings and large organizational decisions
• Cocreate and participate in affinity groups for practitioners
• Employ peer support
• Cofacilitate all sessions and groups with community, spiritual, holistic practitioners, and organizations, as needed, and relevant to the participants of therapy
• Facilitate and hold group and circle spaces not related to a problem
• Encourage peer/therapy participant support
• Discuss the most harmful rules and policies that your organization/practice/hospital/school/board engages in and create coalitions to abolish them and recreate new ways of helping
• Instead of paying consultants, pay for childcare services at your hospital/school/offices
• Engage in outings and activities that do not include a therapy focus for the practitioners
• Provide interns and practicum students and employees 40-50% of the rate/fee, instead of 15-25% of the hourly fee
• Learn from community organizers and commit to creating space for racial identity work, ancestral processes, and political understandings
• Include colonial wounding, historical trauma, intergenerational, and racial trauma in the education of practitioners across the disciplines

3. From Lobotomies to Liberation

The root causes of modern mental and emotional trauma stem directly from over 500 years of colonial violence, government policies, and medical institutions.

Western psychotherapy, social work, and psychiatry have largely operated through an individualistic, patriarchal, and oppressive lens. These fields medicalize and dehumanize the experiences of BIPOC communities while calcifying helpers from their own emotions. Indigenous healing philosophies are built on a wellness model, whereas the Western medical model focuses purely on illness.

Modern mental and behavioral health treatments originated in 16th-century asylums that functioned as carceral institutions to confine the poor, criminalized, and non-conforming. Historical institutions used somatic treatments, purges, bleedings, and terror to restore order. St. Mary of Bethlehem in London, known as Bedlam, and the Hôpital général de Paris housed individuals deemed mentally ill or criminal, subjecting them to horrific confinement and public exhibition.

Origins of Asylums

The term alienist derives from the Latin word alius, meaning other, which transformed into the French term for insane. Medical doctors treating the insane were called alienists in the 19th century before the adoption of the term psychiatrist. Plantations and early asylums shared core management tenets that continue to influence modern punitive mental health and educational institutions.

In residential treatment centers and psychiatric units today, therapeutic holds, behavior point charts, food restrictions, and threats of being sent to detention mirror the carceral mechanisms of asylums and plantations.

Scientific Racism

Scientific racism was historically weaponized to invent fake mental illnesses that pathologized enslaved Black people's natural desire for freedom and resistance. Pro-slavery advocates and medical professionals created fabricated diagnoses to control human impulses.

On March 17, 1851, Dr. Samuel Cartwright presented a report to the Louisiana Medical Association inventing Drapetomania as a mental disease causing enslaved people to flee bondage. He also created Dysaesthesia Aethiopica to explain laziness caused by physical abuse and whippings.

Racialized Schizophrenia

During the Civil Rights Era, psychiatric diagnoses like schizophrenia were fundamentally shifted and racialized to criminalize and sedate political resistance from Black men. A 1968 medical article described schizophrenia as a protest psychosis for Black men developing hostile feelings after aligning with Malcolm X. In 1974, Haldol ads targeted angry Black men with raised fists. According to a 2005 Washington Post report, Blacks in the United States are four times as likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia compared to whites, and Hispanics are three times as likely.

The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond and Dr. Maulana Karenga established that race prejudice combined with institutional power equals systemic racism.

Practitioners can apply emo-decolonial practices to challenge arbitrary Eurocentric clinical rules and honor multiple cultural pathways to wellness.

You can use emo-decolonial practice offerings to transform therapeutic containers. Consider these steps in your work:

• Notice where attachment concerns in therapy participants begin to arise.
• Get curious about Eurocentric arbitrary rules that encourage conformity, individualism, and not getting critical of possible alternatives to dominant practices.
• Consistently ask Who regulates your therapeutic healing relationships, and why?
• Consider multiple forms of processing emotion and communication that your therapy participant may require.
• Honor, consider, and invite multiple forms of wellness.
• Inquire daily about how colonial practices, education, and socialization have impacted the way you engage and do therapy.
• Challenge the pathologizing of behavior.
• How can we honor science, while honoring the felt sense, experience, intuition, and support sovereignty in therapeutic relationships?
• How did the barbaric and racist treatment of enslaved Africans in the South impact Black Americans and Black-identified people globally, today?

