Thank you! And yes—exactly! It’s wild how often therapy is treated like it exists in a vacuum, separate from the real-world systems people have to survive in every day—including messy, political, and often toxic workplaces. When therapists don’t understand those dynamics, it’s easy for their guidance to miss the mark or even cause more harm.
I think part of the problem is that many therapists are trained to look inward but not necessarily outward—to focus on individual coping rather than the systems that create distress. That gap can make clients feel incredibly unseen.
That’s such a powerful analogy—and I really appreciate the sharpness of your critique. You’re right to question the way “treatment resistance” can sometimes function as a deflection of responsibility in mental health care. When practitioners stop being curious and start blaming the client, that’s not care—it’s avoidance.
At its worst, the label treatment-resistant can pathologize people who are actually responding in completely understandable ways to trauma, oppression, or misattuned care. It can mask the system’s failure to adapt, listen, or offer more humanizing approaches.
That said, I also think there’s a version of that phrase that could be reclaimed—one that reflects a mismatch between the model and the person, not a failure on the client’s part. What if instead of “treatment-resistant,” we said, “this approach isn’t resonating with what this person needs right now”? And then got curious, instead of defensive?
Your comment gets to the heart of why I wrote the piece: we need more accountability, more humility, and a greater willingness to question the frameworks we’ve been taught to uphold. Thank you for naming it so clearly.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and taking the time to include these links. I can hear the disillusionment in your words—and you’re certainly not alone in feeling this way. There’s a growing and important body of critique around the limitations and harms of the mental health system, especially when it pathologizes individuals and downplays the real impact of social and systemic injustice. I share many of those concerns.
You’re absolutely right that therapy isn’t a cure-all—and that the field has, at times, failed people in deep and damaging ways. The Dodo bird verdict and meta-analyses showing similar effectiveness across therapeutic approaches do highlight something important: it’s often not the technique itself that matters most, but the relationship, the safety, and the meaning-making that happens in the space between people.
That’s exactly why I believe there is room—and need—for different approaches. When therapy is practiced in a way that centers cultural context, collective struggle, and lived experience, it can become more than symptom management. It can be a space for reclaiming one’s voice, connecting to community, and resisting systems that cause harm. That’s not everyone’s experience, and I respect your skepticism. But I’ve also seen what’s possible when therapy stops trying to “fix” people and instead starts to witness them—fully, without shame.
I don’t believe we need to throw the entire field away. I think we need to decolonize it, reimagine it, and hold it accountable. And that includes listening to critiques like yours, not dismissing them.
Thank you again for engaging with my work and for naming your truth so directly.
Thank you so much for your kind words. It means a lot to know that the piece resonated with you. Naming the unspoken parts—especially in systems that thrive on silence—can feel risky, but responses like yours remind me why it’s worth it. I really appreciate your affirmation and encouragement.
Thank you so much for reading and for sharing your reflections with such honesty and humility. I really appreciate your willingness to sit with discomfort and acknowledge the ways your training, while valuable, didn’t always equip you to meet people where they actually are. That awareness is powerful—and necessary.
What you shared about working with people navigating poverty, debt, and housing instability in the UK resonates deeply. So often, we’re trained to locate distress inside the individual, without enough attention to the systems that create and sustain harm. It’s encouraging to hear how your experience helped widen that lens.
You’re absolutely right—centering lived experience, listening deeply, and making space to be challenged by what we hear is critical. I don’t see your thoughts as inadequate at all. In fact, your comment models the kind of self-reflection and openness that gives me hope for how this field can evolve.
Thank you so much for reading and for your thoughtful reflection. I really appreciate your willingness to sit with discomfort and use it as a space for growth—that’s not easy, and it means a lot to hear the article supported that process.
You raise a good point: perspective shapes so much of what we notice—or don’t—within training spaces. Sometimes what feels like freedom to one person may feel like constraint or erasure to another, depending on their identities and lived experience. I think there’s a real opportunity in what you said: to hold both the wisdom we gain in training and the responsibility we have, once we’re practicing, to shape the work in ways that are more liberatory, more honest, and more inclusive.
