What Is Anti-Oppressive Practice?
“Holding any one worldview as superior leads to ethnocentric and oppressive practices”
What is anti-oppressive practice?
Anti-oppressive practice is an approach to counselling that recognizes that people do not exist within a vacuum. Our experiences are shaped not only by our individual histories, relationships, and choices, but also by the social, cultural, political, and economic systems in which we live. These systems can create very different experiences for different people depending on factors such as race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, ability, age, immigration status, and other aspects of identity.
An anti-oppressive approach therefore asks us to consider not only what is happening within an individual, but also what may be happening around them.
This is particularly important in counselling because there can be a tendency in the field to locate problems entirely within the individual. Someone experiencing anxiety, for example, may be encouraged to develop coping skills to manage their symptoms. These skills can certainly be helpful, but an anti-oppressive perspective also asks us to consider what is contributing to the anxiety in the first place. Is the person experiencing discrimination at work? Are they living in poverty? Are they navigating racism, homophobia, ableism, or gender-based violence? Are they experiencing unsafe housing or financial insecurity?
For those of us who were trained in Canada and the US, we must take into account that our training (typically) comes from a Western perspective, and therefore has many cultural blindspots. Without ongoing and critical reflection, we run the risk of imposing our Western cultural framework or narratives on others.
These questions do not mean that every difficulty can or should be explained by oppression. Rather, they allow us to consider the broader context in which a person's experiences are occurring.
What does oppression mean?
Oppression refers to systems and patterns that create and maintain unequal access to power, resources, opportunities, and safety. It can occur at an interpersonal level, such as through discrimination or prejudice, but it also exists at institutional and systemic levels.
Importantly, oppression does not require an individual person to intentionally oppress another person. A system can produce unequal outcomes even when the people participating in that system do not consciously intend to cause harm.
For example, a policy may appear neutral on the surface while disproportionately affecting a particular group of people. A workplace may have expectations around communication or professionalism that reflect the norms of one cultural group while treating other ways of communicating as less appropriate. A healthcare system may be technically available to everyone while still creating significant barriers for people who experience racism, disability, language barriers, or financial insecurity.
Understanding this distinction is important because otherwise it can be easy to reduce oppression to individual acts of prejudice rather than recognizing the larger systems that contribute to unequal experiences.
What does this have to do with counselling?
Counsellors are not separate from these systems. We are part of them.
In fact, counsellors hold a certain amount of power simply by virtue of our professional role. We have specialized education and knowledge, we are often positioned as experts, and clients come to us during periods of vulnerability. This creates an inherent power difference within the therapeutic relationship.
An anti-oppressive approach involves being conscious of that power rather than pretending it does not exist.
This can involve examining our own assumptions and biases, considering how our identities influence the way we understand our clients, and being willing to recognize when we have made an incorrect assumption or caused harm. It also means being mindful of the ways in which counselling itself has historically been used to pathologize people whose experiences or identities did not fit dominant social norms.
For example, there is a long history of mental health systems treating certain identities and behaviours as pathological. An anti-oppressive counsellor therefore needs to be thoughtful about the difference between distress that originates within an individual and distress that may be a reasonable response to an oppressive environment.
A note on cultural competence
One misconception about anti-oppressive practice is that counsellors need to be experts on every culture, identity, or experience in order to practice ethically — this isn’t realistic. There is no way that we can be experts in every identity and lived experience our clients may bring into the counselling room. Instead, I think humility is more important than expertise.
This means being willing to recognize that we do not know what we do not know. It means asking rather than assuming. It means being open to learning from our clients about their experiences without placing the responsibility on them to educate us. It also means being willing to notice when something we have said or done has landed differently than we intended.
Cultural competence is often discussed in counselling, but it’s not about simply becoming “competent” in someone else's culture. Culture is complex, and individuals within any cultural group have different experiences, beliefs, values, and relationships with their identities. An anti-oppressive approach therefore involves ongoing openness, self-reflection, and curiousity, rather than reaching a point where we can consider ourselves finished learning.
What does anti-oppressive counselling look like?
There is no single set of techniques that makes counselling anti-oppressive. Instead, I think it is better understood as a perspective that informs the way we approach the therapeutic relationship.
It may mean asking clients about aspects of their identity that are relevant to their experience rather than making assumptions about them. It may mean recognizing the impact of discrimination or marginalization when a client brings these experiences into therapy. It may mean examining whether our conceptualization of a client's behaviour is influenced by our own cultural assumptions.
In my view, anti-oppressive practice often involves becoming more curious and less certain.
Rather than immediately asking, “What is wrong with this person?” we can ask, “What has happened to this person?” and “What context are they living within?”
Anti-oppressive practice is an ongoing process
Ultimately, anti-oppressive practice asks us to hold a more complex understanding of our clients' lives. People are not simply collections of symptoms, diagnoses, behaviours, or coping mechanisms. They are individuals with unique identities and histories who are also living within families, communities, institutions, and broader social systems.
As counsellors, we have a responsibility to consider all of these contexts. Doing so does not mean abandoning individual responsibility or therapeutic work. It means recognizing that individual wellbeing and social context are not separate things, and that effective counselling requires us to pay attention to both.
References
Arthur, N. (2018). Counseling in Cultural Contexts. Springer.
University of Pittsburgh, School of Education, Center for Urban Education. https://www.cue.pitt.edu/
