I decided to use the term “disability justice therapy” to describe one of my specialties because I wanted to name how the disability justice principles created by Sins Invalid are central to supporting disabled folks in therapy. So much therapy meant for chronically ill or disabled clients is about treating your symptoms as psychosomatic or training you to be less in need of support. That’s not what I’m about. 

This approach requires that we sit in complexity. You can be proud of your identity and exhausted by your body at the same time. You can want both agency and accommodations (and you deserve both!). You can reject the ableism around you while also working on your own internalized ableist narratives. You can want change without believing you are broken now. And we can explore the ways your emotional states and psyche affect your physical states while still honoring those physiological experiences as very real. 

Over the course of my work, these principles have changed the beliefs I start with, the questions I ask, and the goals I encourage clients to set. 

“Leadership of the most impacted.” 

That’s you. You are the most impacted person in the room during our therapy sessions. You are always living with the health and illness of your own bodymind*, not me. This principle calls on me to center your self-knowledge over the education I received in school and my ongoing training. (This is a central idea in phenomenological therapy as well.)

There are times when my clients’ observations about their functioning challenges or contradicts a clinical interpretation, and that’s okay. I am ready to revise my understanding based on your lived experience. This is particularly important with disabled folks, who are used to being invalidated and doubted when seeking care. I will always be a learner. 

“Our existence is resistance.” 

This principle is anti-capitalist, because capitalism equates worth with productivity. Traditional mental health treatment measures success by capitalist standards: Can you go to work or school? Maintain a social life? Be independent in your activities of daily living?

Many disabled people will never be able to check all, or even most, of the boxes the capitalist model of healthcare requires for “health.” And we are just as worthy as anyone who can. The standards by which you and I measure your well-being need to be anti-capitalist and based on your personal goals. 

Even the way well-meaning therapists expect clients to “do the work” and show “progress” can reflect the idea that productivity is what matters. Capitalism has a way of sneaking into everything. Therapy is what you need it to be, not what I expect it to do to you. 

“Recognizing wholeness.”

You are not simply the reason you came to therapy, or your disability, or your trauma history, or any other one thing I will ask you about. You are a multifaceted human with skills as well as limitations, joy as well as suffering, many ways of being at once. (A core understanding of complexity is something I appreciate about IFS therapy.) 

Therapy often starts by identifying problems. One of the ways I challenge this is by instead asking, what do you want to be different in your life in a year or two? In disability justice therapy, we tease out what other people consider your problems from what your concerns are. 

Your survival strategies make sense in a world not built for you; they are not pathologies. You are allowed to both honor the ways you have made it this far and also want relief from depression, trauma responses, anxiety, sensory overwhelm, or relational patterns that are keeping you isolated. 

“Sustainability.”

Too often, therapists come to work with agendas. And of course, you might come to therapy with an agenda too. But emotional work costs energy, just like feeding and bathing yourself, so pacing is critical. 

When you have abundant energy, we might try out something new that feels like you’re changing your life by leaps and bounds. When you’re dragging yourself through the day, we might talk about the video game you’re playing that’s bringing you joy and making the pain tolerable. Both sessions are good therapy. 

One critical way this disability justice principle shows up in therapy is around trauma work. For any client, trauma work needs to happen at the pace of trust (both between therapist and client, and internally with yourself). Especially for disabled people, the pace of this delicate work needs to account for how your bodymind responds to emotional stress. 

“Interdependence.”

This principle is a challenge to the hyperindividualism of capitalism and white supremacy. We all participate in a vast living ecosystem and need each other (and our natural world) to thrive. As I noted earlier, therapy has traditionally defined success as independence. But true well-being is about being in relationships and systems of mutual support. 

I want to help you build agency. But there is an important difference between having agency and doing everything yourself. In therapy, we might explore if your guilt or shame about needing others is about the need itself or about hyperindividualism. We can figure out together what help you want to ask for, how to ask for it, and how to receive it without shame.

And on a personal level, I’ll note that my clients and I are also interdependent. I receive great meaning from being able to follow my calling. Clients who choose to work with me give me that meaning.

“Collective liberation.” 

This principle upends the entire traditional model of therapy, which locates problems within the individual. Social justice counseling names the important truth that much of our pain is about context, not pathology. Both illness and well-being must be understood in the context of oppressive systems, and some problems can’t be solved in therapy. 

Therapy can do a lot: more insight, greater self-awareness, emotional resilience, relationship skills, accessing our wisdom and agency. But therapy can’t create more accessible systems. It can’t eliminate poverty or racism. It can’t spur medical advances and produce more empathetic, competent doctors. 

Disability justice therapy aims to help you distinguish between what belongs in your own healing work and what is the responsibility of the collective. We honor the grief, rage, and sadness of living in an unwell world. And I don’t ask you to adjust to unjust conditions, but to explore how you can thrive in spite of those conditions. 

Read all 10 principles of disability justice on the Sins Invalid site. 

*“Bodymind” is a term that recognizes our mental and physical processes are not separate, but part of a whole. It is used in disability justice to honor the interdependence of our bodies and minds.