Decolonized Therapy: Returning to Roots, Land, and Ancestral Resilience

Decolonized therapy is more than a clinical approach it’s a return to what colonization tried to erase. Long before colonization, Indigenous and BIPOC communities had their own systems of healing, connection, ceremony, and resilience. Trauma existed, but it was held within relationship, land, and community. Colonization didn’t create trauma; it intensified it and dismantled the cultural practices that once supported emotional and communal wellbeing.

Over generations, the violence of colonization didn’t only impact our histories, it shaped how we saw ourselves. When people are separated from land, punished for language, or taught that their culture is inferior, those messages sink into the nervous system. Many of us learned to survive by pushing through, staying silent, or carrying the weight of being “strong” at all times. Decolonized therapy helps us unlearn those internalized stories while acknowledging the real, ongoing systems that continue to cause harm today.

This approach to healing invites us back into relationship with the body, with breath, with land, and with the ancestral knowledge still carried inside us. It honors that liberation is not just emotional but also cultural and communal. In my own work with Indigenous and BIPOC clients, I see how the body remembers belonging even when the world has taught us to shrink. When we reconnect with ancestral resilience, we begin to root ourselves in something older and more powerful than the narratives placed upon us.

This poem was written from that place of remembering, an embodied truth that rises when we stop waiting for permission to belong and return to who we’ve always been. It comes from movement, breath, land, and the echo of those who walked before us:

Liberation Written by Florina

I feel so much resonance right now.
Like my body just…remembered something.
Something old.
Something sacred.
Something brown,
Breathing,
And still…
Standing.

Sometimes it’s hard to show up in the white spaces.

With this skin.
With this history.
With this voice that trembles between silence and truth.

But I am on this journey,
The journey of letting go.
Letting go of Not Belonging.

Letting go
Of the lie
That said I had to earn my place.

That burden?
It wasn’t just mine.
It was my community’s,
It’s many communities
Still bleeding on this land
We never left.

So I go back.

Back to the body.
Back to the breath.
Back to the soles of my feet
Pressed to earth
The earth that knows my name.

There is so many people.
So many I feel connected to
right now without a single word spoken.

My body is brown.
It used to tremble out of fear.

Now?
Now it begins to feel safe.
Now I begin to feel connected.

Now I take up space.

I move through this world grounded.

This body?
It is mine.

This space?
It is sacred.

This breath?
Is a declaration.

I am stepping forward.
I have what I need.
I’ve always had what I needed.

Because here is the thing,
The possibilities of the present moment,
They are infinite.
They are alive.

And healing?
It doesn’t wait.
It doesn’t happen later.

It happens now.

We don’t have to wait
For the right space,
The right group,
The right invitation.

I belong.
Because I am.
Because I am rooted.
Because I remember.

The center is here.
The center is me.

And my ancestors?
Oh, they walk with me.
They are not behind me.
They are beside me.

Step by step.
Breath by breath.
Moment by moment.

What a gift.
What. A. Gift.

To be here,
To give.
To be
with them,
With me.

Because this
This moment of resistance,
Of rising,
It is not new.

We’ve done this before.
Many, many, many times before.

This time
I choose to embody them
To carry the roots as I stand tall,
And press them deep into the soil
The earth holds me
And the sky sees me rise.

I feel liberated.

Not tomorrow.
Not “when it gets better”
Not when they say it’s okay.

Now.
I feel liberated now.

I don’t need to pretend anymore.
I don’t need to shrink.
I don’t need to hold my breath
To make others comfortable .

I am my ancestors.
I am myself .
I am the ones yet to come .

So thank you
For letting me take space
For letting my ancestors take space

Because yours are here too.
And they are letting you breathe.

This is them .
This is us.
This is together.

A collective.
A force of love
And truth.

And let me say it plain:
Without truth,
We can’t do the work .

We must validate reality .
We must name what is happening .

Because only when we name it
We can change it, heal it, can we move forward as one.

And I feel liberated.
Now.

Decolonized therapy supports healing by validating lived experience, naming systemic oppression, and reconnecting people to practices that foster grounding, safety, and cultural identity. It is a path back to wholeness that honors land-based healing, ancestral wisdom, and the strength within our communities. When we name what has happened—and what continues to happen—we create room for healing that is authentic, empowering, and rooted in truth.

This is the heart of decolonized healing: a return to relationship, culture, land, and the ancestral resilience that has always lived within us. It is a reminder that liberation doesn’t begin someday in the future. It begins now—in the body, in the breath, and in the moment we choose to remember where we come from.