Social justice and remembering ‘the personal is political’ in counselling and psychotherapy: So, what can therapists do?

This brief contribution argues for the importance of a social justice perspective in counselling and psychotherapy, particularly within the current international socio-political context. Much has been said about social justice over recent years in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy and counselling. Professionals and academics have expressed some concerns about what it might actually mean, or how difficult it might be in practice to engage with this perspective. In this paper, the activist phrase ‘the personal is political’ (Hanisch, 1970) is used to illustrate the way in which a social justice approach to counselling and psychotherapy does not need to be something complicated, but rather a foregrounding of a particular understanding of well-being and the people we work with. Following this, some concrete and straightforward suggestions for how therapists might begin to act on their social justice values are made.