Neutral Therapy Can Feel Like Erasure: Notes for Clients Who've Been There

You went to therapy for a reason. Maybe you were grieving, or exhausted, or trying to make sense of a relationship that had gone quiet, or simply aware that something in you needed attention. You found a therapist. You showed up. You tried to explain what you were carrying.

And somewhere in the process, something did not land. The therapist was kind. They were professional. They did not say anything actively harmful. But you left sessions feeling strangely unseen. When you mentioned race, or being trans, or being disabled, or the cost of living, or your family's immigration story, or the weight of what is happening in the world, the therapist's face did a small thing. A softening into careful neutrality. A redirect back to your feelings. A question about how this relates to your relationship with your mother.

You could not name what was wrong. You just knew the work was not quite reaching you.

This post is for you. It is about what is often called "neutral" therapy, why it can feel like a particular kind of erasure to clients whose lives are shaped by forces most training programs still treat as background noise, and what therapy can look like when the therapist stops pretending the world outside the room is not happening.

I am a Vancouver-based psychotherapist working online across Canada. I am a white settler therapist, trans, queer, and disabled, working on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Naming these facts is not decoration. It is one of the first moves in the kind of work I am describing here.

The claim that therapy is neutral

Most therapy training still teaches a particular posture: the therapist should be warm but not personal, present but not political, curious but not opinionated. You bring the material. The therapist holds space. Whatever you arrive with is valid. The therapist's job is to receive it without judgment.

On the surface, this sounds reasonable. A therapy room should not become a lecture. You should not be subjected to your therapist's views on the election. The care should be about you.

The trouble starts when neutrality is treated as an absence of position rather than as a position itself. A therapist who has decided not to speak to the reality that your rent is rising while your wages are flat has taken a position. A therapist who treats your experience of being misgendered at the walk-in clinic as a piece of personal data to be processed, rather than as an ongoing condition of your life, has taken a position. A therapist who asks you how you feel about the residential school news without any acknowledgment of their own location in that story has taken a position.

Neutrality, it turns out, is not neutral. It is a stance. And for clients whose lives are shaped by racism, colonialism, transphobia, ableism, class, or any combination of these, that stance often registers as the therapist quietly declining to see what is actually in the room.

What this can feel like as a client

Clients who have experienced this often describe the same handful of things.

You felt a subtle pressure to translate your experience into language the therapist could receive. You softened the specifics. You left out the parts that felt too much. You took care of your therapist's comfort without meaning to.

You noticed that when you named something systemic, the conversation returned quickly to something individual. Your grief about the state of trans rights became a conversation about your anxiety. Your exhaustion from being the only racialised person on your team became a conversation about setting boundaries. Something got rerouted.

You left sessions feeling tidy. Not better. Tidy. Like you had done the work of being a good client, of producing insight, of showing progress, and you still had not said the real thing.

You sensed that the therapist's professionalism required something of you. A certain performance. A particular kind of composure. You could not quite bring all of yourself into the room.

If any of this is familiar, you are not making it up, and you were not failing therapy. You were registering, accurately, that the frame of the work was not designed to hold the life you are actually living.

Why the frame is like this

Western psychotherapy grew up inside a specific set of assumptions. That the individual is the primary unit of healing. That suffering is best understood as something happening inside a person. That the therapist's role is to remain outside the political and social context of the client's life so the client can make their own meaning without interference.

These assumptions were not neutral when they were built, and they are not neutral now. They developed inside institutions that pathologised Indigenous people, racialised people, queer people, trans people, disabled people, and poor people, and that located the source of distress inside those people rather than inside the systems that were harming them. The training I received as a Canadian psychotherapist is still shaped by those origins.

Renee Linklater, a member of Rainy River First Nations in Northwestern Ontario and an Anishinaabe scholar, writes about this at length in Decolonizing Trauma Work: Indigenous Stories and Strategies. Linklater describes what it has meant for Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island to have their distress diagnosed through Western psychiatric frameworks that treat colonialism as a context to be acknowledged rather than as the wound itself. She draws on the work of Apache and Pueblo psychologist Eduardo Duran, who developed the concept of the "soul wound" to name what happens when generations of people are disconnected from land, language, ceremony, and community, and then handed a diagnostic manual to describe what is wrong with them individually.

Linklater's own story is part of her book. She describes being taken into foster care at a few months old as part of the Sixties Scoop, being raised by adoptive parents whose love was real, and later, as a young adult, experiencing a period of acute distress that a Western psychiatrist could have labelled with several DSM diagnoses. What she was actually offered, through her reconnection with her Anishinaabe family and community, was a talking circle, a shake tent ceremony, and the steady holding of aunties, uncles, and Elders. The wound was not inside her, alone, to be fixed. It was in the long history of what had been done to her family and her people, and the healing had to meet that full scale.

This critique is not new. It simply has not yet reshaped most therapy training, which still teaches therapists to set aside the historical and political context of a client's life in the name of keeping the space "neutral."

What moving beyond neutrality can look like

When a therapist moves beyond the posture of pretended neutrality, a few things can change in the room.

Context becomes part of the material, not background to it. When you mention being misgendered at a medical appointment, the therapist does not redirect to your feelings about it. They sit with the ongoing condition of navigating a medical system that does this, and the impact of that condition on your nervous system, your relationships, and your sense of what is possible.

The therapist's own location shows up, at least enough to be honest about it. Not as a speech, not as a performance of virtue, but as a fact that shapes what they can and cannot see. I am a white settler therapist. I am trans, queer, and disabled. Each of these shapes what I bring to the room. Naming them is not oversharing. It is part of taking your life seriously.

Your analysis of your own life is taken seriously. If you have been thinking about your life through a lens of systemic harm, intergenerational trauma, colonial violence, racial capitalism, or disability justice, that thinking is not pathologised as "intellectualising" or redirected into feelings. It is engaged with. Your mind is not a defence mechanism. It is part of how you have survived.

Healing is not framed as purely individual. You are not the only site of this work. The community you are part of, the ancestors you carry, the relationships that hold you, and the movements that are bigger than you are all part of what makes healing possible. This is a shift from the one-client-one-therapist model toward something that keeps the collective in view.

What this is not

This is not therapy where the therapist talks more than you do. It is not therapy where you have to agree with your therapist's politics. It is not therapy where your personal process is subordinated to a political analysis. It is not therapy where the therapist performs allyship while missing what is actually happening for you.

It is closer to therapy where the therapist has stopped pretending they are outside of history, outside of power, outside of their own location, and outside of the world you are walking through every day. That one shift, honestly made, changes what becomes possible.

At our practice, this stance shapes how we work across modalities. In decolonizing therapy in practice, I write about what we are actually doing and still learning in this territory. In the body as an archive, I write about Dr. Roger Kuhn's Somacultural Liberation and what a settler therapist inherits, in the body, from a colonial lineage. Both posts sit alongside this one.

An invitation

You may have spent years in therapy wondering why the work was not landing. You may have blamed yourself for not being the right kind of client. You may have concluded that therapy is not for people like you. None of those conclusions are about you. They are about a field that is still slowly reckoning with the frames it inherited.

You do not have to start over to try something different. A consult is a conversation. If this approach fits what you are looking for, we can talk about what the work might look like. If it does not, I will try to help you think about what might. You are already carrying enough without carrying the assumption that therapy was never going to reach you.