minding our own business

why psychotherapy should prioritise individual healing over political social engineering

While I believe that Critical Social Justice Informed Practitioners (CSJIPs), under the influence of their political ideology, want to make the world a better place, they are making traditional counselling and psychotherapy a worse place for some of us. A social engineering project is underway, lacking a clearly articulated vision for our profession or society and with little theoretical foundation or evidence base.

I discuss here how, in using psychotherapy as a vehicle for social change, our role is aggrandised, our moral authority inflated, and we risk harming the very people we are meant to help.

Clients arrive for therapy in various states of vulnerability; they are often overwhelmed, dysregulated and struggling simply to function. They have a need to stabilise, process their individual adverse life events, complete important developmental stages and deepen their relationship with themselves. In such moments, it’s not appropriate to introduce more overwhelm by drawing them into the enormity of global crises or systemic injustice; these issues, if they do exist, are not the client’s responsibility to solve, nor are they therapeutic tasks for therapists.

To ask a struggling individual to engage in collective world-healing before or whilst managing their own internal chaos is, frankly, grandiose. And to assume that this political-therapeutic vision should be adopted as a new norm within the profession borders on ideological hubris. It mistakes a highly particular worldview, for universal truth.

The proposal to redirect the immensely powerful resources that psychotherapy and counselling represent so that therapists and clients alike learn ‘to work as if we were living in the early days of a better nation’ is not a neutral or pluralistic idea. The motivational phrase is used in activist and civic contexts; in protest materials, referenced in discussions of progressive politics and sometimes carved on public buildings for example, on the walls of the Scottish Parliament building and the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh. The quote originates from Canadian author Alasdair Gray, who adapted it from a poem by fellow Canadian, Dennis Lee (1972), a poet. It is used in an effort to radically restructure society and is grounded in the beliefs that our current society is not just flawed, but beyond redemption and that there is one shared vision of what a ‘better nation’ looks like. It evokes a sense of historic importance and moral calling, and urges activists to persevere through challenges and setbacks by imagining themselves as part of a generational movement toward equity and reform.

But there isn’t one shared vision of what a better nation looks like. Society is pluralistic, and so is our profession and clients. What one person experiences as justice, another may experience as coercion. What one therapist sees as progress, another sees as ideological imposition. There is no homogeneous kind of society that we can all agree on, just as there isn’t a single psychotherapy approach that we all practice. CSJIP practitioners wish to pretend otherwise and to embed their political ideology into our profession, dressing it up in a stlye of therapeutic clothing that not all of us would wish to wear.

This is one of the most troubling aspects of CSJIP therapy - its deep partisanship and the arrogant assumption that its worldview is self-evident, mainstream, and morally superior. It presumes all therapists (and clients) must believe in the ideology of man-made climate catastrophe, hate Donald Trump, support a particular side in any given war, welcome unlimited immigration and treat certain political narratives as moral facts. It ignores the actual diversity of political beliefs among both therapists and clients.

In reality, this worldview is far from representative. British voting patterns have shown over decades that the public is split more or less 50/50 between Labour and Conservative and currently the trend is increasingly toward populist alternatives which are a long way off from the CSJIP outlook. The recent success of Reform UK in the local elections is a clear signal that many people feel alienated from elite political orthodoxies and are seeking more pragmatic, populist, or nation-aware approaches to the UK’s problems. CSJ-informed therapy, with its progressive ideology and moralistic stance, is positioned well outside that mainstream. It speaks for a narrow subculture, typically urban, professional-class, university-educated, and yet insists on shaping the entire profession around its values.

The themes, values and possibilities of politically-oriented therapy have always existed within the profession but have never been widely influential. There is a reason for this: they do not resonate with the majority of practitioners. Likewise, the values and language of CSJIPs do not resonate with the majority of the general public, who rightly suspect they are being lectured to by a self-appointed moral elite. To universalise this worldview within psychotherapy is not only dishonest, it is deeply anti-democratic.

Moreover, psychotherapy has always been responsive to social and relational dilemmas that clients cannot adequately explore within their everyday lives. We already work with the social context including class, race, identity, religion, cultural pressures, exclusion and discrimination where these arise meaningfully in the client’s experience. This is not new. Since at least the 1980s, therapy has integrated social and systemic thinking. What is being proposed now is not simply social awareness, but a radical and politicised dilution of therapy’s core purpose, and a guilt-based pressure to conform to one ideological model of the world.

In this expanded model, therapists are also guilt-tripped into giving away more of their already limited time and emotional resources. This overlooks the sacrifices most therapists have already made: they have spent thousands of pounds training, volunteered hundreds of unpaid clinical hours to qualify, and have a professional life where many are still underpaid, overworked, and emotionally stretched. To be told that therapy ‘must’ now include social justice activism for example, emotional labour for certain campaigns or identity groups, or carry the moral burden of national and historical wrongdoing is, quite simply, exploitative.

We should also recognise that language around responsibility, when introduced too early in the therapeutic space, can be experienced by a vulnerable client as blame. Clients struggling with trauma, dissociation, or fragile ego structures often carry a deep fear of being ‘bad,’ ‘wrong,’ or ‘not enough.’ To saddle them with moral demands for social consciousness or historical reckoning risks retraumatising rather than supporting them.

Psychotherapy is not about directing people toward specific causes; it’s about helping them become stable enough to choose, freely, with full ownership, how and whether they wish to engage with the wider world. For many of us, the rigid prescriptions of early environments are all too familiar, and we resist seeing therapy become another such space.

Engagement with community and democratic life can be a natural, spontaneous outcome of therapy but only once a person has stabilised their internal world and strengthened their Adult ego state. When clients are well-regulated, grounded, and connected to their own values, they may indeed choose to act in the world. But that motivation must come from within, not as a demand, not as an expectation, and certainly not as a professional orthodoxy.

We should be more modest and more disciplined about the scope of our role. It is not psychotherapy’s job to solve the world’s problems. Much of the suffering in the world is the result of systems and actors far beyond the reach of any one individual - corporations, states, financial elites. Responsibility for these problems should not be laid at the feet of psychologically fragile individuals who already struggle with boundaries, self-worth, and meaning.

There is wisdom in minding our own business. When we stick to what psychotherapy does best, working with pain, relationship patterns, trauma, loss, and meaning, we can support clients to become more resilient, more discerning, and more truly themselves. That in itself is a quiet, subversive contribution to the world. We shouldn’t inflate our role or confuse therapy with activism. Clients come to be met in their humanity, not conscripted into a cause.

references

Lee D, 1972, Civil Elegies