Therapy is Not Meant to Sedate Us

“I don’t want wellness practices that teach me to be at peace with an inequitable world. I need practices that help me to stay sane while doing my part to fight against it. If it makes you compliant to injustice, it’s not healing—it’s sedation.” ~Michell C. Clark

I saw this quote on social media the other day, and it really felt like such a beautiful way of capturing so much of how I feel about therapy.

My relationship with therapy is often a complicated one—not because I don’t deeply believe in the magic that can happen when we feel truly seen, heard, and held, but because the topic of mental wellness is fraught with white-centric ideas, colonization, pathologizing, hyper-individualizing, and spiritual bypassing.

Even as a therapist, sometimes I’m like, “Oof, what are we even doing here?”

And as the quote from Michell C. Clark expresses, I have a deep-seated loathing of how so many therapeutic practices completely ignore the “why” of it all being largely systemic.

Who is meant to feel calm and grounded in a capitalist hellscape?

Who is expected to not be depressed or rageful when experiencing racism?

How are we to go about our daily lives in functional ways without being deeply impacted by the genocide and kidnapping and state-sanctioned violence all around us?

What I also really love about this quote is that it reminds us that acknowledging the systems in which we live and the ways they harm us doesn’t mean we’re lost. It doesn’t mean we’re hopeless.

In fact, hope is something that therapists can be skilled at holding for others—not the “toxic positivity” kind, but the kind that believes that a different world can exist, and that our work is to care for each other, and ourselves, as we create it.

But hope doesn’t mean that we ignore the fact that maybe we feel like shit because *gestures broadly* all of this…and maybe it’s time to stop pathologizing a really valid response to injustice.

Why should you feel at peace with an inequitable world??

Shouldn’t the focus, as Michell C. Clark reminds us, be on caring for ourselves and each other in ways that will help support the longterm work of fighting for something better?

Resilience is vital. Compassion, love, connection, energy, and yes, even rage are all vital.

To me, therapy is one of the many sources of support to build up those things…so that we can go out into the world and feel more able to say, “Yes, all of this is fucked, and yes, I will honor my feelings about that, and yes, I will hold onto the hope that together we can create something different that serves us all, and serves us well.”

Therapy is not meant to sedate us. It’s meant to help us come alive, and to believe that something better is possible.