4. Critique of Diagnosis and Capitalism Fatigue

Standardized psychological diagnoses and the DSM function as colonial tools that decontextualize human suffering, feed capitalism, and pathologize normal reactions to systemic oppression.

Diagnostic categories fail to account for context, culture, and language gaps. They turn big emotions resulting from structural inequalities into individual mental disorders. This medicalization creates an expedited pharmaceutical pipeline that benefits corporations while blaming individuals for societal failures. Last year saw 13.4 billion dollars in antidepressant sales worldwide and 6.5 billion dollars in revenue generated by antipsychotic medications. Between 1847 and 1870, 80 percent of the population in the New York City Lunatic Asylum consisted of immigrants.

A newly immigrated individual experiencing obsessive behaviors resulting from severe trauma such as bombings, military training, and lost family members was inappropriately diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder instead of receiving a trauma-informed evaluation.

• Notice frequently how historical events have impacted your therapy participants' worldview and nervous system.
• Instead of symptoms, consider utilizing expressions.
• Find ways to speak of and work with more humane and natural ways of speaking about perfectly normal and understandable expressions of suffering, pain, or unwellness.
• Consider not utilizing diagnosis at your centers.

Policing Language

The traditional language of mental health and social services is inherently elitist, violent, and punitive. It serves to police and pathologize marginalized communities. Institutional terminology reduces complex human experiences to restrictive labels like defiant, noncompliant, combative, and at-risk. These terms reinforce victim-blaming and maintain structural control over poor and racialized populations by framing systemic survival tactics as individual pathologies.

• Shift away from the phrase marginalized communities to historically and systematically excluded communities, communities targeted for marginalization, or intentionally made vulnerable communities.
• Use food apartheid instead of food desert.
• Find synonyms for words like defiant, defensive, treatment, trauma, oppositional, noncompliant, and combative that nurture wellness and healing.

Burnout and Exploitation

Deep professional burnout is not a personal failure of self-care routines, but a direct symptom of late-stage capitalism and failing systemic structures.

Institutions push unsustainable workloads onto employees under the guise of professional dedication. They offer superficial palliatives like vacations or spa days. This systemic gaslighting obscures the reality that chronic exhaustion is a natural, protective bodily response to relentless exploitation. Full-time manufacturing employees in 1890 averaged 100 hours per week before the 40-hour workweek was established. Sixty-hour weeks are the maximum humans can handle for three weeks before becoming less productive.

• Recognize burnout as capitalism fatigue rather than a personal failure of self-care routines.
• Examine the businesses, corporations, schools, and policies that keep people stressed, sick, and tired instead of focusing solely on individual boundaries.

5. From Historical Trauma to the Soul Wound

Historical trauma is an active accumulation and reverberation of intergenerational trauma across generations that impacts the spiritual, psychological, emotional, and physical health of descendants.

Rooted in Indigenous experiences of systematic oppression, violence, and abuse, historical trauma acts as present-day developmental, racial, or global trauma superimposed upon a traumatic ancestral past. It affects the biology and well-being of descendants who did not directly experience the original events, manifesting as depression, rage, addiction, spiritual crisis, and vacant self-esteem. Over 500 years of contact between original peoples of the Americas and settler nations produced displacement and disconnection.

When you examine a client or yourself, you must ask specific historical questions:

• How has this person/family been impacted by colonization or cultural genocide?
• Is there unresolved grief or rage affecting their well-being?
• What did our elders and ancestors know that we may have forgotten?
• Where is there resilience and strength in the individual, community, and system?

The Soul Wound

The soul wound represents spiritual injury, soul sickness, and ancestral hurt caused by cumulative losses and forced assimilation over extended periods. Eduardo Duran first utilized the concept, which Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart later conceptualized to describe how unaddressed trauma passes down to subsequent generations. It involves the loss of language, culture, and spirituality, resulting in the breakdown of family kinship networks and a deep disconnect from the self and ancestral sources.

Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart frequently highlights the severe suffering and impaired grief among the Lakota people resulting from cumulative massive group traumas such as the Wounded Knee Massacre, the assassination of Sitting Bull, and the forced removal of children to extermination and boarding camps.

Posttraumatic Slave Syndrome

Posttraumatic Slave Syndrome describes multigenerational trauma resulting from centuries of slavery, compounded by contemporary oppression, institutionalized racism, and the belief that societal benefits are inaccessible. Dr. Joy DeGruy highlights direct and indirect methods of transmitting trauma on an ancestral level for descendants of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It connects chattel slavery to present-day oppression after 246 years of chattel slavery in what is now known as the United States of America.

