Therapy is just as political as it is personal.
When people think about therapy, they often imagine something deeply personal.
Your thoughts. Your feelings. Your relationships. Your past.
This is true. We bring ourselves and our experiences everywhere we go.
Of course it is more complicated than that.
The Myth of “It’s Just You”
We’ve been taught, often subtly, that our struggles are individual problems.
If you’re anxious - you need better coping skills
If you’re burned out - you need better time management
If you’re overwhelmed - you need to “take care of yourself better”
That framing isn’t just incomplete, it is harmful.
Because it ignores the reality that many of the things people bring into therapy are shaped by systems, not just personal choices.
What Do We Mean by “Systemic”?
Your mental health is impacted by things like:
Access to healthcare (or lack of it)
Financial stress and wage inequality
Racism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, ableism
Gender expectations and social roles
State violence both direct and indirect
Trauma that is reinforced, not resolved, by our world.
You are not imagining it, it’s how it is.
Therapy that doesn’t get that could be harmful.
Therapy Should Name the System, Not Just the Symptom
Good therapy looks at the systems, environment, people, and power structures and asks how income inequality, racism, homophobia, class struggle, ect affect the person in front of me.
What has happened to you?
What are you navigating right now?
What systems are you surviving inside of?
Because when we zoom out, we often see:
Your anxiety might be a reasonable response to instability
Your anger might be connected to injustice
Your exhaustion might be the result of carrying too much, for too long
That doesn’t mean we don’t work on coping skills.
It means we don’t pretend coping is the whole story.
The Balance: Personal Work + System Awareness
Therapy lives in the tension between two truths:
You deserve tools, healing, and relief
You are not the sole cause of your distress
We can work on:
emotional regulation
communication
trauma processing
behavior change
While also acknowledging:
the systems around you may not change quickly
some environments are genuinely harmful
resilience should not be the only expectation placed on you
Why This Matters for Access
This is also why conversations about therapy are inherently political.
Who gets access to care?
Who can afford therapy?
Who feels safe enough to show up honestly?
These are not neutral questions.
They are shaped by policy, economics, and culture.
At Small Works Counseling, this is part of why sliding scale, accessibility, and community funding matter.
Because mental health care shouldn’t be reserved for people who can easily afford it.
You Are Not the Problem
If you take one thing from this, let it be this:
You are not broken for struggling in a world that can be overwhelming, unequal, and, at times, deeply invalidating.
Therapy is not about “fixing” you.
It’s about:
understanding your story
making sense of your experiences
building tools that actually work for your life
and, sometimes, naming the systems that made things harder than they needed to be
-Norman
