Our approach to care
Anti-Colonial Therapy & Collective Care
Your pain has a context. Your care should too.
Racism, displacement, transphobia, ableism, and economic pressure can shape how safe it feels to rest, belong, or ask for help. Therapy can hold these realities alongside your relationships, culture, and the histories you carry.
Our work centers Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, neurodivergent, disabled, and immigrant communities. Together, we make room to question inherited expectations, understand survival responses, and define what meaningful support looks like for you.
Get Matched With a TherapistRethinking what healing means
Who gets to define what “well” looks like?
Being able to keep working, stay quiet, or meet everyone’s expectations tells us very little about how supported you feel.
At Phoenix Rising, we make room to ask what your life requires of you, what your responses have helped you survive, and what would give you more room to choose.
What we center
- Dignity
- Choice
- Interdependence
Explore what this means for care
Your worth is not your productivity
You may be meeting deadlines while exhausted, keeping the peace while afraid, or masking your needs to remain welcome. We leave room to question expectations that make rest, support, or belonging feel conditional.
In our work together
We can define progress around what matters to you: asking for an accommodation, recognizing a limit, making space for grief, or having more choice in a relationship.
History belongs in the conversation
Our anti-colonial approach asks how power enters the room: whose knowledge is trusted, whose ways of living are treated as normal, and who is expected to adapt. We make space for the effects of racism, displacement, cultural loss, and exclusion alongside your personal and family history.
In our work together
There is room to discuss what a diagnosis means to you, experiences of harm in care, and cultural or spiritual knowledge you want respected. You decide what you want to share.
Your responses deserve context
Staying alert, withdrawing, overworking, or hiding parts of yourself may have helped you navigate unsafe or unpredictable conditions. We approach these responses with curiosity about what they protected and what they cost you now.
In our work together
We explore what still feels necessary, what you would like to change, and what support would make that change possible. You can question an approach, ask for a pause, and help shape the pace.
Care reaches beyond the individual
Collective care recognizes the relationships and material conditions that help sustain us. Chosen family, community, culture, land, housing, and access to support can all belong in a conversation about wellbeing.
In our work together
We can explore where you find belonging, where boundaries are needed, and what support beyond therapy might help. Connection should leave room for your consent, your differences, and your limits.
You bring knowledge of your life. That knowledge belongs in your care.
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The foundations of our care
Why We Reject Pathologizing
Healing cannot be separated from history, culture, community, and land.
Psychology did not emerge in a vacuum. Dominant Western traditions developed within colonial and capitalist systems that often defined wellness through control, productivity, and individualism. These frameworks have turned difference into disorder and pathologized Indigenous, Black, Brown, queer, trans, and neurodivergent ways of being while naming conformity as health.
Our approach draws on abolitionist thinkers such as Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore and their insistence on building life-affirming structures. In therapy, we carry this commitment into relationships of accountability, consent, and collective safety.
Our commitment
Care that expands dignity, agency, and belonging.
Rejecting pathologizing does not mean dismissing distress or a diagnosis you find useful. It means your identity, culture, and ways of surviving deserve context, and you deserve a voice in your care.
Indigenous scholarship & critical perspectives
Open a perspective to read more and explore its sources.
Culture belongs at the center
Gone and Trimble situate mental-health inequities among American Indian and Alaska Native communities within histories of colonization and the limitations of existing services. They describe communities seeking culturally grounded approaches and the authority to address mental health on their own terms.
Why it matters: Community knowledge, cultural continuity, and sovereignty belong in decisions about care. Locally defined healing practices deserve consideration alongside clinical tools, with communities determining what is appropriate.
Grief can carry a collective history
Brave Heart’s work on historical trauma and unresolved grief describes collective wounds connected to massive group trauma across generations. Her Historical Trauma and Unresolved Grief intervention brings historical understanding, grief work, and culturally grounded healing into relationship.
Why it matters: Grief and numbness can be understood within histories of boarding schools, land loss, and family disruption. Collective mourning, community witnessing, and cultural reconnection can have a place in healing.
The “soul wound” asks more of care
In Healing the Soul Wound, Duran explores counseling with Indigenous communities through attention to historical harm, spirituality, and culturally meaningful healing. His work challenges clinicians to question the assumptions they bring into the therapeutic relationship.
Why it matters: Care must make room for the meanings people give to spirit, kinship, culture, and land. Those meanings belong to the person and their community; they are not techniques for a clinician to borrow.
History is not a single diagnosis
Kirmayer, Gone, and Moses caution against treating historical trauma as one universal explanation for Indigenous distress. They call for attention to specific histories, mechanisms, and present-day conditions, and to the limits of claims about transmission across generations.
Why it matters: We need to ask how cultural suppression, disrupted relationships, material conditions, and ongoing discrimination affect a particular person or community. Naming history should deepen understanding without reducing Indigenous lives to inherited injury.
Healing, resilience & survivance
Hartmann and colleagues distinguish three anticolonial ambitions within historical-trauma scholarship: healing trauma, promoting resilience, and practicing survivance. They caution against collapsing collective adversity into individual pathology and call for attention to structural violence that clinical measures can miss.
