The Whispered Rules of Belonging: How Counseling Education Tried to Silence Me

I entered my counseling graduate program full of hope.

I thought I was stepping into a space of healing, one where I could learn how to support others through pain, trauma, and transformation. I didn’t expect to find myself shrinking just to survive.

The first time I was called “articulate” in class, I knew what it meant. It was said with a smile, meant as a compliment, but there was a pause behind it. I had just shared something personal and vulnerable. “You’re so articulate,” my professor said, surprised. I’d heard it before, growing up in white spaces: You speak well, for someone like you.

At the time, I brushed it off. I had already learned how to code-switch, how to smooth out the edges of my voice to fit into rooms never designed for me. I didn’t realize how deeply I would need to rely on those skills to survive graduate school.

As the semester continued, the message became louder, not through shouts, but through silence, micro-corrections, and side comments. I was expected to contribute, but only in ways that fit a certain mold. The more I showed up as myself—bringing in my lived experience, cultural context, and a passion for justice—the more discomfort I seemed to provoke.

One day, after receiving written feedback on my clinical skills as a novice therapist, I read a line that stayed with me. “Be careful; your confidence might come across as cocky.” It wasn’t in response to a class discussion or a moment of arrogance. It was a formal evaluation of my professional development, and that comment, couched in concern, landed differently. It suggested that even in areas where I showed strength, I needed to shrink.

That moment marked a shift. I started to pay attention, really pay attention, to the rules no one said out loud, but everyone enforced. The way certain theories were treated as gospel, always white, male, and Eurocentric. The way diversity was reduced to a sidebar in textbooks, if it appeared at all. The way my classmates looked at me when I challenged the assumption that therapy is neutral.

I started to understand that I wasn’t just being trained in therapeutic skills. I was being trained to conform.

As I began to name the colonial underpinnings of the theories we studied, how psychology’s foundations often erase Indigenous, Black, and non-Western understandings of wellness, I was met with gentle deflections. The feedback was wrapped in kindness, but the message was familiar: You’re too much. Your language makes us uncomfortable. Why can’t you focus on strengths? We’re already doing so much in this field for marginalized populations, more than any other mental health profession.

At the encouragement of a mentor, I submitted a proposal for a national counseling conference, a conference where I’d been warmly received the year before for presenting on neurodiversity-affirming practices. This time, I proposed a presentation on decolonizing mental health care and increasing accessibility for students, clinicians, and clients of color.

Instead of encouragement, I was met with escalating resistance. Feedback that initially seemed supportive soon shifted into a cycle of revisions—each draft met with new concerns, new flaws, new requests. My ideas were called unclear, my language too forceful, and my critique too negative. I was told to “highlight the positive,” to “focus on what’s working,” to center “solutions instead of problems.” They wanted more citations, more balance, more data. It was framed as academic guidance, but the subtext was clear: my analysis made them uncomfortable.

What they didn’t seem to understand is that for many students of color, critique is not abstract; it’s personal. When the theories we’re taught erase our communities, when our histories are missing from the syllabus, when justice is reduced to a footnote, we are not simply excluded; we are harmed. The frameworks meant to help us become counselors can end up invalidating the very identities we bring into the room.

I brought evidence. I shared statistics about racial disparities in access to mental health care, the mismatch between provider demographics and the populations they serve, the impacts of historical trauma and systemic exclusion. These weren’t abstract points, they were lived realities. Still, I was asked to revise. Still, I was told it wasn’t enough.

It began to feel like a slow erasure. Each edit chipped away at the heart of what I was trying to say. I softened my language, reworded references to colonization and white supremacy, and reshaped my message to fit more neatly within the comfort zones of my reviewers. With each change, something in me grew quieter—until the silence began to echo what I was trying to resist.

That’s when I started to see the deeper pattern: how our field often pathologizes the natural responses people have to oppression. Pain becomes a diagnosis. Grief is labeled as dysfunction. Anger is misread as instability. The systems that create harm—capitalism, poverty, and racism—are erased, leaving people to blame themselves for their distress. What remains is a person held responsible for their symptoms, and a profession too cautious to confront the conditions that produce them.

I came to counseling to help people heal. But I couldn’t ignore how much of what I was learning seemed designed to make people fit back into the systems that hurt them.

So, I sought out other voices. I read Resmaa Menakem, Jennifer Mullan, and others who dared to name the legacies of harm in our field. I learned that what I was experiencing wasn’t unique—it was systemic. As Dr. Jennifer Mullan writes, “The mental health industrial complex has always been a tool of compliance, rooted in white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy.” Now, in the final months of my training, I carry a different understanding of healing. It’s not about adjusting people to unjust systems. It’s about holding space for truth. For grief. For resistance. For reclaiming our stories and our bodies.

And most of all—for naming what’s broken.

Because we can’t heal what we’re afraid to name. And I refuse to keep whispering.