Abolitionist Therapy and Sexual Healing as Collective Care

Term / Principle	Meaning	Why It Matters	How We Practice It
Abolitionist Therapy	Cultivating healing without punishment, pressure, or forced compliance.	Safety deepens when people are not being corrected or controlled.	We offer pacing choice, consent in every step, and curiosity instead of authority.
Non-Pathologizing Lens	Seeing emotions and adaptation as intelligence, not flaw.	Many responses labeled as “disorder” are forms of survival wisdom shaped by context.	We ask what a response protected rather than what is “wrong.”
Decolonial Healing	Recognizing how systems created shame around desire, identity, and emotion.	Ideas of “normalcy” often come from colonial, religious, and medical authority.	We explore origins of beliefs gently and support your right to choose what aligns with you.
Consent-Centered Care	Collaboration instead of hierarchy.	Safety grows when care is chosen, not imposed.	Clients set pace, communication needs, and boundaries. We adapt to capacity and preference.
Sexual Healing as Liberation	Honoring desire, grief, safety, and pleasure as part of being whole.	Shame often comes from systems rather than personal failure.	We support gentle reconnection to desire, boundaries, and embodied choice.
Disability-Honoring Practice	Valuing sensory needs, stims, pacing, and rest.	Access and dignity are inseparable.	Movement welcome, alternative communication welcome, capacity-aligned pacing.
Nervous System Awareness	Understanding that bodies respond to safety and danger long before language.	Freeze, shutdown, or overwhelm often reflect protection, not resistance.	Somatic options, sensory-supportive grounding, gentle pacing guided by the body.
Collective Care Lens	Honoring interdependence and community care.	Healing is shaped by social conditions and relationships, not only individual effort.	We name structural harm, welcome chosen family if desired, and strengthen support networks.

Abolitionist Therapy and Sexual Healing

“What if healing is not compliance, but reclamation.”

Abolitionist Therapy and Sexual Healing

Idea	Description
Why People Come to Therapy	Many people enter therapy not because they are broken, but because they have lived inside stories that were never meant for them. Systems often reward obedience, punish difference, and teach us to question our instincts instead of trust them.
What Abolitionist Therapy Asks	Abolitionist therapy invites a quieter question. What changes when healing is not compliance, but reclamation.
From “What is wrong” to “What happened”	Instead of focusing on deficits, we explore environments survived, strategies that made life possible, and the intelligence in those responses. Withdrawal can be a nervous system choosing life. Resistance can be care.
Rooted in Abolitionist Thought	Abolition reminds us that many systems we were taught to trust are rooted in containment and punishment. As Mayor and Williams note, carceral logic can rely on force, surveillance, and the belief that some people are disposable.
Building New Possibilities	Abolition is not only about ending harm. It is about presence and building life affirming institutions. We practice toward futures that honor dignity, consent, and shared safety.
Sexual Healing in this Lens	Sexual healing becomes a return to voice, sensation, agency, and connection after systems that encouraged dissociation from pleasure and body. It is slow and relational. It honors pacing, consent, curiosity, and breath.
Freedom as Practice	As Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes, freedom is not a secret. It is a practice. Practice includes slowness, choice, community, and repair. It makes room for contradiction. Healing can be messy, sacred, quiet, and communal.
Core Belief	People are not problems. People are stories still unfolding, shaped by bodies with memory and cultures that hold ways of caring beyond domination and shame.
What We Work Toward	We do not only survive the world as it is. We practice the world as it could be. A world where safety is built through relationship, belonging is not earned by shrinking, and pleasure becomes a way of remembering freedom.

Sources for further reading: Mayor & Williams, 2024, “Dreaming of an abolitionist drama therapy.” The Arts in Psychotherapy.

What Abolition Means in a Therapy Context

Abolition in therapy is not a metaphor or a trend. It is a commitment to offering care that does not rely on punishment, pressure, or control. It asks us to stay curious when someone protects themselves, rather than demanding compliance or naming it resistance. It invites us to widen our understanding of safety beyond regulation and diagnosis and toward dignity and choice.

Abolitionist practice asks questions like:

• How do we support someone without making them convince us they are “trying” hard enough

• How do we build safety without using compliance as the measure of progress

• How do we honor humanity without requiring performance, productivity, or politeness

• How do we understand distress through history, culture, and power, not only symptoms

Traditional mental health systems grew inside carceral and colonial structures. That history shaped ideas about whose emotions were “too much,” whose bodies were “too deviant,” and whose pain needed to be controlled. For decades, queerness, transness, disability, neurodivergence, sex work, dissociation, and non-Western spiritual practices were pathologized.

Many still are in subtle ways, when someone is told they are “maladaptive” instead of adaptive, “avoidant” instead of protecting, “defiant” instead of discerning, “attention-seeking” instead of trying to stay alive in connection.

Abolitionist therapy does not dismiss suffering. It refuses to treat suffering as proof that someone is broken.

It treats behaviors as communication and coping, not evidence of defect. For example:

• A client who hesitates to speak is not “non-participatory” but protecting themselves after years of not being believed

• A shutdown might be a nervous system response to overwhelm, not disinterest

• Stimming, silence, scripting, or needing pauses is not avoidance, it may be regulation

• Distrust of authority can come from histories of medical, racial, or gender-based harm

Abolitionist practice makes room for all of this. It allows someone to arrive dysregulated, guarded, angry, numb, unsure, grieving, hopeful, or exhausted, without asking them to tidy their story first.

