15/01/2026
People come to me for individual therapy, and again and again I am confronted with how profoundly the systems around them continue to fail them.
Police fail them.
Mental health systems fail them.
Education systems fail them.
Child protection, justice, housing, welfare over and over again people are harmed not by their own inadequacy, but by systems that were meant to protect them and did not.
Listening to story after story of systemic failure can pull me into despair. It fills me with rage.
Sometimes I read things like “f**k therapy, we need a revolution,” and I pause, wondering how useful my work really is.
And then I remember my task.
My work is to sit with people and gently, relentlessly remind them that their suffering is not a flaw in who they are. It is evidence of what was missing. Of who did not show up. Of systems that failed to hold, protect, listen, or care.
I sit with the beliefs shaped by neglect and harm the belief that they are a failure, that they are not enough, that if they were truly worthy someone would have protected them. And together, slowly, we begin to loosen those beliefs and make space for something truer.
That they are worthy.
That they are enough.
That they deserved protection and did not receive it.
That what happened to them was not a reflection of their value, but of systemic failure.
And in remembering this, I also remember why therapy matters.
Because while a revolution is necessary and at the same time people still need places where their nervous systems can settle, where dignity is restored, where humanity is named and reflected back to them.
Therapy is not separate from revolution.
It should be where strength is rebuilt.
Where courage is resourced.
Where people remember who they are beneath the harm.
And still, individual therapy cannot carry us through collapse.
It cannot repair broken systems.
It cannot replace housing, justice, safety, education, or collective care.
It cannot ask individuals to metabolise what is fundamentally collective harm.
Healing cannot be privatised.
What carries us through collapse is the collective.
Mutual care. Shared responsibility. Solidarity.
People organising, protecting one another, and refusing abandonment.
In an ideal world therapy would not be needed.
But in our world its still relevant.
A place where shame loosens so voices can rise.
Where worth is restored so people remember they belong.
Therapy is always political.
To be human is political.
And helping someone reclaim their worth in a world that has repeatedly denied it, is quietly and powerfully, an act of resistance.