Thank you again for engaging with the piece so thoughtfully.
Thank you so much for sharing this. Your words hold so much truth, pain, and clarity. I hear the disillusionment, and I also hear the deep desire for justice, real change, and care that actually responds to the world as it is—not as it should be through the lens of privilege or conformity.
What you described happens far too often: therapy that centers the individual’s “resilience” while ignoring or even denying the harm being done to them in real time. It can feel like gaslighting—especially when tools like CBT are applied in rigid, decontextualized ways that pathologize natural, righteous responses to oppression.
You’re right: some of what gets labeled as “maladaptive” is actually resistance, awareness, and a sign that a person is still alive in the face of chronic invalidation. When the therapeutic system can’t hold space for that truth, it does end up protecting the status quo.
I’m sorry that you were pushed out of the field before you could find a space where questioning, dissent, and systemic critique were welcome. We need voices like yours. And I hope—truly—that spaces continue to open where clients are not expected to suppress their pain but are supported in naming it, and where therapists are held accountable to the world beyond the therapy room.
Thank you again for your honesty. You’re not alone in feeling this.
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with such honesty and care. I really appreciate your respectful tone and your willingness to engage with the complexity of this work.
It’s true that we each carry different histories, different forms of pain, and different pressures—often invisible to one another. The weight of presumption, from any direction, can be heavy. I deeply resonate with your hope that we can move forward with mutual respect, even when our frameworks or lived experiences don’t align perfectly.
I share your wish for dialogue that honors difference without defensiveness, and for a collective commitment to “first, do no harm.” That principle has to include cultural humility—recognizing the limits of our own lenses and making room for those whose paths diverge from our own.
Thank you again for your thoughtfulness and for holding space for peace, especially for the sake of our children. That shared commitment means a lot.
Thank you so much for your kind words and for engaging so deeply with the heart of what I was trying to express. You’re naming something so important—the way conformity often becomes a silent expectation in mental health care, and how that expectation can be profoundly damaging to both clients and practitioners.
I really appreciate your insight about the relationship between denied pain and projected prejudice. That resonates. When people are disconnected from their own wounds or conditioned to minimize them, it often limits their ability to extend compassion outward. Genuine empathy—for ourselves and for others—requires a kind of courageous honesty that many systems actively discourage.
I’m grateful for your reflection and for the reminder that respect for difference begins with self-awareness and self-regard.
Thank you for such a thoughtful and poetic reflection. I really appreciate you engaging with the piece in such a deep way. Your question about how to keep the inner voice alive, especially in academic and clinical spaces that can feel rigid or depersonalized, really resonates with me.
For me, the “lights come on” when we stop treating learning as a performance and start making space for questioning, for discomfort, and for listening, both to ourselves and to each other. Decolonizing the way we learn is as much about unlearning as it is about discovery. It’s about making space for truths that don’t always fit neatly into the frameworks we’ve been taught, and staying awake to what’s often been silenced or dismissed.
I love what you said about holding space sacred for learning and unveiling. That’s exactly what I hope we can move toward – together. Thank you again for your generous words.
Thank you so much for your openness and reflection. I really appreciate your honesty. It takes courage to name what you saw and sit with the discomfort of not knowing what to do at the time. So many of us are navigating inherited silences, and your willingness to engage in dialogue is such an important part of the healing process.
You’re absolutely right; true healing requires interactive dialogue, truth-telling, and collective accountability. We all carry pieces of this history, and I believe that when we start naming them together, we open the door to something more honest and more liberating for everyone. Thank you for being part of that conversation.
I appreciate you engaging with that line—it’s such a pivotal realization for me. When I talk about being trained to conform, I’m pointing to how certain norms in our field can unintentionally silence lived experiences, especially those shaped by systemic oppression. I don’t believe psychological pain should be politicized, but in many cases, it already is—because people’s distress is often rooted in unjust conditions like racism, poverty, or marginalization. When we ignore those roots, we risk pathologizing people instead of truly helping them heal.
My hope is that we can expand the field to hold both individual pain and the broader contexts that shape it, with compassion, not conformity.
