“If you’ve come to help me, you’re wasting your time. But if you’ve come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
— Aboriginal Australian teaching, often attributed to Lilla Watson, Indigenous artist, activist, and academic
what is liberatory psychology?
Liberation Psychology has a foundation in the work of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator who fought for literacy, social consciousness, and equity. His work influenced Ignacio Martín-Baró, a social psychologist and Jesuit priest who, before his assassination during the Salvadoran Civil War, gave us, “Writings for a Liberation Psychology” — and a frame for empowerment-oriented psychotherapy.
Liberatory Psychotherapy begins by positioning psychotherapeutic work within a context of interdependence. In this way, the well-being of an individual is connected to the well-being of the greater world. With self and community co-creating one another, a larger context for healing arises.
Psychotherapy with a liberatory approach applies critical consciousness, situating the emotional and psychological difficulties faced by individuals in the context of the larger cultural, racial, socioeconomic, and historical conditions in which they are arising.
Liberatory psychotherapy supports social and individual transformation through practices of empowerment, prioritizing people who have been historically denied access to resources. Rather than asking people to adapt to injustice, a liberatory approach seeks to transform oppressive systems.
Learn more about my approach here.
“What is required is a new Dharma, a radical Dharma that deconstructs rather than amplifies the systems of suffering, that starves rather than fertilizes the soil of the conditions that the deep roots of societal suffering grow in.”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation
