Therapy Is Punk: Queering the Edges of Healing

Punk, Decolonization & the Rebellion of Care

The world hums with static — feedback, distortion, the kind that rattles the bones. Systems are splintering. Fascism rebrands itself as safety. People are terrified and tired. And in the middle of all this noise, we’re still here — sitting with clients, listening to breath, to trembling, to grief, to the body’s quiet refusal to disappear. I’m scared too. Scared for my clients. Scared for my community. Scared for the fragile threads still holding us together. But fear isn’t the end — it’s the opening note before the distortion kicks in.

The System Was Never Neutral

Let’s be honest: Western mental health was never built for liberation. It was built to manage, contain, normalize. It grew out of white, patriarchal, colonial frameworks that medicalized pain and pathologized difference. It divided mind from body, individual from collective, personal from political. It treated healing as compliance. The DSM is a symptom of empire — a taxonomy of control. Insurance companies decide who’s “worthy” of care. Licensure boards police tone and language, confusing obedience with ethics.

Therapy, as an institution, was trained to quiet the noise — to keep things palatable, predictable, “professional.”

But we are not meant to be quiet.

Punk Was Always Therapy — and Therapy Was Always Queer

Punk is a decolonial practice. A refusal to replicate systems that demand obedience. Communal. Anti-hierarchical. Body-based. Improvised. It takes pain and turns it into sound, movement, connection — a scream that becomes solidarity.

To be queer is to live this ethic.

Queerness has always been punk: a refusal of binaries, a celebration of the margins, a building of chosen family from what the system abandoned.

Both punk and queerness say: You don’t get to tell me how to exist. They both reclaim the body — as protest and as home.

Queering therapy isn’t just inclusive language; it’s disrupting the colonial, capitalist logics that make therapy sterile and hierarchical. It’s therapy as collective improvisation. Mutual regulation, not clinical distance. Expertise rooted in lived experience. A session as co-creation rather than compliance. Punk is what queering therapy sounds like — feedback, distortion, courage.

The Punk in the Room

In my practice, punk shows up as ethos, not aesthetic. When a client panics, we sit in the noise. When grief floods, we turn toward it. When anger roars, we listen. The session becomes a basement show: raw, imperfect, intimate, alive. Therapist and client build the setlist together. The walls might shake a little — that’s okay. Punk and queer healing invite what the system mutes: imperfection, uncertainty, aliveness. Rupture as rhythm. Repair as music.

Burnout, Feedback & Finding the Downbeat

We’re tired.
All of us.

Therapists, activists, clients — playing on blown speakers in a room half on fire. Burnout isn’t failure; it’s data. It tells us the tempo’s been wrong for too long. At a show, when the amp fries mid-set, the energy doesn’t end. Someone grabs a megaphone. Someone pounds the floor for percussion. The sound shifts, but the song continues.

That’s where we are now. The medical-industrial complex is collapsing. Our job isn’t to fix it; it’s to find the downbeat again. Slow down. Ground in community. Remember: ethics aren’t about control — they’re about care. And care, practiced honestly, will always disrupt hierarchy.

The Queer-Punk-Decolonial Thread

Decolonizing therapy. Queering therapy. Punking therapy. Different languages, same rhythm.

Each asks: Whose knowledge was erased? Who profits from our exhaustion? What happens when we center the body, the collective, the sacred mess of being alive? Healing doesn’t come through assimilation — it comes through authenticity. Liberation isn’t theoretical — it’s relational. Repair happens in community, not isolation. And sometimes, the most therapeutic act is to stop pretending we’re fine.

The Call to Build Something Different

We can’t wait for institutions to bless our next move. We have to write our own permission slips. We have to build therapy that feels like a house show: sweaty, imperfect, communal, sacred. Therapy that values embodiment over performance, process over product, truth over politeness. Therapy that holds queerness not just as identity but as methodology — a way of seeing, creating, connecting. This is therapy as rebellion. Therapy as love. Therapy as mutual survival.

Questions for Reflection

• What does liberation look like in your practice?

• How does queerness move through your work — in language, in body, in presence?

• What power structures do you unconsciously uphold?

• How might you dismantle them?

• How does your therapy sound — clinical silence or something closer to music?

• What would it mean to stop waiting for the system to change and start building your own underground now?

Because the system may not hold — but we can.

In our communities.
In our collectives.
In our sessions.
In our songs.

Therapy, at its truest,
has always been punk —
a refusal to look away,
a commitment to the raw and the real.

And queerness?
Queerness is the reverb
that reminds us
we were never meant to play quietly.