Thank you so much for your kind words. It means a lot to know that the piece resonated with you—I wrote it in hopes that others who’ve had similar experiences would feel seen. I share your hope that more of the counseling community will begin to truly listen and reflect. Thank you for being in this work with me.
Thank you so much for this thoughtful response. Your words really mean a lot to me. Writing this piece was both vulnerable and necessary, and hearing that it resonated reminds me why we keep showing up and speaking out. I’m grateful to be in community with people who also believe in the possibility of a more just and human future, and who help bring that vision into focus. Thank you for seeing it with me.
Thank you so much for your kind words. I’m really grateful we had the chance to work together that year—I remember how committed you were to your students, and it meant a lot to be able to support your efforts in the classroom. I appreciate your encouragement more than you know, and I’ll keep speaking up—for all of us.
Thank you for your comment. I want to take a moment to clarify what I mean when I talk about colonization and decolonizing mental health, because these concepts are often misunderstood.
Colonization is not just about people migrating. It’s a violent process of occupation, displacement, and cultural erasure. When Europeans colonized North America, it involved genocide, land theft, forced removals, and systemic attempts to destroy Indigenous languages, spiritual practices, and ways of life. That history matters—not just as a past event, but because its impacts are still felt today through intergenerational trauma, broken treaties, racial inequities, and the continued marginalization of Indigenous communities.
When I talk about decolonizing mental health, I’m not vilifying individuals—I’m questioning the dominant frameworks we’ve inherited. Our current mental health systems are deeply rooted in Western, capitalistic, patriarchal, heteronormative, and ableist worldviews. Decolonizing means making space for other ways of knowing and healing—ways that center community, relationality, culture, and collective care. It means recognizing that what’s labeled as “mental illness” is often a response to systemic violence, not just an individual pathology.
Acknowledging this history isn’t about blame. It’s about truth-telling, and building a profession that can actually hold space for the full humanity and lived experiences of all people.
Thank you! And yes—exactly! It’s wild how often therapy is treated like it exists in a vacuum, separate from the real-world systems people have to survive in every day—including messy, political, and often toxic workplaces. When therapists don’t understand those dynamics, it’s easy for their guidance to miss the mark or even cause more harm.
I think part of the problem is that many therapists are trained to look inward but not necessarily outward—to focus on individual coping rather than the systems that create distress. That gap can make clients feel incredibly unseen.
Appreciate you calling this out!
Report comment
That’s such a powerful analogy—and I really appreciate the sharpness of your critique. You’re right to question the way “treatment resistance” can sometimes function as a deflection of responsibility in mental health care. When practitioners stop being curious and start blaming the client, that’s not care—it’s avoidance.
At its worst, the label treatment-resistant can pathologize people who are actually responding in completely understandable ways to trauma, oppression, or misattuned care. It can mask the system’s failure to adapt, listen, or offer more humanizing approaches.
That said, I also think there’s a version of that phrase that could be reclaimed—one that reflects a mismatch between the model and the person, not a failure on the client’s part. What if instead of “treatment-resistant,” we said, “this approach isn’t resonating with what this person needs right now”? And then got curious, instead of defensive?
Your comment gets to the heart of why I wrote the piece: we need more accountability, more humility, and a greater willingness to question the frameworks we’ve been taught to uphold. Thank you for naming it so clearly.
Report comment
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and taking the time to include these links. I can hear the disillusionment in your words—and you’re certainly not alone in feeling this way. There’s a growing and important body of critique around the limitations and harms of the mental health system, especially when it pathologizes individuals and downplays the real impact of social and systemic injustice. I share many of those concerns.
You’re absolutely right that therapy isn’t a cure-all—and that the field has, at times, failed people in deep and damaging ways. The Dodo bird verdict and meta-analyses showing similar effectiveness across therapeutic approaches do highlight something important: it’s often not the technique itself that matters most, but the relationship, the safety, and the meaning-making that happens in the space between people.