Healing begins when people do not have to prove innocence, normalcy, or readiness in order to be supported.

Here, readiness is not a test. It is something we build together through safety, choice, and relationship.

Why Sexual Healing Belongs in Liberation Work

Sexuality is never only private. It is shaped by culture, religion, colonization, media, and power. Many people learned to disconnect from desire not by choice, but by survival. Shame often has an origin story.

Abolitionist sexual healing honors that:

• Pleasure is not indulgence. It is reclamation.

• Boundaries are not resistance. They are wisdom.

• Numbness is not apathy. It is protection.

• Slowness is not avoidance. It is self-respect.

• Saying no can be an act of survival and an act of freedom.

We create space for grief, anger, ambivalence, curiosity, and joy, because intimacy is not linear. For many, healing begins in the nervous system, not the mind. The body remembers long after language forms around experience.

What Non-Pathologizing Care Looks Like

At Phoenix Rising, to be non-pathologizing is to begin with the belief that people make sense. That every coping strategy once had a purpose. That the body is not a problem to solve, but a teacher to meet with patience.

This includes:

• Consent at every step of the therapy process

• Naming systemic harm, not placing blame on individuals

• Pace guided by capacity, not urgency

• Respect for stimming, silence, processing time, and non-linear communication

• Honoring cultural and spiritual resilience practices

• Making space for neurodivergent sensory needs and communication styles

You do not need the right language to begin. You do not need to perform wholeness to deserve care.

Abolitionist Sexual Healing in Practice

In session, this may look like:

• Exploring desire without shame or hierarchy

• Naming the impacts of purity culture, racism, transphobia, and ableism on intimacy

• Working somatically with shutdown, freeze, and overwhelm

• Reconnecting with sensation and pleasure at your own pace

• Re-learning consent as ongoing, relational, and mutual

• Moving from self-surveillance to self-trust

• Supporting communication in relationships that honors different nervous systems and processing speeds

• Valuing chosen family, queer kinship, and community support as healing environments

Healing is not about returning to who you were before. It is about becoming who you are without fear.

Collective Care as the Ground of Sexual Healing

Abolitionist therapy recognizes that healing does not happen in isolation. We are shaped by the worlds we move through and by the people who accompany us. Community, companionship, and belonging are not extras. They are conditions that make healing possible.

This does not mean rushing togetherness or forcing vulnerability. Some arrive needing distance. Trust can take time. There is room for that. Healing can begin quietly, in a room where your body is not judged, your pace is respected, and your story is held without urgency.

Reimagining Wholeness

Decolonial and abolitionist healing invite us to notice where internalized rules still live:

• I must be cured to be worthy

• I must forgive to move forward

• I must be desirable to have value

• I must not need anyone

• I must never feel anger or grief

• I must earn rest and pleasure

We do not rush past grief or complexity. At the same time, we make space for pleasure, ease, humor, and hope, even when it feels unfamiliar.

Healing is remembering that your body has always been yours.

Why We Choose This Path

We choose abolitionist care because we believe:

• People are not problems

• Survival is intelligence

• Desire is not shameful

• Rest is not weakness

• Care is not control

• Boundaries are not rejection

• Liberation is a practice, not a destination

We walk beside you, not ahead. We honor your story. We trust your body. We listen. We go slowly. We co-create safety rather than assume it.

Healing is not a return to normal.
Normal was often the wound.

Healing is a return to dignity, agency, belonging, and choice.

Want to Explore This Approach With Us?

Phoenix Rising provides queer-affirming, neurodivergent-affirming, trauma-informed, abolitionist-aligned therapy for sexual healing and identity liberation.

We serve clients online across Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and more!

You deserve care that honors your body, your story, and your freedom.

FAQ

Question	Answer
What is abolitionist therapy?	Care that does not rely on punishment, pressure, or forced compliance. We ask what happened, not what is wrong. We name structural harm and center dignity, consent, capacity, and choice. This aligns with scholarship that critiques carceral logics in mental health and imagines life-affirming care.
How is this different from traditional sex therapy?	We do not measure progress by politeness or productivity. Sexual healing includes grief, numbness, confusion, and pleasure. We explore how colonial, religious, and medical narratives shaped shame. Sessions move at your pace with informed choice in every step and practices that rebuild voice, sensation, and agency.
What if I shut down, mask, or feel numb?	Shutdown, freeze, and masking are protective responses. We treat them as wisdom, not failure. We use gentle somatic options, sensory supports, and slower timing so your body sets the speed. You do not need perfect language to begin. Showing up as you are is enough.
How do you practice consent and accessibility?	Consent is ongoing and collaborative. You choose topics, pace, formats, and pauses. Stimming, scripts, silence, and alternative communication are welcome. We adapt lighting, movement, and timing, and we can include chosen family if helpful. Safety grows through relationship, not correction. Access and dignity always travel together.
Who is this for and how do I start?	For LGBTQIA+ folx, survivors, neurodivergent people, and anyone seeking non-pathologizing care. If systems taught you to distrust your body, this space is for you. Start by booking a consult or completing our matching form. We will co-create a plan that honors culture, capacity, and choice.