Why it matters: An anticolonial approach must take Indigenous sovereignty and collective life seriously. Symptom measures alone cannot capture the political, cultural, and relational conditions that shape wellbeing.
From scholarship to accountability
How practice changes, concretely
These are implications for accountable care. Indigenous ceremonies and cultural practices remain under the direction of the communities and knowledge holders to whom they belong.
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Intake & understanding
With permission, make room for land ties, boarding-school histories, child removal, language loss, and ceremony access when relevant. Understand distress alongside disrupted relationships, roles, and stories.
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Care planning
Let clients identify the cultural supports they want involved. Respect community ceremonies and, when invited and appropriate, collaborate with elders or community-led supports without appropriating their practices.
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Defining progress
Ask what belonging, restored roles, cultural connection, and meaningful change look like to the person. Consider these alongside symptom change, without turning cultural participation into a requirement.
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Community authority
In programs serving Indigenous communities, place tribal nations and community leaders in decision-making roles. Work toward funding and documentation that answer to community-defined priorities.
Rejecting pathologizing is an act of care and resistance.
This scholarship invites us to understand distress within a broader social and historical map. Our liberatory commitment is to make therapy a shared space of inquiry, where relationships, meaning, dignity, and self-determination can shape what thriving means.
Care in relationship
Collective Care as Healing Practice
You do not have to earn support by carrying everything alone.
The demand to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” places the weight of survival on individuals, even when the conditions shaping distress are shared. Cost, discrimination, inaccessible services, and fear of being misunderstood can make reaching for care difficult.
At Phoenix Rising, collective care means taking those conditions seriously. Therapy can sit alongside chosen family, cultural belonging, mutual aid, and practical support. Together, we can explore which relationships sustain you, where boundaries are needed, and what would make care more accessible.
Mental health care is a human right.
Our work centers Black and Brown communities, including Indigenous, queer, trans, neurodivergent, disabled, and immigrant people. We believe access to care should never depend on proximity to privilege.
Room for rest, relationship, and the support you choose.
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Support without performance
You can arrive uncertain, exhausted, angry, or unsure what to say. Care does not require a story of resilience.
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Connection with consent
You decide who belongs in your support system. Collective care leaves room for privacy, distance, and boundaries.
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Access as shared work
Cost, disability access, language, and scheduling belong in the conversation about what support is possible.
Anti-colonial commitments. Everyday practice.
What this looks like in our practice.
Our abolitionist and liberatory commitments shape how we understand distress, share power, and build care. We bring clinical knowledge into conversation with community knowledge, history, disability justice, and the material conditions of everyday life.
Relational therapy
Your life belongs in the room.
We understand distress through relationships, history, and the conditions people are asked to survive.
Our relational-cultural, narrative, and liberation-focused approaches bring psychology into conversation with Black feminist thought, Indigenous scholarship, and disability justice. Race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and migration shape one another, including whose needs are believed and whose survival is judged.
In practice
- Ask what happened, what kept you going, and what it cost.
- Make room for housing, work, family expectations, culture, and access.
- Define meaningful change with you, including the conditions that need to change.
Community partnership
Care grows through shared power.
Therapy belongs within a wider network of relationships, resources, and collective action.
An anti-colonial approach recognizes communities as knowledge holders. Mutual aid, peer support, cultural spaces, and grassroots organizing can sustain forms of care that clinical services cannot provide alone. Partnership should follow community priorities and include payment or other agreed support for community labor.
In practice
- Ask which people and spaces you want involved in your care.
- Explore community resources alongside therapy when useful.
- Build collaboration around consent, shared decisions, and accountability.
Supervision & learning
Clinical authority must be accountable.
Our own assumptions, decisions, and institutional power belong under examination.
Our supervision draws on abolitionist and anti-colonial frameworks, disability justice, and Black, Indigenous, and queer scholarship. We examine how clinical language, diagnoses, and ideas about risk can reproduce racism, ableism, or demands for compliance.
In practice
- Ask whose interpretation is being treated as authoritative.
- Examine how race, class, gender, and professional power shape a session.
- Treat concerns about harm as a call for reflection, repair, and changed practice.
Accessibility & consent
Consent stays open to revision.
Your needs, boundaries, and capacity help shape the pace and structure of care.
Access takes ongoing conversation about sensory needs, communication, culture, time, money, and energy. We work collaboratively on how sessions unfold and explain options and limits. Consent should remain meaningful when you disagree, need an adaptation, or change your mind.
In practice
- Discuss pacing, pauses, processing time, and ways to communicate.
- Explain the purpose of an approach and invite questions.
- Make room to decline an exercise, revisit a goal, or request a different direction.
Beyond the therapy room
Build the conditions that sustain care.
Collective wellbeing depends on resources, relationships, and the possibility of rest.
Our abolitionist commitment asks what makes safety possible: stable housing, material support, accessible care, and relationships that can respond to harm with accountability. Within our practice, collective care also means examining workload, peer support, and burnout.
In practice
- Recognize practical support and community connection as part of care.
- Support rest and shared responsibility among people providing care.
- Advocate for accessible services and conditions that reduce harm.
You can ask how these commitments will show up in your care.
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