Let’s be honest about the modern mental health world: we talk a lot about trauma, but we rarely talk about joy. Traditional therapy is obsessed with symptom management, reduction, and fixing what is broken. While processing trauma is absolutely necessary, focusing only on suffering accidentally plays right into the hands of the systems that hurt us. It sends a subliminal message that marginalized people are defined entirely by their struggles. To truly decolonize therapy, we have to move past basic survival. Pleasure isn’t a luxury or a reward you have to earn after a long week of capitalism—it is your birthright. Reclaiming bodily joy and deep community connection is a fierce, beautiful act of rebellion against systems designed to wear us down.
How Oppression Shows Up in the Body
Systems like racial capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy aren’t just abstract concepts we read about in books; they are physically wired into our nervous systems. Oppression functions by regulating our bodies, conditioning marginalized folks to live in a constant state of hypervigilance, tightness, and compliance (Hook, 2023). Think about it: capitalist culture demands that your worth equals your productivity. In that framework, resting feels dangerous, and just sitting still feels like a waste of time.
When your body is constantly dealing with daily microaggressions and systemic violence, your autonomic nervous system gets locked in a survival loop. You are either running on stress hormones (fight-or-flight) or completely shut down and numb (dorsal vagal freeze) (Porges, 2021). Over time, this constant survival mode disconnects you from your own bodily cues. Chronic exhaustion and dissociation aren’t individual flaws or failures—they are the literal physical toll of enduring systemic harm.
Decolonizing Somatics and EMDR Through Pleasure
Standard trauma treatments, including typical Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), often make the mistake of focusing entirely on clearing out the bad stuff while totally ignoring how to bring in the good stuff. A liberation-focused approach to EMDR and somatic work completely flips this script. During the Resource Development and Installation (RDI) phase of EMDR, a decolonial therapist won’t just help you build basic coping skills. They will intentionally help you anchor and magnify the physical feelings of joy, ancestral resilience, and community belonging (Afuape, 2011). This shifts therapy from “how do I survive?” to “how do I thrive?”
We also need to call out the fact that body-based healing didn’t start in Western therapy offices. Long before Eurocentric psychology commercialized “somatic therapy,” Indigenous cultures and communities of color used rhythmic movement, collective singing, storytelling, and communal grieving to reset their nervous systems (Menakem, 2017). Decolonizing somatics means stepping away from clinicalized, rigid exercises. It means inviting people to reconnect with their body’s natural wisdom, asserting that our bodies deserve comfort, delight, and untamed pleasure right now.
Pleasure Activism: Joy as a Strike
The idea of “pleasure activism,” popularized by Adrienne Marie Brown (2019), points out something brilliant: if we want liberation, we have to make the process of healing feel good. Oppressive systems rely on us being too exhausted, isolated, and demoralized to imagine anything better. When you claim somatic joy, whether that’s through an afternoon of radical rest, enjoying sensory pleasures, or dancing just for the sake of it, you are essentially going on strike. You are withdrawing your energy and compliance from the machinery that tries to exploit you.
This kind of somatic joy is lightyears away from the superficial “self-care” sold to us by corporations, which usually just means buying an expensive product to feel relaxed enough to go back to work the next day. True somatic joy is an inside job. It’s about tuning into small, life-affirming physical sensations, the warmth of the sun on your skin, the deep relief of a full breath, or the ease of unhurried movement. Cultivating this awareness allows you to rewrite the trauma stories written on your skin, replacing messages of unworthiness with the lived reality of your own sacred dignity.
Connection as Collective Regulation
One of the biggest flaws of Western psychology is its hyper-individualism. It isolates us by treating trauma and healing as things that happen completely inside one person’s head. Liberation psychology reminds us that systemic trauma happens in a context, which means healing must happen in community (Martín-Baró, 1994). Because systems of control deliberately isolate people to break solidarity, choosing to connect with others becomes a massive act of defiance.
Collective connection is essentially a cheat code for our nervous systems. When marginalized people gather in spaces where they feel safe and free to express joy, their nervous systems co-regulate. This shared vibe lowers stress hormones across the board, flips on our body’s safety switches, and restores a deep sense of belonging (Porges, 2021). This relational pleasure—found in shared laughter, mutual aid, community organizing, or shared rituals—acts as a shield against structural violence. Co-regulation is a beautiful reminder to a tired nervous system that it was never meant to carry the weight of the world alone.
Conclusion
For a decolonial and liberation trauma therapist, somatic work and EMDR cannot just be about helping clients tolerate a broken world more quietly. True psychological liberation means opening up the floodgates to the best parts of being human: joy, pleasure, and deep connection. Believing that pleasure is your birthright completely shatters the oppressive idea that marginalized bodies exist only for labor, suffering, or assimilation. By choosing to cultivate somatic joy and community connection, we stage a beautiful inner mutiny. We prove that despite every system trying to numb and constrict us, our bodies are still vibrantly alive, deeply connected, and completely free to feel good.
References
Afuape, T. (2011). Power, resistance and liberation in therapy with survivors of trauma: To her, open fields. Routledge.
Brown, A. M. (2019). Pleasure activism: The politics of feeling good. AK Press.
Hook, D. (2023). The psychology of oppression: Systemic power, subjection, and somatic resistance. Palgrave Macmillan.
Martín-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology (A. Aron & S. Corne, Eds.). Harvard University Press.
Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.
Porges, S. W. (2021). Polyvagal safety: Attachment, communication, self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.