That’s exactly why I believe there is room—and need—for different approaches. When therapy is practiced in a way that centers cultural context, collective struggle, and lived experience, it can become more than symptom management. It can be a space for reclaiming one’s voice, connecting to community, and resisting systems that cause harm. That’s not everyone’s experience, and I respect your skepticism. But I’ve also seen what’s possible when therapy stops trying to “fix” people and instead starts to witness them—fully, without shame.
I don’t believe we need to throw the entire field away. I think we need to decolonize it, reimagine it, and hold it accountable. And that includes listening to critiques like yours, not dismissing them.
Thank you again for engaging with my work and for naming your truth so directly.
Report comment
Thank you so much for your kind words. It means a lot to know that the piece resonated with you. Naming the unspoken parts—especially in systems that thrive on silence—can feel risky, but responses like yours remind me why it’s worth it. I really appreciate your affirmation and encouragement.
Report comment
Thank you so much for reading and for sharing your reflections with such honesty and humility. I really appreciate your willingness to sit with discomfort and acknowledge the ways your training, while valuable, didn’t always equip you to meet people where they actually are. That awareness is powerful—and necessary.
What you shared about working with people navigating poverty, debt, and housing instability in the UK resonates deeply. So often, we’re trained to locate distress inside the individual, without enough attention to the systems that create and sustain harm. It’s encouraging to hear how your experience helped widen that lens.
You’re absolutely right—centering lived experience, listening deeply, and making space to be challenged by what we hear is critical. I don’t see your thoughts as inadequate at all. In fact, your comment models the kind of self-reflection and openness that gives me hope for how this field can evolve.
Report comment
Thank you so much for reading and for your thoughtful reflection. I really appreciate your willingness to sit with discomfort and use it as a space for growth—that’s not easy, and it means a lot to hear the article supported that process.
You raise a good point: perspective shapes so much of what we notice—or don’t—within training spaces. Sometimes what feels like freedom to one person may feel like constraint or erasure to another, depending on their identities and lived experience. I think there’s a real opportunity in what you said: to hold both the wisdom we gain in training and the responsibility we have, once we’re practicing, to shape the work in ways that are more liberatory, more honest, and more inclusive.
Thank you again for engaging with the piece so thoughtfully.
Report comment
Thank you so much for sharing this. Your words hold so much truth, pain, and clarity. I hear the disillusionment, and I also hear the deep desire for justice, real change, and care that actually responds to the world as it is—not as it should be through the lens of privilege or conformity.
What you described happens far too often: therapy that centers the individual’s “resilience” while ignoring or even denying the harm being done to them in real time. It can feel like gaslighting—especially when tools like CBT are applied in rigid, decontextualized ways that pathologize natural, righteous responses to oppression.
You’re right: some of what gets labeled as “maladaptive” is actually resistance, awareness, and a sign that a person is still alive in the face of chronic invalidation. When the therapeutic system can’t hold space for that truth, it does end up protecting the status quo.
I’m sorry that you were pushed out of the field before you could find a space where questioning, dissent, and systemic critique were welcome. We need voices like yours. And I hope—truly—that spaces continue to open where clients are not expected to suppress their pain but are supported in naming it, and where therapists are held accountable to the world beyond the therapy room.
Thank you again for your honesty. You’re not alone in feeling this.
Report comment
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with such honesty and care. I really appreciate your respectful tone and your willingness to engage with the complexity of this work.
It’s true that we each carry different histories, different forms of pain, and different pressures—often invisible to one another. The weight of presumption, from any direction, can be heavy. I deeply resonate with your hope that we can move forward with mutual respect, even when our frameworks or lived experiences don’t align perfectly.
I share your wish for dialogue that honors difference without defensiveness, and for a collective commitment to “first, do no harm.” That principle has to include cultural humility—recognizing the limits of our own lenses and making room for those whose paths diverge from our own.
Thank you again for your thoughtfulness and for holding space for peace, especially for the sake of our children. That shared commitment means a lot.
Report comment
Thank you so much for your kind words and for engaging so deeply with the heart of what I was trying to express. You’re naming something so important—the way conformity often becomes a silent expectation in mental health care, and how that expectation can be profoundly damaging to both clients and practitioners.
