For our May 17 Campfire Learn Together, we are watching and discussing “Therapy Is Not Neutral with Dr. Jennifer Mullan, facilitated by Iya Affo“.
Therapy is not neutral. Our community can attest to that. Pretending it is neutral covers up harm.
Therapy has never been separate from the world that shaped it.
It carries the fingerprints of empire, whiteness, capitalism, and the historical harms that have shaped modern psychology.
A Decolonial Invitation to Remember, Relearn, and Resist: THERAPY IS NOT NEUTRAL | Instagram
The myth of therapeutic neutrality is not an innocent oversight. It is a design feature. When a therapist presents themselves as a blank mirror — unpositioned, apolitical, outside the systems their client is drowning in — they are not being objective. They are performing objectivity: claiming the “conquering gaze from nowhere” that Donna Haraway named as a way to represent while escaping representation. The therapist gets to be unmarked. The client carries all the marks.
There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.
—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968/2018)
Dr. Jennifer Mullan — clinical psychologist and author of Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice — sat with facilitator Iya Affo to name what many of us have felt in our bodyminds long before we had language for it: that the helping professions have harmed, and that the first step toward something different is refusing to pretend otherwise.
Mullan describes what she calls the “four pillars” of decolonizing therapy: the past (historical trauma, the grief and rage that have never been given a stage), the political (who has access to care, who decides, who is excluded), the psychological (how colonization lands in the soma and nervous system), and the people (how we are — or are not — in genuine relationship with each other). This is not a framework that tidies trauma into manageable symptoms. It is a framework that follows trauma back to its roots.
This is why I cannot be neutral. And I don’t believe any other therapist should be either. Because if we pretend that your discomfort is the result of your own personal flaws – some brokenness that exists solely within yourself – then we collude with the systems that caused your discomfort in the first place.
We know this collusion by its effects. Minority stress is not a metaphor — it is a documented mechanism by which hostile social environments translate into chronic disease, accelerated aging, and broken nervous systems. When a therapist redirects a client away from the systemic roots of their distress and toward cognitive reframing of “irrational” fears, they are not helping them cope. They are helping the system that harmed them remain invisible.
There’s a myth still floating around in therapy rooms: that we, as clinicians, should remain politically neutral. That talking about politics is “biased,” “inappropriate,” or “outside the scope of practice.”
That myth is not only outdated — it’s dangerous.
Therapists, Neutrality Is No Longer an Option — Politics Is Tearing Us Apart — Mad In America
Mental health doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s shaped — deeply and daily — by politics, policies, and power. If we ignore this, we’re not providing care. We’re providing containment. We’re telling our clients, in effect, “Bring your trauma, but not the truth about where it came from.”
Therapists, Neutrality Is No Longer an Option — Mad In America
Mullan offers a visceral image for the layered nature of the harm: the “trauma burger.” The current-day stress and oppression form the middle patty. Beneath it: personal childhood and adolescent trauma. On top: the unprocessed, epigenetically transmitted weight of historical and ancestral trauma that your people never had the conditions to metabolize. You are carrying a burger you didn’t order, made from ingredients accumulated across generations. The therapist who hands you a mindfulness worksheet has not looked at the menu.
This is epistemic injustice in clinical form. When a therapist dismisses a client’s account of systemic harm as catastrophizing, paranoia, or “magnifying” — when a young Black person’s fear of police contact is reframed as cognitive distortion — the therapist is enacting testimonial injustice: deflating the credibility of testimony because it doesn’t fit the dominant frame. The client’s lived knowledge is discounted. The system is protected.
…flush neutrality down the toilet in order to make room for the bliss and pleasure of true individual and collective emotional freedom.
Make no mistake—even if no one in the room is white—whiteness is IN the room. Even if colonization is not in the room, it is IN the room. Therefore, some deep-down safety mechanism is ever present in many people of the global majority, in order to protect white people’s fragility and feelings.
The pretense of neutrality is not just a cognitive error. It operates through the body, through the room, through the relationship. Polyvagal theory names what Mullan is describing at a somatic level: the therapist’s nervous system is always in the room, always co-regulating or co-dysregulating, always participating in whether the client feels safe enough to be fully present.
