wellnesswithkini, Oakland, CA (2026)

08/24/2026

Welcome to Kini Chang, LMFT, founder of Thriving Mind Collective. “If therapy told you healing was a solo journey. It lied.”

One of the most persistent myths in Western mental health is this idea that healing is fundamentally an individual process. You go to therapy. You do the work. You get better. Alone.

And for some people, in some contexts, that model offers real relief. I won’t dismiss that. But for communities whose wounds are collective, whose trauma came from systems, from displacement, from the erasure of language and land and lineage, treating one person at a
time was never going to be enough.

Decolonial healing asks a completely different set of questions. Not just: what happened to you?
But: what happened to your people? What did your ancestors carry that never got named? What
does your community need to repair, not just what do you need to process?

The land holds memory. Your ancestors hold wisdom. Your community holds capacity for healing that no single therapy office can replicate. This isn’t mysticism. This is what the research on collective trauma and community-based healing has been showing us for decades. We just haven’t built our systems around it yet.

This week’s reflection: Who in your lineage do you think about when you think about healing? What would it mean to heal with them, not just for yourself?

⭐️ Save this and share it with someone who’s been told their healing is only their responsibility.

08/21/2026

Happy Wellness Wednesday Kini Chang, LMFT, but now Thursday!! LOL!! Last week I said the therapist holds hope when the client can’t yet hold it themselves.

That’s true. But it’s only half the story.

For a lot of the folks I sit with, especially IBPOC clients carrying stories that started before they were born, hope wasn’t just missing. It was Denied. Sometimes punished.

So when I hold hope in the room, I’m not just holding it for one person’s Tuesday afternoon. I’m holding it for a lineage. For the grandmother who couldn’t afford to hope because hoping wasn’t safe for her. For the client’s descendants who will inherit whatever we do or don’t work through together.

That’s what liberation psychology adds that individual models often miss: hope isn’t a feeling I loan you until you can carry it yourself. It’s a practice of refusing the story that people like us were never meant to have it.

Held this way, it’s not neutral or soft. It’s resistance.

And it’s not one-directional. Every time a client stays in the room with their pain instead of running from it, they hand hope back to me too.

That’s the work. Not just holding hope, passing it down until it doesn’t need holding anymore.

08/19/2026

Mark Wolynn has spent decades studying something that sits right at the intersection of neuroscience, family
systems, and epigenetics how the unresolved trauma of parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents can show up in us as anxiety, depression, chronic pain, or a fear with no clear origin in our own life story.

Wolynn’s core idea, laid out in his book It Didn’t Start With You, is that trauma isn’t only passed down through what we’re told or how we’re raised. It may also be passed down biologically. Epigenetic research suggests traumatic experience can alter gene expression, not the DNA sequence itself, but how those genes are expressed, and that some of these changes can be inherited by the next generation.

He developed what he calls a trauma language map — paying close attention to the specific words, phrases, and unexplained fears a person uses, and tracing whether they echo an unresolved experience somewhere earlier in the family line. A phobia that doesn’t map onto anything in your own history. A recurring sense of dread with no clear source. Sometimes, Wolynn’s work suggests, these are inherited signals, not invented ones.

This matters clinically because it changes the question. Instead of only asking “what happened to you,” it invites asking “what happened in your family line that you might still be carrying.” Naming that doesn’t erase your pain. But it can lift the isolation of believing something is wrong with you, when you actually inherited a weight that was never fully put down.

Comment below “pattern” if a fear or pattern in your life has never quite made sense to you.

08/17/2026

Welcome to Kini Chang, LMFT Scholar Series! Paulo Freire never wrote about therapy directly. But his critique of banking education applies almost perfectly to a
certain kind of clinical relationship, the one where a client is positioned as a passive recipient of expert wisdom
instead of an active participant in understanding their own life. For many people carrying racial or intergenerational trauma, witnessing was never offered.

Liberation-centered care offers that. You bring the lived knowledge. I bring clinical training. We connect, attune, and co-create together. That’s not a lesser form of expertise. It’s a more honest one.

In the therapy room, that shifts the clinician’s role. I’m not always there to interpret, reframe, or analyze. Sometimes my job is simply to witness, fully, without flinching, without rushing to fix, while a client tells the truth about what they’ve survived.

❇️ Have you ever felt like a diagnosis instead of a person in a therapy room? comment below about your experience

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08/15/2026

We’ve talked about Resmaa Menakem’s concept of clean pain versus dirty pain. There’s a bigger structure underneath that work. The three-part path he lays out in My Grandmother’s Hands: reckoning, repair, and out into the world.

Reckoning is the first part, settling into your body enough to actually feel what’s there, instead of managing it from a safe intellectual distance. Naming the trauma honestly, in the body, not just in narrative.

Repair is the second part. Relational, felt-sense work of metabolizing that trauma with support. Not alone, not just through insight, but through embodied practices done with someone else who can help regulate your nervous system alongside you.

And out into the world is the third, and I think most overlooked, part. Menakem insists that healing doesn’t end in the therapy room. It has to move back out into how you show up in relationships, in community, in the systems you’re part of. Because racialized trauma isn’t just personal. It’s collective. Repair that stays contained to one person in one room, disconnected from community, is incomplete.

This is why I don’t see decolonial healing as something that happens purely through individual talk therapy. It has to include body-based work, relational repair, and a return to community. All three, in sequence — not just one.