Conventional therapy practices often perpetuate white supremacy by maintaining rigid power dynamics, avoiding discussions of race, and pathologizing normal emotional responses to oppression. Ji-Youn Kim outlines how therapists uphold oppressive structures by positioning themselves as experts and treating racial trauma as a past event rather than an ongoing daily experience.

6. Intergenerational Trauma Transmission and Ancestral Wisdom

Trauma experiences from prior generations are passed down through epigenetic changes in gene expression rather than alterations in the DNA sequence itself.

Cellular biology and epigenetic research show that extreme stress, starvation, oppression, and colonization leave chemical marks, such as alterations in human sperm methylation patterns, which influence how future generations read their DNA and react to stress. Wolynn's work on epigenetics in 2016 and Valeii's research in 2021 explore these biological modes of inheritance.

Populations subjected to systemic violence and historical oppression exhibit cumulative PTSD symptoms known as survivor syndrome. During World War II between 1942 and 1945, approximately 120,000 Japanese and Japanese American individuals from the West Coast were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in internment camps, producing silence and emotional vulnerability in their children, the Sansei.

Mechanisms of Transmission

Trauma is transmitted across generations through multiple pathways, including direct communication, indirect nonverbal cues, projective identification, repetition compulsion, and attachment disruptions. Direct transmission involves overt discussions or modeled behaviors. Indirect transmission occurs via unconscious communication, psychodynamic projective identification where parents project unmanageable feelings onto children, and repetition compulsion where unresolved conflicts are reenacted.

Unconscious reenactments of ancestral trauma can manifest as sudden visceral rage and out-of-body responses to perceived threats. In late 2007 in Oakland, California, the author was followed home from a BART train station and screamed in fierce rage at the pursuer, later realizing through somatic therapy with Dr. Bola Cofield that she was reliving her grandmother's abuse history.

Indigenous and shamanic frameworks conceptualize extreme stress and trauma as spiritual injuries or soul loss, contrasting with the static and pathologizing nature of the DSM. Eduardo Duran and Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart introduce terms like soul sickness and soul wounding.

Emo-Decolonial Practice Offerings

Therapists can help clients decouple from inherited ancestral material by utilizing specific somatic inquiries and grounding exercises. You can guide participants using concrete steps:

• Get into the habit of asking your therapy participants: Is this yours?
• Create a small workbook with the participant related to what they might do when feeling overwhelmed by ancestral material and historical experiences.
• Create a backpack audio meditation or breathing exercise for your client to use, reminding them of things such as: Take a breath. Take a walk. Excuse yourself. Ask for clarification. Cuddle your cat. Pick a card from your Oracle Deck. Ask yourself Is this my sadness?

7. From the Inside Out: Energetic Boundaries and Practices

Energetic boundaries are invisible signatures that extend beyond our physical structure, allowing us to connect without toxic enmeshment.

Energetic Boundaries Definition

Unlike physical boundaries, energetic boundaries project far and wide. They reflect your personal style and presence, interacting constantly with the energy fields of others.

Roots of Energy Psychology

Energy psychology bridges Western psychotherapy with traditional bioenergy systems. This framework draws on Freud's psychic energy, thought field therapy, and modern energy programs. Over 100 research studies, including 51 randomized controlled trials, confirm the treatment value of energy psychology.

Burnout in Helping Fields

Helping professionals endure financial debt and a lack of emotional support. Between 21% and 61% of mental health professionals experience signs of burnout. This exhaustion stems from colonial capitalistic conditioning rather than individual failure.

Sensory-processing sensitivity makes individuals more aware of subtleties and more easily overwhelmed. Biologists have found this innate evolutionary survival strategy across over 100 species.

White supremacy and systemic oppression distort energetic boundaries. Marginalized groups often absorb privileged anxiety and risk burnout by acting as uncompensated community healers.

You can establish a felt sense of energetic protection using physical and somatic exercises:

• Feel the 360-degree space around you by sitting quietly and sensing the air extending about 1-3 feet, stretching your arms above your head, to the sides, and to the front.
• Place a physical boundary around you using a six-foot piece of string, yarn, shawls, towels, or a sheet, adjusting the distance to find what feels right.
• Clear your space by placing your hands in front of your chest with palms facing out, taking a deep breath, and exhaling slowly while pushing outward to move unwanted thoughts or situations outside of your boundary.

