Our Commitment to Anti-Colonial and Collective Care in Therapy.

Why We Reject Pathologizing

Psychology as we know it did not emerge in a vacuum. It was built within colonial and capitalist systems that defined wellness through control, productivity, and Western individualism. These frameworks turned difference into disorder and separated healing from culture, community, and land. They pathologized Indigenous, Black, Brown, queer, trans, and neurodivergent ways of being while naming conformity as health.

These insights align with abolitionist thinkers such as Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who remind us that healing requires the creation of life-affirming structures, not punitive ones. In therapy, this means moving away from coercive interventions and toward relationships of accountability, consent, and collective safety.

What specific Indigenous scholars show, and why it matters

• Joseph P. Gone and Joseph E. Trimble link today’s mental-health inequities among American Indian and Alaska Native communities to colonial policies that outlawed ceremony, displaced people from land, and replaced Indigenous knowledge with Western diagnostics. Gone argues for “alter-Native psy-ence”: community-defined, ceremony-based, sovereignty-honoring care. In practice, that means talking circles, sweat lodge, culture camps, and language restoration are not add-ons but core treatment, and outcomes are judged by restored relationships, roles, and cultural continuity rather than only symptom checklists.
  
  

• Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart introduced Historical Trauma and Unresolved Grief, describing how boarding schools, land loss, and family disruption create collective wounds that echo across generations. Her Lakota group interventions (Iwankapiya) focus on grief education, storytelling, ritual, and community witnessing to transform shame into belonging. The takeaway is that grief, substance use, and numbness are intelligible responses to historic harms, so healing must include collective mourning and cultural reconnection.
  
  

• Eduardo Duran describes the “soul wound,” a name for trauma that sits in spirit, body, kinship, and land all at once. He documents therapeutic work that integrates prayer, song, story, and local ceremony with clinical skill. The implication is clear: if care ignores spirit, land, and kin, it will misread the wound and miss the medicine.
  
  

• Laurence Kirmayer, Gone, and Joshua Moses caution against treating “historical trauma” as a single syndrome. They urge clinicians to specify mechanisms: cultural suppression leads to role loss, which erodes meaning, which fuels despair, which shows up as substance use or violence. That clarity invites targeted responses like rebuilding roles for youth, renewing ceremony access, and strengthening land-based practices, alongside clinical support.
  
  

• William Hartmann and Gone outline anticolonial prescriptions: center sovereignty in program design, privilege local definitions of wellness, and measure success by surveillance and cultural continuity. They document providers who pair therapy with elders’ guidance, seasonal rituals, and communal responsibilities, which improves engagement and relevance.
  
  

How practice changes, concretely

1. Intake and formulation: Ask about land ties, boarding-school history, child removal, language loss, and ceremony access. Map distress to disrupted relationships, roles, and stories, not only to individual symptoms.
   

2. Care planning: Pair clinical tools with culture as treatment. That can mean scheduling sessions around community ceremonies, inviting elder consultation, integrating talking circles, and supporting language or land-based activities.
   

3. Evaluation: Track belonging, role restoration, language use, ceremony participation, and community connection alongside symptom change.
   

4. Accountability: Place tribes and local leaders in decision roles, not only advisory roles. Align funding and documentation to community definitions of success.
   

Why this reframes “pathology”

Across this scholarship, what gets labeled depression, addiction, or oppositional behavior is often a legible response to land theft, school trauma, and cultural erasure. The clinical task shifts from correcting individual deficits to restoring relationships, meaning, and sovereignty. That is the core of alter-Native psy-ence, historical trauma healing, and survival-centered care.

For us, rejecting pathologizing is an act of care and resistance. It allows clients to locate their pain within a broader social and historical map rather than internalizing blame. We approach every session as a shared space of inquiry, a place to reimagine what thriving can mean outside of colonial definitions.