When many people think about therapy, they picture sitting in an office talking about feelings, coping skills, or childhood experiences. Therapy can absolutely include those things, but healing is often more layered than traditional mental health models have taught us to believe.
The idea of decolonizing mental health may sound unfamiliar at first, but, at its simplest, it means broadening how we understand healing. It means recognizing that emotional well-being is shaped not only by thoughts and behaviors, but also by culture, family dynamics, identity, community, migration experiences, and lived realities.
Many therapy models taught in schools and training programs were developed through a Western framework. These approaches often focus heavily on the individual: changing thoughts, reducing symptoms, and improving functioning. These tools can be helpful, and I use many of them in my work. However, for many first-generation individuals, immigrants, and people from marginalized communities, emotional distress does not happen in isolation.
For example:
- Anxiety may be connected to survival, financial stress, or family expectations
- People pleasing may develop as a way to maintain safety or connection within family systems
- Burnout may come from carrying responsibilities for others while navigating demanding or unfamiliar environments
- Guilt and shame may be tied to migration experiences, generational patterns, or cultural expectations
Sometimes people enter therapy believing something is inherently “wrong” with them, even though many of their responses make sense in the context of what they have lived through.
What Does a Decolonizing Approach to Therapy Look Like?
A decolonizing approach does not reject therapy or evidence-based practices. Instead, it creates space for mental health care to become more culturally aware, collaborative, and contextual.
In practice, this may include:
- Exploring how culture, family roles, and identity affect mental health
- Understanding behaviors with curiosity instead of immediate judgment
- Recognizing the impact of systemic stress and lived experiences on emotional well-being
- Making space for conversations around boundaries, generational patterns, and cultural expectations
- Honoring healing practices that already exist within culture, spirituality, or community
- Viewing therapy as a place for self-understanding and emotional processing, not only symptom reduction
How I Integrate This Into My Practice
As a first-generation Mexican American therapist, I understand what it can feel like to navigate multiple worlds at once. Many of my clients are balancing personal goals with family responsibilities, cultural expectations, and the pressure to hold everything together.
In therapy, I aim to create a space where clients do not have to constantly explain the cultural context behind their experiences. Together, we explore emotional patterns, stress responses, identity, relationships, and self-worth in ways that feel connected to their real lives.
I incorporate evidence-based approaches such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), narrative therapy, and emotional regulation tools. I also believe healing involves understanding why certain patterns developed in the first place and learning to approach ourselves with more compassion and less shame.
Expanding the Definition of Healing
Decolonizing mental health is, in many ways, about giving people permission to define healing more broadly.
Healing may include:
- Learning boundaries without abandoning your values
- Resting without guilt
- Reconnecting with your voice and identity
- Breaking generational patterns
- Building emotional awareness
- Feeling safe enough to be fully yourself
Therapy should not require people to disconnect from their culture, story, or humanity in order to heal. Those experiences can become an important part of the healing process itself.
Healing can also exist outside the therapy room. It can live in conversation, music, movement, spirituality, storytelling, shared meals, rest, community care, and collective support. Many cultural practices already carry wisdom, connection, and emotional support, even if they are not always recognized within traditional mental health spaces.
Therapy can become a place not only for individual healing, but also for reconnecting with the parts of ourselves and our communities that have long helped people survive, adapt, and care for one another.
Written by: Marilyn Rodriguez
