Freedom for whom

Freedom for Whom

There’s a heaviness that settles in my body in July.

The country fills with talk of freedom — fireworks, flags, words like “liberty” and “independence.”

But for many of us, those words don’t land as celebration.

They land as reminders — of who that freedom was built for, and who it wasn’t.

The Myth of Freedom

They call it Independence Day, but independence built on captivity is not freedom.

It’s a myth dressed in red, white, and blue — one that asks the oppressed to applaud the story of their own erasure.

This land declared liberty while it was still soaked in the blood of those it enslaved and displaced.

And centuries later, the same myth still moves quietly through our systems — through laws, through classrooms, through the very language of “safety” and “healing.”

The celebration was never meant for everyone.

And when you live inside that truth, July 4th stops feeling like a holiday.

It feels like a collective amnesia — a day when a nation congratulates itself for a freedom it never fully delivered.

When Oppression Enters the Therapy Room

The hardest part is watching how this myth slips into spaces that promise care.

Therapists and clinics that speak of inclusion, equity, trauma-informed practice — and yet decorate their offices with the very symbols that perpetuate exclusion.

Flags, patriotic quotes, red-white-and-blue bunting, “freedom” signs on bulletin boards — each one a quiet reminder that even here, nationalism takes priority over truth.

For someone who’s lived inside systems that punish, silence, or erase — those decorations aren’t festive.

They are reminders of who the system was built to protect, and who it was built to control.

When the same emblem that justified harm becomes the backdrop of your healing, your body remembers: even here, safety has conditions.

Therapy tells you to lower your guard, but the walls are still painted with the colors of power.

The Harm of Symbolic Hypocrisy

When a therapist claims to be aligned with oppressed communities but celebrates a holiday rooted in their oppression, it creates a fracture —

a quiet, invisible contradiction that the client feels before it’s ever spoken.

And when those spaces are owned and led by white, cisgender, heterosexual women who have known their own form of oppression —

there’s a particular kind of blindness that can happen.

They may understand what it means to be dismissed or underestimated,

but still fail to see how the very systems that hurt them are the ones they now uphold.

Being oppressed in one way doesn’t absolve anyone from examining how they perpetuate it in others.

If you are going to claim liberation work, you have to be willing to look at all the ways you might still be complicit —

even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it touches your pride, even when it challenges what you believe about being “one of the good ones.”

Therapy asks for trust.

But trust can’t grow in the shadow of a flag — or a belief system — that never protected you.

Why It Can’t Stand as a Symbol of Hope

People say the Fourth of July is about hope — the birth of a nation, the promise of freedom.

But hope built on denial is not hope. It’s gaslighting.

A system that refuses to look at its own violence cannot offer liberation.

A profession that claims to be for the oppressed cannot celebrate the oppressor and still call it care.

If therapy truly wants to be a space of healing, it must stop borrowing its symbols from systems that wound.

It must learn to hold the pain of this history instead of covering it in fireworks.

Because healing — real healing — doesn’t come from pretending the wound is closed.

It comes from looking directly at it, naming who it hurt, and refusing to celebrate the hands that made it.

Author’s Note

This piece is about the dissonance between what therapy claims to be and what it often mirrors — how systemic oppression can live even in the spaces built to heal it.

It’s not about blame, but about awareness: about seeing how symbols, silence, and pride can recreate harm.

If we want to talk about liberation, we have to start by asking whose liberation we mean.

And if freedom is the story we’re telling, then truth must be the ground we tell it from.

Disclaimer

This piece weaves together personal experience, reflection, and observation.

Not everything written here is a direct account of lived events — some of it is reflection on the broader realities of the world, particularly within the United States.

It isn’t meant to accuse or expose anyone, but to explore how power, care, and oppression can coexist, even in spaces meant for healing.