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08/13/2026

🍃 Welcome to Wellness Wednesday!! Kini Chang, LMFT As an LMFT working at the intersection of liberation psychology and decolonial psychotherapy, I see healing not as something we build from scratch, but as something we return to. Many of my clients, especially those from IBPOC communities, arrive believing their instincts, their bodies, their ancestral knowing can’t be trusted. That message isn’t theirs. It’s inherited, institutional, colonial.

My work is about reversing that.

🧐Before intervention or insight, I ask: what did you know before you were taught to doubt it?

In an Attachment-Informed and Intergenerational EMDR framework, the body already holds the story. My role isn’t to hand clients a new way of knowing, it’s to clear the noise so they can hear what was already theirs: a lineage of survival intelligence, often mislabeled as symptoms rather than honored as wisdom.

08/11/2026

David Archer David Archer’s work on anti-racist psychotherapy makes the case that racial trauma is a full nervous system event encoded through repeated experiences of threat and harm the same way any trauma is. That’s why insight alone often isn’t enough. You can know, intellectually, that something wasn’t your fault, and still carry it in your shoulders, your jaw, your sleep.

Archer, an anti-racist psychotherapist, argues that racism isn’t just a social or political issue to be discussed
intellectually in the therapy room. It’s a trauma. It gets encoded in the nervous system the same way any other trauma does through repeated experiences of threat, hypervigilance, and harm that the body remembers even when the conscious mind has moved on.

Which means talk therapy alone often isn’t enough. You can understand intellectually that a racist encounter wasn’t your fault, that the systems around you are unjust, that your anger is valid and still carry the somatic imprint of that trauma in your shoulders, your jaw, your startle response, your sleep.

Archer’s integration of EMDR and culturally responsive frameworks treats racial trauma the way it deserves to be
treated as a full nervous system event, not just a cognitive one. The reprocessing work isn’t about making peace with racism. It’s about releasing the body’s stored threat response so the nervous system isn’t perpetually bracing for harm.

This is why decolonial therapy has to be trauma-informed at the somatic level. Somatic and EMDR-informed approaches to racial trauma aren’t an add-on to decolonial therapy. They’re essential to it.

✍️ Comment below if you want me to DM about how EMDR treats racial trauma and fits into decolonial healing.

⚡️ Save this for a client or clinician who’s only ever done talk therapy for racial trauma.

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08/08/2026

Michel Foucault spent decades studying how power operates, not just through laws and institutions, but
through knowledge itself. Through the categories we’re given to understand ourselves. Through what he called the clinical gaze, the way medical and psychological authority doesn’t just observe a person, it produces the very categories of normal and abnormal that person gets measured against.

That should make every clinician a little uncomfortable. Because it means diagnosis is never neutral. Every time we name a symptom, apply a label, or decide what counts as a disorder, we are participating in a system of power that has historically pathologized entire communities, their grief, their anger, their ways of coping with conditions no one should have to survive.

Foucault’s work doesn’t ask us to throw out clinical language. It asks us to hold it with humility. To ask: who built this diagnostic category? Whose distress did it center? Whose behavior did it quietly criminalize or exoticize along the way?

Decolonial therapy means naming that history instead of pretending clinical categories are simply objective truth
handed down from science. It means asking the client what their experience means to them before deciding what the DSM says it means.

Power is always in the room. The question is whether we name it or let it operate silently.

Follow if you want more of the theory behind the practice. Share this with a clinician who’s never questioned where the categories came from.

08/06/2026

There’s no such thing as ‘not racist.’ There’s only racist and antiracist. That distinction changes everything.

Ibram X. Kendi’s central argument is deceptively simple: there is no neutral ground. “Not racist” is a claim
people make to distance themselves from responsibility, without doing the active work of dismantling racist ideas or policies. “Antiracist,” on the other hand, is a practice — an ongoing, active commitment to identifying and undoing racist structures, in the world and within yourself.

Kendi also flips a common assumption. Most people think racist ideas produce racist policies. He argues it’s usually the reverse, self-interested policy comes first, and racist ideas get manufactured afterward to justify it.

Which means the work isn’t just about changing individual attitudes. It’s about interrogating systems.

What does that have to do with therapy? How to be an antiracist psychotherapist? A lot of healing work for clients of every background requires examining internalized narratives about race, worth, and belonging that were absorbed, not chosen.

For clients of color, that might mean unlearning internalized narratives about inferiority. For clients doing their own antiracist work, that might mean recognizing “I don’t see color” as a shield rather than a practice and building the muscle of active antiracism instead.
Neutral isn’t real. And healing work that pretends otherwise isn’t actually neutral either. It’s just protecting the status quo.

Save this. Share it with someone doing their own antiracism work client or clinician.

08/04/2026

Frantz Fanon introduced a concept that doesn’t get nearly enough attention in clinical training. Most of psychology is built on ontogeny and phylogeny, the idea that who you are is shaped by your individual development and your species’ biology. Fanon added a third layer. For colonized and racialized people especially, he argued, psychology has to also account for sociogeny, the way social and historical forces literally shape the structure of the psyche.

What that means in practice: some of what shows up as anxiety, hypervigilance, or a fractured sense of self isn’t purely biographical. It isn’t only about your childhood or your individual nervous system. It’s also about the social and historical conditions your mind was formed inside of conditions of racism, colonization, and displacement that get inherited before a person even has language for them.

This matters clinically because a purely individual frame can miss something essential. It can pathologize a client for carrying weight that was never theirs alone to begin with.

Sociogeny asks clinicians to widen the frame. To ask not just “what happened to you,” but “what history is living inside this moment with you.”

That’s not an excuse to avoid the individual work. It’s an insistence that the individual work has to include the social and historical context, or it isn’t complete.

Does this reframing resonate with how you think about where symptoms come from?

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