Social justice counseling rests on the truth that our deepest embodied experiences are shaped by oppressive systems. In this framework, “symptoms” are better understood as survival responses or adaptations to the environment than as internal problems to be treated.
This work is not about changing your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to make you more compliant, but about honoring the costs of living in those systems, releasing the harm they have done to whatever degree possible, and carving out space to be who you truly are.
Lived experience is more important than studies or the DSM
You are the most important source of knowledge about your experience. Period.
Research knowledge is limited to what gets funded, and what gets funded reflects the interests and priorities of dominant groups. The DSM (which is based on that research) doesn’t know what it was like to grow up in your body or community. And the studies I read in grad school probably didn’t include folks like me or the marginalized clients I see.
Complex human experience cannot be captured in data.
This means curiosity comes before—instead of, even—labeling. Disabled folks who are sad about not being able to do what they love are not depressed, they are grieving. Trans folks who are on edge out in the world are not paranoid or anxious, they are rightfully fearful.
Leading with curiosity gives clients an opportunity to be believed, when they’re used to being invalidated. And then we both know what we’re really working on in therapy.
Contextualize and depathologize
Just like we contextualize experiences within family systems, we need to contextualize them within cultural, societal, and political systems. This includes everything from experiences at school and community establishments to our hobbies, what we talk about with our friends, and much more. This is what liberation psychology calls us to do: foster critical consciousness to understand the nature of our social realities outside dominant ideologies.
Naming the power structures we live under is the start, not the end, of social justice counseling. After naming, we can explore how you have adapted to those structures. What do anxiety, hypervigilance, or depression reflect about the environments you’re navigating? How can you hold onto what you need of these strategies and let go of the parts that are increasing your suffering?
What have you not been able to say or feel for fear of negative consequences in the context of those systems? I offer space to say and feel those things in sessions. Does this change the external realities? No, but it does create the freedom to release some of that tension instead of holding it all the time.
How have we internalized marginalization in our thoughts and feelings—how are we still enforcing dominant paradigms within ourselves? Exploring these questions can lead to rewriting our understanding of our struggles and even who we are. That brings us to:
Identity development as a radical act
What have we learned about ourselves from oppressive systems? How do those beliefs show up in relating to ourselves and the people in our lives?
Surviving in oppression teaches us to believe what they tell us to believe and conform to expectations we had no say in. We shrink down to fit, hiding essential parts of who we are along the way.
Part of liberation-focused therapy is in refusing to do that any longer. Waking up to oppression involves a lot of unlearning, including that which we thought to be true about ourselves.
This starts by asking questions about our everyday experiences. For instance, what types of faces, bodies, and representations of identities did you see growing up and where you live now. Did you see yourself anywhere in those? If so, what did those representations tell you about how to think and behave? If not, what did you make of your own absence?
One framework that can help us understand this process is racial identity development for People of Color, biracial people, and white people. These models describe the process of encountering structural oppression, exploring one’s own culture and belief systems, and arriving at self-definition and empowerment in relation to the dominant paradigm.
Identity development often involves sitting with shame and grief. But it also invites you to understand your struggles differently, speak to your own needs and desires, and find out what authentic living looks like for you.
Witnessing, not fixing
Many people come to therapy with stories they’ve never been able to tell or feelings no one can tolerate. We want to be less alone in our pain.
But even the mainstream language we use in the field—”treatment planning,” “outcomes,” “interventions”—suggests that clients come in with a problem and need the equivalent of a bandage, a pill, or surgery to get rid of that pain.
That’s not what social justice therapy is about. Distress based on lived experience of oppression is a right, just response, not a problem to be solved. Therapeutic witnessing means to listen deeply and be a companion as you explore the complexity of your experiences. To help you hold what is too much to hold alone.
When my client is angry about the ableism a doctor just threw at them, what is needed is recognition, not relaxation exercises or cognitive reframing. I will invite that anger into the conversation, sometimes even encourage it. Often marginalized folks minimize our own experiences of injustice to cope and survive.
It can be deeply nourishing, then, to honor the powerlessness my clients are feeling instead of trying to soothe them, or myself, by pretending there are individual solutions to distressing social conditions.
Metabolize trauma
“Healing” trauma when the world is traumatizing is a complicated idea. The trauma of marginalization doesn’t stop. For most of its history, the field of psychology didn’t even recognize that as trauma. It was too challenging to the people in charge and too hard to figure out how to use individualized treatment models to “fix.”
When trauma isn’t a thing of the past that can be “healed,” it’s more helpful to work on metabolizing and releasing its effects to the degree we are able. This is about acknowledging your own reality and how these experiences affect you, allowing that pain to be present and witnessed, and fostering practices that offer emotional release.
I’m not here to tell you which practices will do that (though I’ll offer suggestions when they’re welcome), but to invite you to notice what you might already be doing that you could do more of, and what communal or cultural practices you might participate in for this purpose.
In a social justice counseling framework, metabolizing trauma involves being realistic about what’s possible. How can you build capacity to be with your experiences instead of overwhelmed by them? How can you foster well-being in direct resistance to systems that perpetuate trauma?
And let’s remember that a life that holds trauma is about much more than suffering: it is about creativity, strength, and joy.
Therapy isn’t enough
Distress grounded in social conditions won’t be solved in therapy. Individual therapy itself is a recent practice developed by white men—that’s real. There are many good critiques to be made. At the same time, therapy is one of a collection of practices that can improve our holistic well-being.
Community care becomes more possible when you have learned that it’s okay to trust others. Reciprocal intimacy is more available when you’re clear about your own desires, needs, and boundaries, when you’ve done some healing of attachment wounds. Action and activism become lifegiving when you aren’t riddled with shame, grief, or paralysis.
Social justice counseling practices are about reclaiming and empowering ourselves.
