Decolonizing Therapy Quotes

“There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.”
― Jennifer Mullan, Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice

“this work also highlights the need to return back Home: to our ancestry, to many of our practices, our medicines, our native tongues, and our communal ways of thriving, while reconfiguring and integrating these practices into the present and future.”
― Jennifer Mullan, Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice

“Certainly there were formations of gender norms and heterosexuality prior to colonization but what colonialism did was officially establish the gender binary and heteronormativity. What colonialism did was criminalize people for transgressing from these gender and sexual norms.—Alok Vaid-Menon & Janani Balasubramanian, trans Indian poets and organizers, Darkmatter (The Cake, 2015)”
― Jennifer Mullan, Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice

“As Sutherland writes: “In the 18th century, Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then known, became France’s wealthiest overseas colony, largely because of its production of sugar, coffee, indigo, and cotton generated by an enslaved labor force” (Sutherland, 2007). There were three general groups of African descent: those who were free (est. 30,000 in 1789), half mixed-race and identified as mulatto, who were quite wealthy; those who were enslaved (close to 500,000 people); and those who had run away (called Maroons) who had retreated deep into the mountains and lived off subsistence farming. Despite the harshness and cruelty of Saint-Domingue slavery, there were rebellions before 1791. As Carroll writes: “One plot even involved the poisoning of masters” (Carroll, n.d.; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2020). Sutherland notes that “the Haitian Revolution has often been described as the largest and most successful … rebellion [and revolution] in the Western Hemisphere.”
― Jennifer Mullan, Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice