I help therapists, healers, and space-holders bring decolonial and liberatory values into their work—so you’re not just saying you’re aligned… you’re actually practicing it. ⬆️ More integrity, more connection, more liberation. ⬇️ Less burnout, less performative wokeness, less colonial residue. If you want a practice where marginalized clients feel safe, seen, and honored—and you want to feel more grounded and intentional in your work—subscribe and join a growing community of practitioners doing this work differently. You practice can be liberatory-- let's get you there!
When the world’s walls feel like they’re closing in
|
Reader, When the world is on fire (again), your system will want to do what it has always been trained to do: retreat into survival mode. Your sessions may feel less effective, your presence less sharp, your words less flow-y. You may even get attached to the script that you’re not “on top of your game.” But let me tell you this: It is not your fault. The real culprit is the system of oppression that thrives when we’re in survival mode. It wants us hopeless, scattered, anxious, and disconnected, so we can’t imagine or create liberation. It asks us to measure healing by progress notes, productivity, and “coping skills.” It tells us therapy is about making people functional in a dysfunctional world. Here’s the truth: therapy—liberatory therapy—is not about coping harder. It’s about acknowledging how external forces drag us back into survival mode and naming that as systemic, not personal failure. So when the walls feel like they’re closing in? The antidote is slowness. Space. Breathing room. Not hustling for more coping skills, not pretending we’re unaffected, but modeling groundedness and resistance by refusing to rush and cope in a pre-determined way. In liberatory practice, we don’t measure progress by symptom checklists. We measure it by our collective ability to stay human in an inhumane world. ✨ We don’t heal by pushing harder, we heal by slowing down together. Survival mode is not the end of the story, it's where the system wants you to be. Let’s resist the grind and reclaim space for care, for ourselves and our communities. Survival. Mode. Is. Not. Liberation! ⭐️ Reflection Prompts
🔥 Hit reply and share your reflections with me, I want to know what's happening in your world! Here's to resisting through pauses and spaciousness, In solidarity, Silvana @ Decolonize Your Practice PS. If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, you can subscribe here. PPS. And forward this email to a peer as well! PPPS. You can read previous Liberatory Letters here. ⬆️ Let's connect! |
Liberatory Letters
I help therapists, healers, and space-holders bring decolonial and liberatory values into their work—so you’re not just saying you’re aligned… you’re actually practicing it. ⬆️ More integrity, more connection, more liberation. ⬇️ Less burnout, less performative wokeness, less colonial residue. If you want a practice where marginalized clients feel safe, seen, and honored—and you want to feel more grounded and intentional in your work—subscribe and join a growing community of practitioners doing this work differently. You practice can be liberatory-- let's get you there!
Reader, A quick update on what's here: 🌻 Community Liberation Sessions. The last meeting of the year is next week. Sign up here. 🔥 The Practice of Liberation. Monthly personal reflections of liberatory work beyond professional practice went out this last Monday. Read more about it in the PS section or subscribe here. Last week I invited you to question whose ethics we practice. That conversation began with one of the very first questions ever submitted in Community Liberation Sessions: “Is it...
August 2026 | issue #10 Reader, The very first time I was diagnosed with depression, I was in my early twenties.My therapist told me I had what was then called endogenous depression. “We don’t really know why,” she said, “but some people are simply more prone to it.” She treated me using CBT. For a while, I believed that story. I believed there was something inside me—my brain, my genes, my chemistry—that made me fundamentally more susceptible to depression than other people. Don’t get me...
Reader, A quick update on what's here: 🌻 Community Liberation Sessions. The last meeting of the year is next week. Sign up here. 🔥 The Practice of Liberation. Monthly personal reflections of liberatory work beyond professional practice goes out this Monday. Read more about it in the PS section or subscribe here. In one of the very first Community Liberation Sessions I offered back in 2023, a clinician asked whether it would be considered ethical to offer a lower sliding scale specifically to...