Swathiti, a 19-year-old South Asian nonbinary goth-identified person, came into therapy asking direct questions about empaths, visions, and the therapist's relationship with ancestors, leading to a successful two-year therapeutic relationship. This work relied on the author's 18 years of psychotherapy practice, 10 years in a mentoring container with Dr. C., and over two years of therapy work with Swathiti.

8. Emo-Decolonial Work and Collective Liberation

Emo-decolonial work requires a co-occurring four-part practice spanning political, psychological, collective, and ancestral arenas.

You must engage simultaneously across four distinct arenas to achieve true emotional decolonization:

• POLITICAL: Politicizing Your Practices
• SELF/PSYCHE: Emotional Evolution, Including the Body, Spirit, and Mind
• COLLECTIVE: Cocreating Decolonial Pathways in Emotional (Mental) Health
• ANCESTRAL: Communing and Getting to Know Our Ancestors and Ancestry

Emo-Decolonial Engagement

You can use natural plant medicines as accessible allies for processing grief and rage. In 2020, Dr. Jacqui Wilkins of Xálish Medicines categorized these botanicals by their functional effects on the nervous system.

• Use Hawthorn, Rose, or Linden to soothe the heart during grief and rage
• Look toward Marshmallow leaf, Mullein, and Lemon Balm to cool internal fire and balance the nervous system
• Work with Mugwort, Vervain, Ginger, or Mints to move stagnant anger and energy
• Utilize Shooting Star or California poppy flower essences for embodiment and integration

Jarod felt not Black enough and experienced structural racism in a corporate board meeting. He used a Somatic Soul Trauma Timeline to trace his behaviors and diagnoses to colonization and family history linked to the antebellum South of 1865.

Peer Support as Therapeutic

You find true community through justice-oriented peer support that institutional individual care cannot match. The author coordinated Peers Educating Peers for 13 years after the organization first changed her life at 20 years old.

• Identify the need of those most affected by harm.
• Identify our shared focus and shared goal.
• Identify what is being done.
• Identify what folks need to include community members.
• Build community together, including outings and cookouts not related to the work.

Practitioner Self-Care and Resistance

Mental health practitioners suffer from severe burnout and capitalism fatigue because the medical-industrial complex exploits empathy. Anonymous social workers reported managing up to 89 clients, suffering office heart attacks, and facing threats during bereavement leave. Bethell et al. noted in 2022 that 21.8 percent of U.S. children ages 3 to 17 were assessed for one or more health conditions.

• Acknowledge sociodemographic, social, political, and health risk factors.
• Ensure methodologies are appropriate to the questions being addressed.
• Consider not creating theories without the consent and lead guidance of original descendants.
• Include community members and service users in research design, conduct, and analysis.
• Define and clarify differences between treatment and healing.

10 Key Ideas

1. Standard Western therapy functions as a colonial industrial complex that pathologizes normal survival responses and ignores the root causes of systemic and historical trauma.
2. Emotional decolonization requires unlearning the lies of a white-centered colonial lens and divesting from harmful institutional frameworks like rigid treatment plans and session limits.
3. The historical origins of mental health institutions in 16th-century asylums and scientific racism weaponized fake diagnoses like drapetomania to control and criminalize marginalized populations.
4. Standardized psychological diagnoses in the DSM decontextualize human suffering and fuel a pharmaceutical pipeline that pathologizes normal reactions to structural oppression and capitalism fatigue.
5. Historical trauma acts as an active accumulation and reverberation of ancestral hurt, soul wounds, and posttraumatic slave syndrome across generations.
6. Trauma is transmitted across generations through epigenetic changes in gene expression, direct communication, and unconscious behavioral reenactments.
7. White supremacy and systemic oppression distort energetic boundaries, forcing marginalized helpers to absorb anxiety and risk burnout through uncompensated emotional labor.
8. Healing requires an emo-decolonial practice spanning four distinct arenas: political, self and psyche, collective, and ancestral.
9. Justice-oriented peer support and natural plant medicines offer accessible, community-centered pathways for processing grief and rage that institutional individual care cannot match.
10. Practitioners can utilize somatic soul trauma timelines to help clients trace their present-day distress and behaviors back to colonization and family history.