Decolonial Healing. Living Otherwise.

Course Description

In Decolonial Healing. Living Otherwise, marcela approaches therapy practice from the question: How do we want to live? This question becomes especially urgent when we consider the colonial wound violently inflicted by modernity through its fracturing inventions of Western time, the human, nature, and the body, as well as its control over our senses and perceptions.

Instructor Information

Educational Goals

1. Develop an understanding of the epistemic foundations of therapy in relation to colonial power, from a decolonial perspective.
2. Develop an understanding of modernity's persuasive stories that control therapists listening skills, perception, and conceptualization of the body.
3. Develop an understanding of ancestral relational frameworks other than eurocentric to engage in conversations including other corporalities, temporalities, and sensing.

Measurable Learning Objectives

1. Participants will be able to identify at least two epistemic assumptions underlying contemporary therapy and explain their relationship to colonial power from a decolonial perspective.
2. Participants will be able to identify at least two modernity-based narratives that influence therapists’ listening skills, perception, and conceptualization of the body.
3. Participants will be able to compare Eurocentric and ancestral relational frameworks in relation to knowledge, corporalities, and ways of sensing.

Outline with Main Points for Each Topic (including times)

1. 8:30–8:45 AM · Introduction — 15 minutes

   • Introduction to the paradox of modernity/coloniality

2. 8:45–9:15 AM · Decolonial healing and the colonial wound — 30 minutes

   • Perspectives of suffering from the lens of the colonial wound in every day life.
   • Healing as an ancestral relational practice and its purpose

3. 9:15–9:30 AM · Final reflections and conversation with the audience — 15 minutes

   • Closing reflections on living otherwise from a decolonial perspective.
   • Conversation with the audience.

Total instructional time: 15 + 30 + 15 = 60 minutes / 60 = 1.0 CE hours

Signing in and out

• Sign in at the door between 8:00 AM and 8:30 AM.
• Sign out and complete this session’s evaluation at the door when it ends at 9:30 AM.
• Sign-in, sign-out and the evaluation are not part of the 1.0 CE hours.

References

• polanco, m. (2024). Autonomous healing: Calling on the unfuckwithables, putamente radicales. In E. Segal, C. Hoff, & J. Cho (Eds.), An encyclopedia of radical helping (pp. 68–70). Thick Press.
• polanco, m. (2025a). Suicide through magical realism: How did the Colombian Amazons soothe the epidemic of the ropes? Journal of Systemic Therapies, 44(3–4), 100–119. https://doi.org/10.1521/jsyt.2025.44.3.100
• polanco, m. (2025b, January 29). Spilling over modernity’s borders and boundaries: A decolonial story about Alzheimer’s, family, and migration. Psychotherapy.net. https://www.psychotherapy.net/perspectives/articles/spilling-over-modernity-s-borders-and-boundaries-a-decolonial-story-about-alzheimer-s-family-and-migration/
• polanco, m., Kumar, P., Olyad, F., & Enemark, C. H. (2025). Decolonially speaking, sensing, and thinking: Racialized tuition-based family therapists learning without teaching. Family Process, 64(1), Article e13034. https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.13034
• polanco, m., & Pham, A. (2024). Suicide and the coloniality of the senses, time, and being: The aesthetics of death desires. Social Sciences, 13(11), Article 576. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci13110576