I really appreciate your insight about the relationship between denied pain and projected prejudice. That resonates. When people are disconnected from their own wounds or conditioned to minimize them, it often limits their ability to extend compassion outward. Genuine empathy—for ourselves and for others—requires a kind of courageous honesty that many systems actively discourage.
I’m grateful for your reflection and for the reminder that respect for difference begins with self-awareness and self-regard.
Report comment
Thank you for such a thoughtful and poetic reflection. I really appreciate you engaging with the piece in such a deep way. Your question about how to keep the inner voice alive, especially in academic and clinical spaces that can feel rigid or depersonalized, really resonates with me.
For me, the “lights come on” when we stop treating learning as a performance and start making space for questioning, for discomfort, and for listening, both to ourselves and to each other. Decolonizing the way we learn is as much about unlearning as it is about discovery. It’s about making space for truths that don’t always fit neatly into the frameworks we’ve been taught, and staying awake to what’s often been silenced or dismissed.
I love what you said about holding space sacred for learning and unveiling. That’s exactly what I hope we can move toward – together. Thank you again for your generous words.
Report comment
Thank you so much for your openness and reflection. I really appreciate your honesty. It takes courage to name what you saw and sit with the discomfort of not knowing what to do at the time. So many of us are navigating inherited silences, and your willingness to engage in dialogue is such an important part of the healing process.
You’re absolutely right; true healing requires interactive dialogue, truth-telling, and collective accountability. We all carry pieces of this history, and I believe that when we start naming them together, we open the door to something more honest and more liberating for everyone. Thank you for being part of that conversation.
Report comment
I appreciate you engaging with that line—it’s such a pivotal realization for me. When I talk about being trained to conform, I’m pointing to how certain norms in our field can unintentionally silence lived experiences, especially those shaped by systemic oppression. I don’t believe psychological pain should be politicized, but in many cases, it already is—because people’s distress is often rooted in unjust conditions like racism, poverty, or marginalization. When we ignore those roots, we risk pathologizing people instead of truly helping them heal.
My hope is that we can expand the field to hold both individual pain and the broader contexts that shape it, with compassion, not conformity.
Report comment
Thank you so much for your kind words. It means a lot to know that the piece resonated with you—I wrote it in hopes that others who’ve had similar experiences would feel seen. I share your hope that more of the counseling community will begin to truly listen and reflect. Thank you for being in this work with me.
Report comment
Thank you so much for this thoughtful response. Your words really mean a lot to me. Writing this piece was both vulnerable and necessary, and hearing that it resonated reminds me why we keep showing up and speaking out. I’m grateful to be in community with people who also believe in the possibility of a more just and human future, and who help bring that vision into focus. Thank you for seeing it with me.
Report comment
Thank you so much for your kind words. I’m really grateful we had the chance to work together that year—I remember how committed you were to your students, and it meant a lot to be able to support your efforts in the classroom. I appreciate your encouragement more than you know, and I’ll keep speaking up—for all of us.
Report comment
Thank you for your comment. I want to take a moment to clarify what I mean when I talk about colonization and decolonizing mental health, because these concepts are often misunderstood.
Colonization is not just about people migrating. It’s a violent process of occupation, displacement, and cultural erasure. When Europeans colonized North America, it involved genocide, land theft, forced removals, and systemic attempts to destroy Indigenous languages, spiritual practices, and ways of life. That history matters—not just as a past event, but because its impacts are still felt today through intergenerational trauma, broken treaties, racial inequities, and the continued marginalization of Indigenous communities.
When I talk about decolonizing mental health, I’m not vilifying individuals—I’m questioning the dominant frameworks we’ve inherited. Our current mental health systems are deeply rooted in Western, capitalistic, patriarchal, heteronormative, and ableist worldviews. Decolonizing means making space for other ways of knowing and healing—ways that center community, relationality, culture, and collective care. It means recognizing that what’s labeled as “mental illness” is often a response to systemic violence, not just an individual pathology.
Acknowledging this history isn’t about blame. It’s about truth-telling, and building a profession that can actually hold space for the full humanity and lived experiences of all people.
Report comment