I’ve been battling colonial values my whole life. In therapy training, they arrived dressed as neutrality.
There’s something almost elegant about that disguise. Neutrality sounds like fairness. Like an empty room, waiting. But rooms are never empty. They are furnished by whoever built them — their assumptions about what a self is, what healing looks like, whose suffering counts as political and whose is merely personal.
I was trained, as many of us were, to leave my politics at the door. To hold a ‘neutral’ space. What I noticed was that the tutors who said this most firmly were the ones least able to examine what they’d already brought in with them.
Lecturing clients about their oppression is not therapy. That much is true. But silence has its own ideology. Unprocessed colonial values don’t disappear because we don’t name them — they settle into the room like furniture, and we call it the therapeutic frame.
Right now, Palestine. Sudan. Iran. Israel. The West’s long, unresolved, quietly catastrophic relationship with Islam. These are not geopolitics at a distance. They are arriving with our clients, carried in the body, present in the consulting room whether we acknowledge them or not.
We can keep calling the room neutral. Or we can look at what’s actually in it.
That’s what this conference is for — not to arrive at answers, but to be honest about the questions we’ve been afraid to ask. We’d love you to be part of that conversation.
The Myth of Therapeutic Neutrality — Islam: Therapy, Spirituality and Politics 15–16 May 2026 | Online | £25