Even if we could set aside our values, our bodies would not let us. Therapy is an embodied and relational process, and our nervous systems are always participating. Micro-shifts in breath, tone of voice, posture, or facial expression shape how safe or unsafe a client feels, often outside conscious awareness.
Co-regulation, described in Polyvagal Theory, shows that a regulated therapist can help a client’s system settle, while a tense or withdrawn therapist can amplify activation. We do not have to say anything for this to happen — our presence is already being read by the client’s nervous system.
There are moments when neutrality stops being restraint and becomes collusion. Staying silent in the name of letting the client lead can reinforce the very dynamics that harm them elsewhere. Not naming a class difference, a racial tension, or even the fee they are struggling to afford can leave the client feeling unseen.
This collusion lands on the body. It lands in the emotions. It constitutes what our glossary names as affective injustice: the systematic discounting of some people’s emotional experience as less valid, less rational, less deserving of uptake than others. Mullan names this in specific terms: when a client’s sacred rage — her phrase for “the love child of ancestral trauma, shame, and suffocated grief” — is pathologized rather than witnessed, something crucial is lost. The emotion that is trying to tell the truth is silenced. The system that generated it is protected again.
Therapy is not about indoctrination — it’s about liberation. And liberation requires honesty. It requires naming reality. It requires expanding our understanding of trauma beyond personal history and into structural context.
The argument for neutrality hides behind professionalism, but neutrality is not ethical. It is not compassionate. In many cases, it is violence. Silence benefits the status quo. And the status quo is deeply oppressive.
Being apolitical in the therapy room privileges the comfort of the privileged over the safety of the marginalized. It centers the therapist’s anxiety about “being political” over the client’s lived trauma. It sends the implicit message: You can talk about your symptoms, but not their roots. You can cry, but not rage. You can describe what hurts, but not who hurt you — especially if it’s the government, the culture, or capitalism itself.
That’s not therapy. That’s pacification.
Therapists, Neutrality Is No Longer an Option — Mad In America
Mullan asks what it would look like for the helping professions to genuinely heal rather than treat. She calls practitioners back toward ancestral ways of knowing: toward the healer who stayed for weeks, was fed and housed by the community, was held in reciprocal relationship with the people they served. She calls for circles instead of individual sessions. For groups that continue to hold each other when the expert steps away. For the kind of care that doesn’t depend on one person carrying everything alone.
The myth of neutrality protects the therapist more than the client. It allows us to bypass our own discomfort, to believe we can sit outside the messiness of power, culture, and human response. But therapy is never a technical exchange — it is relational, embodied, and shaped by systems much larger than the room.
We watch. We reflect. We bring our whole selves.
Join Us
Campfire Learn Together happens every Sunday at 10AM Central, online via Discord. This session is on Sunday, May 17. Open to the whole community — no preparation needed, no expertise required. Come as you are.
We’ll watch together, take a bodymind break, and then open up the reflection questions as a community conversation. You can participate by video, voice, text chat, or just by being in the room. All modes are welcome. Cameras optional. Silence is participation.
Join our community to get access, then find us in our online space. Our Campfire Learn Together page describes some of what to expect. If this is your first Campfire, you’re in good company — many of our regulars showed up for the first time not knowing quite what to expect, and stayed.
Main Takeaways
Therapy is not neutral — it never has been. It carries the fingerprints of empire, whiteness, and capitalism. The claim of neutrality is not an absence of position; it is a position that protects the status quo and leaves the systems causing harm invisible.
The “trauma burger” is layered and intergenerational. Current-day oppression and stress sit on top of personal history, which sits on top of ancestral and historical trauma that was never given the conditions to be metabolized. Effective healing has to account for all three layers, not just the one on top.
Minority stress is not metaphor — it is mechanism. Hostile social environments produce chronic disease, accelerated biological aging, and dysregulated nervous systems. Redirecting clients away from systemic roots toward individual coping is not care. It is containment.
