More and more, I hear people describing themselves as powerless in the face of our current political environment. They feel overwhelmed by a seemingly unrelenting attack on everything they once considered settled in our country. I hear over and over, “These are unprecedented times.”
I get it, and I can validate how real and painful these feelings are. What we are watching, the erosion of civil rights protections, the normalization of cruelty, the visible contempt for the dignity of whole communities, should be painful. That pain is a moral response to being human and witnessing harm, regardless of your politics.
But I have to ask, with some love and a little bit of edge, are these really “unprecedented times?”
For some people, this level of visible political instability is new. For many others, Black Americans, Indigenous people, immigrant communities, and LGBTQIA people, this is not a departure from American history. It is a continuation of it. Slavery. The violent displacement of Native nations. Japanese American internment. Criminalization and brutality against LGBTQIA communities. Waves of immigration raids, deportations, and family separations across decades. These are not footnotes. They are entire chapters in American history.
But chapters are not the whole story.
And that is where therapy has to live right now.
The Blueprint Already Exists
In the Black community specifically, the answer to political despair is not new. It was built across generations. The Divine Nine fraternities and sororities. The NAACP, Prince Hall Masons, and Eastern Stars. The Black Church. These were not simply social organizations or spaces for fellowship. They were and are part of the African American infrastructure that has protected its people for hundreds of years.
They pooled money when banks refused Black depositors. They funded education when schools were segregated and underfunded. They created mentorship pipelines when mainstream institutions locked Black professionals out. They organized voter registration drives under the constant threat of violence. They filed lawsuits, trained lawyers, and challenged unjust laws and they won. They built mutual aid networks that fed families, buried the dead, and kept communities intact through periods that were, by any measure, more overtly dangerous than this one.
All while they kept living. They raised children. They laughed. They worshipped. They gathered. They did not allow the hostility of the outside world to become the whole of their interior world.
The evidence of that work is visible right now. While the racial wealth gap remains real and demands correction, we are also living in the most economically and educationally advanced era in Black American history. The largest middle class. Record employment. Wealth that has grown dramatically in just the last decade. Poverty at historic lows. Life expectancy is up by nearly 15 years since 1950. Infant mortality is down. Access to healthcare expanded.
None of that happened by accident. It was built. By the same infrastructure, the same discipline, and the same refusal to surrender that the ancestors modeled.
I speak most fluently from inside my own community. These institutions and these stories were handed to me in childhood. But every people has such a legacy. Indigenous nations preserved language and governance under violent displacement. Immigrant communities built sanctuaries and legal defense networks during deportation waves. The strategies differ. The principle is the same: organized people, moving with discipline and purpose, shift conditions over time.
That is the model. Not the performance of strength. Not the suppression of grief. But the refusal to let fear become the final word.
So what’s this got to do with therapy and mental health, you ask?
Power Narrowed Is Not Power Erased
Trauma, by definition, involves powerlessness. Something happens that overwhelms the system. Something or someone temporarily takes control. But in over two decades of clinical work, I have rarely met a trauma survivor who had no power at all. I have met people whose power was brutally constrained. People whose options were cruelly limited. But even then, there was adaptation. Strategy. Endurance. Faith. Something inside that kept going.
Power narrowed is not power erased.
Political despair mirrors trauma. It whispers that you are small. That the system is too big. That nothing you do matters. And if therapy only validates that message without widening the frame, it risks reinforcing it and co-signing on helplessness. That is not care. That is collusion.
I want to be direct about something: checking out is not the answer. And sitting with your therapist week after week processing how bad it is without ever asking what you are going to do with what you still have is not healing. It may feel supportive, but it forgets a very important component of healing: your agency. Even when you are not sure of your next step in circumstances such as what we are experiencing in the country right now. Hint… hint… our ancestors have the answers.
What Therapy Must Do Right Now
People often tell me they appreciate working with me not because I am endlessly soft, though I can be, but because things move, and that movement came from their choices, their power. In sessions we acknowledge the hurt. We honor the grief. We tell the truth about injustice. Sometimes we laugh at ourselves. And then we figure out what comes next. Pain is real. It is present. But it is not all, and it cannot be all, unless we allow it to be.
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My grandmother used to say she “handed it over to God.” She did her part and released the rest. There is deep psychological wisdom in that. That release was not passivity. It was containment. When we believe we must control everything, we collapse. When we remember that we have a lane and that others have theirs, we can sustain engagement. We can show up tomorrow. We can do our part.
During periods of political contraction, therapy cannot become a space where helplessness is rehearsed. It must become a space where agency is restored. Not dominance. Not control over systems far larger than any one of us. But agency as choice. As contribution. As community. As tending to your family, your work, your body, your spirit, and showing up, in whatever way you can, for something larger than yourself. And honoring those choices when you make them.
The ancestors did not allow despair to rob them of their power. And the inheritance they left us, the institutions, the strategies, the blueprint, was built precisely so that we would not have to start from nothing.
Erosion does not erase the blueprint.
This moment is serious. It is destabilizing. It requires grieving.
But it is not unprecedented. And neither is organized resilience.
As a therapist, I understand that our clients are more than what has happened to them. They are more than what is happening around them. And sometimes the most compassionate and most honest thing I can say is this:
Yes, this is hard.
Yes, it is real. Pause…
Now let’s talk about what you are going to do with the power you still have.
