Here’s why this corrupts the work and how to recognize when your therapist is doing it.
Listen or watch the full conversation here:
There’s a shift happening in psychedelic therapy spaces that’s subtle enough to go unnoticed but dangerous enough to corrupt the entire field.
Karen named it directly: “What’s actually happening in the therapy that I’ve seen is that therapists are subtly positioning the client as a victim to society.”
This isn’t accidental. It’s not a bug in the system. It’s become embedded in how therapy is being practiced especially in progressive therapy spaces. And understanding why it’s happening and why it’s dangerous is critical for anyone considering psychedelic-assisted therapy.
The Shift in Therapeutic Purpose
Psychedelic therapy, at its best, does something specific: it facilitates healing. It helps people access insight about their own patterns. It helps them integrate difficult experiences. It helps them feel more whole, more capable, more connected to themselves and others.
But a subtle shift has occurred in some therapy spaces. The purpose has changed.
Instead of facilitating healing, some therapists are using psychedelic experiences to position clients as victims to society. And then they’re guiding them toward a particular conclusion: their healing work includes becoming an activist against an oppressive system.
Karen described this dynamic: “They’re more likely to say, cut off contact with anyone who disagrees with you. Go through the world feeling like a victim, knowing how oppressive society is. And so you must now advocate for others who are oppressed.”
This is a fundamental shift. The therapy moves from “Here’s support for your healing” to “Here’s your role as an activist.”
How This Became Legitimate
What makes this shift insidious is that it’s being justified by changes to professional therapeutic codes.
Karen explained: “All of our rules and guidelines in the therapy world have been rewritten to say that it is our therapeutic role to advocate for our client in an oppressive society. And so the natural extension of that is clients are viewed as victims and therefore have to be advocates for dismantling society.”
This is important to understand. Professional ethics codes have been rewritten to position advocacy as part of the therapist’s role. The therapist is supposed to advocate for the client within an oppressive society.
This sounds reasonable on the surface. It sounds like the therapist is protecting the client.
But Karen identified what it actually creates: “The natural extension of that is clients are viewed as victims and therefore have to be advocates for dismantling society. That’s so dangerous.”
Because when you position someone as a victim especially someone in a vulnerable state, having just had a psychedelic experience you remove their agency. You tell them they’re not responsible for their own healing. Society is the problem. They must fight society.
Why This Is Dangerous
The danger operates on multiple levels:
First, it removes agency. Real healing involves recognizing that you have the capacity to change your relationship to your experience, to develop new skills, to access your own power. But victim positioning tells you the source of your problem is external and insurmountable. It tells you your healing depends on society changing, not on your growth.
Second, it replaces integration with ideology. Psychedelic experiences are profound and open to interpretation. Real facilitation helps clients make their own meaning. But ideologically-driven facilitation guides clients toward predetermined conclusions. The therapist’s worldview becomes the frame through which the experience is interpreted.
Third, it recruits rather than heals. The client comes for healing. They have a profound experience. And instead of being supported to integrate that experience in their own way, they’re positioned as a soldier in someone else’s war. Their healing work becomes ideological work.
Fourth, it damages connection. Karen pointed to this: real healing helps people feel connected. But victim positioning and activist recruitment divides people. It tells them to cut off contact with anyone who disagrees. It positions disagreement as oppression. It fragments the social fabric.
How to Recognize It
The key indicator is the therapist’s worldview becoming the frame for the client’s experience.
Karen articulated this directly: “If you sit down and do a psychedelic journey with a neutral, at least moderate therapist, you’re gonna get a very different outcome than if you’re sitting with a progressively liberal therapist who makes you feel like a victim.”
This is crucial. The therapist’s political worldview their beliefs about society, oppression, and what clients should do about it becomes embedded in the therapy.
A neutral or moderate therapist facilitates the client finding their own meaning. Their own integration. Their own path.
A progressively liberal therapist one who sees society as inherently oppressive, who positions clients as victims of that oppression, who sees the therapist’s role as advocacy creates a very different outcome. The client emerges positioned as a victim with an activist mandate.
The Integrity Question
This raises a fundamental question about therapeutic integrity: whose agenda is being served?
In real therapy, the agenda is the client’s healing. The therapist’s job is to facilitate that. Even when the therapist has a particular worldview, they’re supposed to set that aside and serve the client’s own process.
But in corrupted therapy, the therapist’s agenda their political beliefs, their activism, their view of what’s wrong with society becomes embedded in the therapeutic relationship. The client’s healing becomes secondary to the client’s recruitment.
This is especially dangerous with psychedelics because the client is in such a vulnerable, open state. Their normal critical faculties are suspended. They’re highly suggestible. And in that state, a therapist with a political agenda can embed that agenda deeply.
What Real Therapy Looks Like
Real psychedelic therapy helps people:
Feel more whole and resourced
Recognize their own agency and capacity
Integrate difficult experiences in their own way
Feel more connected to themselves, others, and society
Access their own wisdom and understanding
Develop their own meaning from their experience
It doesn’t tell them who to blame. It doesn’t position them as victims. It doesn’t recruit them into causes. It facilitates their own healing and their own understanding.
The Broader Implication
Karen’s observation has implications for the entire professionalization of psychedelic therapy.
As the field becomes more regulated, more professional, and more embedded in ethical codes, we need to be vigilant about what’s being embedded in those codes. We need to ensure that professional standards protect healing, not ideology. That they protect client agency, not client victimization. That they protect the integrity of the work, not the therapist’s political agenda.
Because the moment therapeutic codes start requiring therapists to advocate for clients in “oppressive society,” you’ve shifted from therapy to activism. And clients deserve to know that’s what’s happening.
The Choice
If you’re considering psychedelic-assisted therapy, you need to understand that the therapist’s worldview matters. Not in a way that means you should choose someone who agrees with you politically. But in a way that means you should choose someone who facilitates your own healing and integration, not someone who positions you as a victim and recruits you into their cause.
Ask the therapist about their approach. Ask how they understand the client’s role. Ask whether they see themselves as facilitating your own understanding or as guiding you toward predetermined conclusions.
Because real therapy helps you heal. Corrupted therapy helps you become an activist.
Both might claim to be helpful. But only one actually serves your wellbeing.
♻️ Share this if you believe therapy should facilitate healing and agency, not victim positioning.
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Our book Sensible Psychedelics: Why the Psychedelic Renaissance Needs Conservatives, Skeptics, and the Politically Homeless goes live August 10th. Learn more at www.sensiblepsychedelicsbook.com