Pretending neutrality is epistemic injustice. When a therapist dismisses a client’s account of structural harm as distorted thinking, they are not correcting a cognitive error. They are enacting testimonial injustice — deflating the credibility of lived knowledge because it doesn’t fit the dominant frame.
Pathologizing emotion is affective injustice. Sacred rage — the “love child of ancestral trauma, shame, and suffocated grief” — wants to be witnessed, not managed. When the helping professions treat big, politically coherent emotions as symptoms to be reduced, they silence the emotion that is trying to tell the truth.
The body is always in the room. Through co-regulation, breath, tone, and posture, the therapist’s nervous system is already participating — shaping whether the client feels safe enough to be fully present. There is no neutral embodied presence.
Healing is collective, not individual. Mullan calls for circles instead of one-on-one sessions, for healers held in reciprocal community rather than extracted from it, for groups that continue to function when the expert steps away. Mutual aid is not a supplement to healing. It is a form of it.
This work is for everyone. Colonization has dehumanized all of us — those harmed most directly and those whose peoples did the harming. The invitation to return to a fuller, more embodied, more honest way of being in relationship is not exclusive. It is universal.
Related Glossary Entries
Minority Stress — The documented mechanism by which social disadvantage, stigma, and structural marginalization translate into physical and mental health disparities. Minority stress shifts the frame away from individual pathology and toward the social environments producing harm.
Epistemic Injustice — Harm done to someone in their capacity as a knower. In clinical settings, this includes testimonial injustice (dismissing a client’s account of systemic harm as distorted thinking) and hermeneutical injustice (lacking the frameworks to even recognize certain experiences as valid).
Affective Injustice — Injustice related to a person as an affective being: the systematic discounting of certain people’s emotional experience as less valid, less rational, less deserving of uptake. Emotional imperialism — one group imposing its emotional norms on another — is a core mechanism.
Objectivity — The claim to a neutral, disembodied vantage point: what Donna Haraway called “a conquering gaze from nowhere.” Claims of objectivity allow some to represent while escaping representation — to be the unmarked standard against which others are measured.
Reflection Questions
Mullan names something that many of us have felt in the body before we had words for it: that the so-called helping professions have harmed us, that this harm is not incidental but structural, and that naming it is the beginning of something more honest and more healing than what came before. These questions are an invitation to bring your own bodyminds into that territory.
On the myth of neutrality
Therapy presents itself as neutral. So does research. So does science. So does medicine. So does the school. So do many of the systems that have decided things about us. What does it feel like, in your body, when a system that has power over you insists it is simply applying objective standards? What does it feel like when someone names the non-neutrality out loud?
On the trauma burger
Mullan describes the trauma we carry as layered: current-day stress, personal history, and the intergenerational weight of what our people weren’t allowed to grieve. Do you feel those layers as distinct, or do they collapse into each other? Has naming the ancestral or historical layer ever changed how you understood something you were experiencing?
On sacred rage
Mullan calls rage “the love child of ancestral trauma, shame, and suffocated grief” — a sacred emotion that wants to be expressed rather than managed. Many of us have been told our emotions are too much, irrational, pathological, dangerous. When have you experienced your anger as information rather than symptom? What did it know?
On who gets believed
Epistemic injustice names the harm done when testimony is dismissed because of who the speaker is — when your account of your own experience is overridden by someone else’s interpretation of it. Have you experienced this in a clinical or helping-professional context? What happens to you when your reality is reframed without your consent?
On decolonizing your own healing
Mullan asks: which of your lands do you have the time, money, and effort to return to? What are the ancestral or traditional ways of knowing that have helped you — the ones that didn’t come from a DSM, a wellness app, or a productivity framework? What practices, communities, or forms of connection have actually regulated your nervous system?
On what collective healing could look like
Mullan argues for circles, for community, for care that doesn’t require an expert at the center to function. Stimpunks is built on a version of this: mutual aid, peer support, learning together. What would it mean for your healing to be held not by one licensed professional but by a community? What would you need? What would you bring?
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