Across time and cultures, people have experienced psychological distress, and today we are more aware of this than ever before, because - and also perhaps thanks to - psychology and what is generally (and wrongly) referred to as 'mental health', is increasingly entering mainstream culture. However, psychological distress is often treated as private dysfunction in need of individual correction. But what if these symptoms - anxiety, disconnection, rage, and grief among many others - are not internal malfunctions, but mirrors of wider harm, that is individual but also collective, current but also historical, and even ancestral?
Colonial legacies, systemic violence, and consumer-driven post-modernity have shaped the soul in profoundly fragmenting ways. This reflection explores how Euro-American psychology, therapy, and academia often continue to carry the imprint of these systems - and how healing is needed not only for those who have been historically oppressed, but also for those - knowingly and often unknowingly - carrying and recreating the structures of domination.
The Hidden Currents of Supremacy in Psychology
Psychology, as taught and practised in much of the world, follows and is informed by Euro-American norms. These frameworks often promote individualism, rationality, productivity, 'regulation', and control as signs of wellness, and good health. In this worldview, wellness is linear, clean (sanitised), and self-contained - but this approach is not universal or natural per se, rather it is culturally specific.
Frantz Fanon (1967, p. 18), the prominent Martinican activist, psychiatrist and theorist wrote,
“The colonised is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards.”
The same logic operates when dominant psychology defines healing according to its own image. Those who do not fit its mould are often pathologised - especially if they come from Indigenous, Central or South American, African, Arab, or Asian traditions where suffering and healing are both considered to be communal, relational, and spiritual.
Edward Said (1978, p. 336) reminds us,
“No one today is purely one thing.”
Yet mainstream psychology still classifies and diagnoses in rigid, reductive ways, often overlooking the socio-political-economic-racial-cultural and historical context of the subjects in question, as well as their specific collective and ancestral dimensions of suffering and resilience.
Post-liberal capitalism does not only carry colonial values, but has also commodified the soul. Thus, trauma and healing are sometimes reduced to simplistic notions around 'wellness', around which thousands of products can be sold, as means to wellness and healing. Pain, and suffering become ailments, and the solutions are there to be standardised, mass-produced, marketed, bought and consumed.
Gabor Maté (2022) calls this “normalising the abnormal”, referring to this way of commodifying trauma, pain and suffering, as well as the so-called 'solutions' to these.
The Sacredness of Anger and Grief
Within Euro-American psychology and therapy culture, anger - especially from so-called racialised or marginalised people - is often seen as a threat to be managed rather than an energy to be allowed, witnessed and validated, and the expression of deep historical wounding that needs to be engaged with.
These are often seen as a threat, a malfunction or 'disregulation' that needs to be 'regulated', which in effect equates to being flattened, thus silenced as a source of disruption and possible aggression. In many decolonial traditions, however, anger is a sacred response to injustice. It signals vitality, clarity, and protection of what is sacred. It constitutes a call for reparation, and for justice to be restored. In this context, it becomes clear that it is a healthy human response to distress, abuse, violence, and pain.
James Baldwin wrote,
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time” (1961, p. 5).
Fanon, too, viewed rage as a gateway to agency and liberation. Suppressing these energies and expressions within therapeutic spaces risks moral and psychological silencing, disguised (generally unconsciously so), as clinical professionalism
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) cautions that peace without justice is a lie. To decolonise healing is to allow space for grief and rage as forms of truth-telling that disrupt comfort and restore dignity. If allowed to be expressed, and validated they become the agents of liberation and healing on a personal level, and also collectively.
Collective and Ancestral Approaches to Healing
In Diné (Navajo) traditions, Hózhó refers to balance among people, land, spirit, and cosmos. When harmony is lost, rituals aim to restore that broader web - not just the individual.
In traditional Arabic rooted cultures, baraka - spiritual blessing or sacred presence - flows through memory, story, and place. Healing is embodied and communal, often held through dhikr (remembrance) or oral tradition (Hannoum, 2001). Such ways of knowing rarely fit within mainstream, Euro-American-styled clinical models, yet they continue to sustain those seeking wholeness on collective and ancestral terms, and have a great deal to offer mainstream, contemporary Euro-American-centric psychology, therapy, academia and practice.
The Forgotten Wound of the Coloniser
Conversations about decolonisation often centre on the wounds of the oppressed, but those who inherit the systems of power also carry an injury - subtle, unacknowledged, and often unnamed.
Baldwin observed,
“People who imagine that history flatters them… are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves” (1963, p. 100).
Those working within dominant cultures, especially in psychology and wellness, may unconsciously reproduce superiority and control even when their intentions are to heal.
This too demands courage. Not guilt, but a willingness to see one’s complicity (even if unconscious) with honesty and love. Decolonising is not about blame - it is about mutual liberation.
A New Kind of Psychology
Decolonising psychology requires that we reclaim, and enable diverse and authentic narratives around specific histories, legacies of trauma and wounding, and their unique expressions. We must also resist pathologising, in order to allow all expression - which often naturally holds anger and rage - not as 'symptoms' of dysfunction, but rather as healthy and natural human responses to injustice. These expressions themselves carry within them the power, and specific pathway to healing for each subject and her/his lineage, and should not be seen as inconvenient or threatening liabilities. Thus, we can engage in intentionally decolonising the Soul, and start healing at truly deep, collective and ancestral levels.
This decolonial stance would make psychology and healing plural, and alive to diverse stories, emotions, spiritual roots and authenticity, and enable in a quintessentially psychosynthetic manner for the pathway to healing to emerge from within the wounding, holistically, humanistically, and in alignment with Self.
References
James Baldwin: was an Afro-American writer and activist, who was deeply political - an outspoken civil rights activist who challenged racial injustice, sexuality taboos, and American socio, political hypocrisy through essays, speeches, and public debates, often alongside figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician from Canada. She’s politically engaged in Indigenous sovereignty, decolonisation, and environmental activism, blending art, storytelling, and theory to advance Indigenous resurgence movements.
Frantz Fanon: was a Martinican psychiatrist and theorist who was very politically active. He joined the Algerian liberation movement against the French coloniser power, worked with the FLN during the Algerian war of independence, and served as a diplomat for the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic. His political work was inseparable from his psychology and writing, and he is a very important reference in the study of colonialism and post colonialism as well as cultural and political critical studies.
Abdelfattah Hannoum: is a Moroccan scholar and anthropologist, specialising in colonial and postcolonial history, memory, and cultural theory. He is a professor at the University of Kansas (USA) and known for works linking North African history with postcolonial thought.
Edward Said: was Palestinian-American scholar, and literary critic. His most important and lasting contribution is founding postcolonial theory and critiquing Western representations of the East. His book Orientalism, 1978, remains a major reference point in postcolonial theory and cultural and political studies.