Liberatory Practice

Creative work in therapy can stabilize or overwhelm depending on how it’s used. This article distinguishes therapeutic art from art therapy, emphasizing clinical containment, scope, and ethical responsibility. It explores how material choice, structure, and pacing shape activation, and frames containment as a practice of care that protects client autonomy, supports regulation, and resists extraction-based models of healing.

Autism is often framed as a social deficit, but many autistic communication differences reflect cultural mismatch rather than impairment. Drawing on Erin Meyer’s cultural frameworks and the double empathy problem, this article explores how dominant social norms define competence, shape diagnosis, and create barriers to work and care — and why inclusion requires mutual adaptation, not correction.

Social work promotes self-care while operating within systems that reward self-sacrifice and chronic overextension. This article examines how professional culture, training, and structural expectations normalize depletion, particularly through gendered and classed dynamics. It argues that burnout is not an individual failure but a systemic issue, and calls for collective action to challenge the norms that consume helping professionals.

Professional martyrdom describes a pattern in which workers organize their professional identity around sacrificing personal resources—time, money, or wellbeing—to meet unmet needs. Often framed as compassion or commitment, these everyday acts shift responsibility from institutions to individuals, distort care relationships, and sustain under-resourced systems. Naming the pattern reveals how sacrifice becomes normalized and why sustainable care requires shared responsibility

Sacrificial professionalism describes a professional culture in which workers are expected to incur ongoing personal cost—time, money, health, or well-being—so others benefit. Common in helping professions, this norm reframes sacrifice as commitment, shifts responsibility for systemic gaps onto individuals, and enables the commodification of care. Naming the phenomenon reveals its structural origins and opens possibilities for more sustainable professional practice.

Deliberately developmental supervision frames the supervisory relationship not just as oversight, but as the primary site of personal and professional evolution. Anti-oppressive supervision centers power, equity, and the structural forces that shape safety and risk. Both approaches are gaining traction, and for good reason. Clinicians are burned out. Workforces are strained. Agencies are navigating staffing shortages and administrative overload. In this context, models promis

Polyamorous relationships are often described as intentionally non-hierarchical, values-driven, and grounded in consent. Many polycules explicitly reject rigid rules in favor of co-created agreements that prioritize autonomy, transparency, and relational agency. Yet even the most intentional systems are shaped by structure, whether that structure is named and negotiated or left implicit and unexamined. Structural Family Therapy (SFT) offers a useful lens here, not because pol

Explore how the Industrial Revolution pathologized human difference. Learn to decolonize autism by centering Indigenous frameworks like takiwātanga and pîtoteyihtam.

In trauma theory, anti-oppressive practice, and disability justice, one truth keeps resurfacing: the body already knows what it needs, but culture keeps getting in the way. Stimming—rocking, flapping, tapping, humming, pacing, chewing, spinning, fidgeting—is one of the clearest examples. It is an act of self-regulation, expression, and sensory equilibrium, and yet it is one of the most policed behaviors in neurodivergent bodies. To understand why stimming is pathologized inst