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Therapy
Liberating Psychotherapy, Society, and Yourself
Why psychotherapy must support both authentic selves and just societies.
Posted April 29, 2025 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
- Therapy can disrupt entrenched patterns and open up ways to live differently.
- Liberatory change goes beyond self-understanding. It alters relationships to self, others, and institutions.
- Good therapy fosters social imagination, helping us envision how authentic selves are cultivated with dignity.
Written by guest author Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D.
Clients enter therapy hoping that exploring their fears, desires, pain, and patterns with another person can do something—can change their situation. Yet, it’s natural to wonder, How? How is it that by talking to someone else, a person can live differently? And beyond this, what does one person’s therapy have to do with social liberation?
There is ongoing debate around these questions in the psychotherapy literature precisely because the answers are not clear. To allay skepticism and stigma, mainstream therapy often describes itself as a medical treatment where a professional diagnoses and treats the problem.
Yet, this view misses how psychotherapy is, at best, an experience that breaks patterns—patterns we live out in relationships, social norms, and systems. Culture and politics shape our selfhood, and we, in turn, go about our lives in ways that fit or push back on policies and conventions.
If we overlook the connection between self and society, then we are obstructed from seeing how a great deal of psychological pain and disorder comes about when we must adapt ourselves to dysfunctional situations.
Good Therapy Breaks Patterns
If you’re in therapy, seeking a therapist, or pursuing a career as one, you, too, have probably wondered whether and how psychotherapy can be liberatory.
As a practicing psychologist and professor who teaches clinical theory and practice, I believe that psychotherapy can be a site for liberation when it unlocks alternative possibilities for how we understand and relate with the world, not independent of it. As a client, therapy opened up alternatives for me. More than simply talking, therapy became a new environment—a relational system with different rules and conditions. It threw my well-worn roles and expectations into uncertainty.
I’ll share an example from my own therapy.
“I am generally pleased being small in the world.” As soon as the words tumbled out of my mouth, an alarming feeling sunk into my gut and echoed. I could not unhear it. But it wasn’t what I meant to say. What an uncanny sensation. I felt estranged from what I was saying, but, clearly, I had uttered a familiar logic by which I lived.
I scanned my therapist’s face, trying to decipher what sense he was making of me. He didn’t say anything. Yet I didn’t feel abandoned by him either. His presence was alarming in its own way. It demanded that I show up in this moment instead of outsourcing some verdict about me to him.
How could I explain myself? Why did I want to be small, and when did I go into hiding? Although I had unwittingly devised ways to conceal myself, it was also true that I felt pained when no one could find me. I was working as an accomplice to an unquestioned logic that I could now understand and revise. In therapy, I was being seen, not explained.
Experiences Change Us
We tend to make sense of our existence through experiences. Our very sense of self—our personhood and our map of the way things are—are created in a type of experiential feedback loop with people, ideas, and systems.
No one told me to hide, but I couldn’t find evidence—tools, models, or stories—that helped me make sense of existing as a bicultural Brown woman. A type of reality for me was that I was wrong, and I would overwhelm—or, worse, incapacitate—any resource or person I needed.
Just as oppressive experiences can alienate us and shape our painful patterns, alternative ways of being in relationships and systems can heal us. As it happens, psychotherapy is both an experience with another person and a social institution.
My experience of being seen in therapy, for example, defied the logic of my world. It was sensible for me to hide. If health were simply a matter of adapting to one’s situation, then I was well. By this logic, a healthy person under authoritarianism is one who adapts to repression, who self-monitors, distorts truths, and avoids reality to conform. But liberation involves disrupting oppressive enclosures and control. Health isn’t distorting truth to obey and conform, but honestly confronting dysfunction and resisting to adapt to it.
How Therapy Works
Research suggests that, above all else, it is the relationship between the client and therapist that drives therapeutic change. But what does this mean?
Unlike conventional medical treatments, where an expert’s prescription acts upon a pathology, the active change ingredients in therapy aren’t physical tools; nor is the problem squarely located within the client. Spoken words and supportive relationships do not physically operate upon a disease entity to cure it, though biologically therapeutic effects may work hand in hand with overall healing. Therapy can work precisely because humans are not determined by any one factor—genes, zip code, or one traumatic event.
It is because we are multifaceted that the complex nature of the therapy interaction becomes a site that recreates and rethinks patterns that inevitably arise—a relationship that is so genuinely honest and exploratory that we can glimpse what other selves and systems may be possible.
Despite the robust research on therapy change factors, a lot of focus gets placed on expert prescriptions. Training therapists often ask what to do, confusing specific approaches (e.g., humanistic-existential, cognitive-behavioral, psychodynamic) with step-by-step instructions applied irrespective of the client’s situation or what’s going on between client and therapist.
Yet, even specific and structured approaches are delivered through the relationship and work because an alternative feedback loop is being co-created. The therapy relationship itself is an active experience that counters norms.
It is all too easy to fall into the trap that evidence-based therapy means delivering a manual or structured plan to resolve a self-contained problem or diagnosis. What we know, however, is that therapy is a dynamic, evolving experience made up of in-the-moment contingencies that are radically explored and responded to together.
Liberatory Change
Therapy allowed me to venture into who I could be when other systems were possible. If hiding was a way to self-regulate within an authoritarian ideal, then therapy acted as a small-scale version of a well-functioning family or social system where I could come forward more authentically. What is freedom if not reclaiming some modicum of self-direction and genuine participation in relational and social life?
This freedom not only enables us to participate in the world differently, but it also challenges society to adjust to liberatory selves. What I mean to say here is that changed selves pressure systems to reorganize and support, not oppress, human dignity and thriving.
If we see therapy merely as a prescriptive treatment for individual disorders, then we:
- Overlook the multifaceted nature of humans.
- Fail to understand the complex realities of psychological pain.
- Risk scapegoating individuals who are suffering.
- Absolve systems and social structures of the responsibility to support individual human flourishing and healthy democratic societies.
- Dismiss and discount alternative, effective methods and paradigms that can help us better understand and address problems.
- Curtail the full and diverse range of alternative and liberatory possibilities for self and society.
Alternatively, if we can be changed by experiences that rouse different future possibilities, therapy can be about much more than individual wellness. Therapy can be a site for self and social imagination—where liberation may be brought about with and for each other.
