Western mental health models often center the individual while overlooking the collective, cultural, and spiritual dimensions that shape our identities. This narrow approach can leave people, especially Indigenous and BIPOC communities, feeling unseen and unsupported.
Decolonizing therapy is a growing movement that challenges these limitations. It calls for a return to healing practices that honor ancestral knowledge, community connection, and the spiritual self—a restoration of what colonization sought to erase.
At NATIVation Counseling, we practice decolonized therapy not as a trend, but as a philosophy and lived commitment. Our approach integrates clinical expertise with Indigenous wisdom, centering land, spirit, and cultural identity in every healing journey.
Begin your healing journey today with a therapist who honors your story and spirit.
Understanding the Need: Why Decolonization Is Essential
For Indigenous communities, trauma is not just personal—it is historical, systemic, and intergenerational. The impacts of colonization, forced assimilation, land displacement, and cultural erasure have created what psychologist Eduardo Duran describes as the “soul wound.”
The soul wound represents a deep rupture in identity, community, and spiritual connection—an inherited pain that lives in both the individual and the collective.
At NATIVation, we acknowledge that healing must address these root wounds. Standard Western talk therapy alone is not enough—it must be expanded, reframed, and held within culturally and spiritually informed spaces.
Western vs. Indigenous Approaches to Therapy
Many traditional Western therapy models are rooted in individualism and clinical structure. While effective for some, they often fall short when addressing the needs of Indigenous communities, where healing is inherently collective, spiritual, and relational. Traditional mental health systems often emphasize compliance over connection—leaving Indigenous clients feeling culturally unsafe or unseen.
Here’s how the two approaches differ:
Western Therapy
- Focuses on the individual — healing is often framed as a personal journey, disconnected from community or ancestry.
- Spirituality is often excluded — the therapeutic space tends to be secular, with little acknowledgment of spiritual beliefs.
- Healing takes place in clinical settings — therapy is office-based, protocol-driven, and led by the provider.
- Knowledge is scientific and Eurocentric — rooted in research, theory, and pathology.
Indigenous-Centered Therapy
- Relational and ancestral — identity is understood in connection with family, ancestors, land, and community.
- Spirituality is central — healing includes Creator, ceremony, and sacred practices.
- Healing is experiential and communal — often involves elders, storytelling, drumming, and land-based rituals.
- Wisdom is holistic and lived — grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems and cultural ways of knowing.
While Western models prioritize structure and evidence-based tools, Indigenous approaches emphasize balance, interconnectedness, and spirit. At NATIVation, we strive to hold both ways of knowing—bringing together clinical integrity and cultural wisdom to create a truly decolonized healing space.
Core Principles of Decolonized Therapy
At NATIVation Counseling, decolonized therapy is more than a method—it is a return to right relationship with self, community, culture, and land. Here are the guiding principles behind our work:
- Contextualized Trauma: Recognize that trauma is not just psychological, it is cultural, historical, and collective.
- Cultural Humility: Therapists act as allies and learners, not all-knowing experts.
- Two-Eyed Seeing: Blend the strengths of Western tools like EMDR with Indigenous knowledge and ceremony.
- Community and Ceremony: Healing includes elders, peers, and ritual—especially when traditional practices have been disrupted.
- Land-Based Healing: Connection to place, nature, and ancestral lands supports regulation and reconnection.
Society for Psychotherapy – A Call to Action: Decolonizing Clinical Practice
Decolonizing EMDR: Centering Voice and Ceremony
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a powerful trauma modality, but it’s rooted in Western understandings of psychology. To be truly effective for Indigenous and historically marginalized clients, it must be decolonized.
According to the Touchstone Institute, this means:
- Centering client voice and autonomy
- Validating systemic trauma, not just individual pain
- Embedding EMDR within cultural rituals, such as smudging, drumming, or tobacco offering
- Recognizing that safety is not universal, and trauma may come from the systems clients must still live within
At NATIVation, we practice EMDR as ceremony. Clients aren’t just reducing symptoms, they’re reclaiming names, stories, and belonging.
The Research Behind Decolonized Therapy
This movement is not only culturally valid—it is evidence-supported. Research from multiple institutions affirms the need for more inclusive, Indigenous-centered mental health practices:
- Hosny (Harvard, 2024): Offers a Global South framework for decolonizing clinical psychology, with eight actionable steps.
- Lewis et al. (2018): Found that the EMPOWER training model increases clinician cultural humility and improves outcomes for Indigenous clients.
How NATIVation Counseling Embodies Decolonized Therapy
Our work at NATIVation is grounded in Indigenous values, not just incorporated into them. Here’s how that shows up in practice:
- Culturally Grounded Frameworks: We use models like the Seven Grandfather Teachings and Medicine Wheel to guide healing.
- Adapted Modalities: Western tools like EMDR, CBT, and hypnotherapy are reinterpreted through a decolonized lens.
- Community & Ceremony: We collaborate with elders and co-create rituals, especially where traditions were disrupted by colonialism.
- Identity Empowerment: We help clients shed colonial labels and reconnect to voice, purpose, and ancestral truth.
- Holistic Healing: We invite the body, mind, spirit, and land into the therapeutic space—not as extras, but as essentials.
A Message for Therapists: Where to Begin
Decolonizing your own practice is not a checkbox—it’s a transformation. If you’re a therapist looking to do this work, here are some starting points:
- Reflect on your own education and biases
- Learn directly from Indigenous knowledge holders
- Incorporate land, story, and ceremony into your practice
- Let your clients lead—their wisdom matters
- Understand that this is not about inclusion—it’s about undoing erasure
Ji Youn Kim – 8 Ways I Try to Decolonize Therapy
Therapy as Reclamation
Decolonizing therapy is about more than method—it’s about memory, truth, and liberation.
It’s about restoring what colonization tried to take: identity, connection, land, and spirit. At NATIVation Counseling, we are not just doing therapy. We are remembering, reclaiming, and reimagining healing.
Experience therapy that honors your story, your culture, and your ancestral wisdom. Contact us today.