In a clarifying moment from our recent gathering, Jennifer Mullan names why therapy is not—and has never been—neutral. She speaks to how diagnostic frameworks and therapeutic systems of organizing often create environments where neither clients nor clinicians can fully belong. These structures quietly communicate who fits, who doesn’t, and who must contort themselves to be legible.
Dr. Jenn points to the way diagnoses can flatten lived experience, turning survival responses into pathology and complexity into categories. In doing so, therapy can reproduce the very harms it claims to heal—asking people to adapt to systems shaped by empire, whiteness, and capitalism, rather than questioning the systems themselves.
She reminds us that this impacts therapists too. When practitioners are trained to prioritize neutrality, compliance, and professionalism over truth, embodiment, and history, they are also denied full humanity. Decolonizing therapy, she says, requires naming these conditions and refusing the myth that healing can happen without context.
In her framing, the work is not to make people fit therapy—but to transform therapy so that people can belong.
This is a moment from Therapy Is Not Neutral: A Decolonial Invitation to Remember, Relearn, and Resist
A Community Gathering with Dr. Jennifer Mullan, facilitated by Iya Affo
#TherapyIsNotNeutral #DecolonizingTherapy #JenniferMullan
#MentalHealthJustice #EmbodiedHealing #CollectiveLiberation
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