When Safety Isn’t a Given: Why Anti-Oppressive Practice Is Essential in Trauma Therapy

I have never known what it feels like to belong to the majority.
Even though, globally, I am part of the global majority, that idea doesn’t feel tangible. It doesn’t translate into daily experiences of ease, safety, or belonging.
We often don’t know how deeply something has hurt us until we experience its opposite; safety, attunement, recognition. Only then does the body exhale and realize how much tension it’s been carrying all along.
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A Moment in Session
Recently, during a phone session, a client was sharing about her traumatic experiences.
As I listened, I gently asked, “How do you think your ethnicity, being a person of colour has impacted your health and your nervous system?”
She paused for a long time. Her voice softened.
“No one has ever asked me that before,” she said. “I’ve never felt this seen or validated.”
That moment landed heavily for both of us. It wasn’t a theoretical conversation about oppression. It was a lived reminder that racism and systemic inequities are not abstract concepts; they are embodied experiences that shape how safe or unsafe a nervous system feels in the world.
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The Nervous System and Oppression
Oppression leaves traces in the body.
For people who are racialized, the nervous system often adapts to a chronic undercurrent of vigilance, anticipating misunderstanding, dismissal, or harm.
This isn’t “overreacting.” It’s adaptive survival.
The nervous system becomes attuned to microaggressions, to subtle shifts in tone or space, to the thousand small ways safety has to be earned instead of assumed.
Without recognizing this layer, therapy risks missing the full picture.
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The Problem with “Neutral” Therapy
Therapists are often taught to be neutral, to avoid bringing up race, culture, or systemic oppression unless the client introduces it.
But “neutrality” in an unequal world is not neutral. It quietly sides with the dominant experience.
When we fail to name the impact of oppression, clients internalize that silence. They begin to question whether their pain is real or valid. That absence of recognition is retraumatizing; it tells the nervous system, again, that it’s on its own.
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Why Anti-Oppressive Practice Is Not Optional
Anti-oppressive work isn’t a specialty, it’s the foundation of ethical trauma therapy.
It means we ask questions others don’t.
We bring curiosity about culture, history, and context into our conceptualizations.
We view “resistance” or “avoidance” through the lens of survival rather than pathology.
This work is not about perfectly knowing; it’s about humbly noticing and naming what has been unnamed for too long.
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A Different Kind of Safety
That single moment of validation with my client reminded me: safety isn’t created by soft lighting or calm voices.
Safety begins when someone’s lived experience doesn’t have to be explained.
When a body can finally relax because it feels understood not studied.
This is the heart of trauma therapy: not just reprocessing the past, but helping the nervous system experience what true belonging feels like; perhaps for the first time.