Why I Chose Not to Pursue Licensure

By Michelle Kucera-Jewell

We are in a moment where there is a critical need for radical care.

Care that challenges the status quo.
Care that isn’t about managing people’s pain to make them productive again—but about dismantling the conditions that created that pain.

We need care that is:

• Relational
  Rooted in connection, trust, and mutual respect—centered on human-to-human presence, not clinical detachment.

• Trauma-informed
  Honors the impact of trauma on the nervous system, relationships, and identity—offering care with gentleness, attunement, and consent.

• Anti-carceral
  Rejects systems of punishment, surveillance, and control—embracing autonomy, community accountability, and healing over discipline.

• Anti-colonial / Decolonial
  Challenges Western dominance and extractive models of care—uplifting Indigenous wisdom, ancestral practices, and collective sovereignty.

• Rooted in collective liberation
  Understands that personal healing is inseparable from social justice—working not just for individual wellness, but for the freedom and dignity of all beings.

This is the kind of care I believe in. It’s the care I offer. And it’s why I chose not to pursue licensure in psychology.

I’ve long been committed to healing work that resists pathologizing people’s pain and instead honors it. I believe our wounds carry wisdom. That the stories we carry are not disorders to be managed but portals to wholeness. My work does not pathologize. It does not reduce a person to a symptom or a diagnosis. I don’t believe in fixing people—I believe in witnessing, walking with, and remembering the sacred in each of us.

From early on, I felt a deep misalignment with the systems that claim to define and deliver “mental health.” I’ve made a conscious decision not to support or participate in many modalities within the Western medical model, because too often they replicate harm. I’ve witnessed how these systems gaslight people in their pain, minimize their lived experience, and silence their intuition. Rather than offering true support, they often re-traumatize those seeking care. I cannot, in good conscience, align myself with structures that uphold oppressive standards of “wellness.”

That decision—to not pursue clinical licensure—came from a deep, embodied knowing—a fierce and faithful commitment to the kind of healing I knew was possible.

Even as I moved through academic spaces—first earning my undergraduate degree in Specialized Studies titled Global Awareness and Accountability, which brought together anthropology, political science, and communications, and later completing a Master’s in Cultural Studies where I focused on the power of narrative to either oppress or empower—I remained clear: I wasn’t interested in legitimizing my work through state-sanctioned systems.

As I work to complete my PhD in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, I remain rooted in the school’s foundational belief that healing must tend to the soul of the world. Pacifica’s ethos honors myth, psyche, and imagination—not as abstractions, but as living, guiding forces. My work in Integrative Therapy emerges from that soil, weaving ancestral wisdom, archetypal knowing, and liberatory practices into forms of healing that live beyond clinical constraints.

I didn’t want my work to be governed by billing codes and diagnostic labels. I didn’t want to spend my life translating soul and story into language legible to systems designed to maintain the status quo.

My calling has always been toward something more expansive—toward a way of healing rooted in reciprocity, remembrance, and reverence. Healing that sees each person as sacred, not broken. Healing that listens to pain, rather than silencing it.

My work is also deeply informed by years of frontline activism—especially within abolition and liberation movements. I was once a loud, angry activist (rightfully so), fighting against systemic violence and injustice. But over time, I began to notice a deep absence in those spaces—something essential was missing: spirit. The sacred. The soul of the work.

Later, as I immersed myself in spiritual communities—living and working at off-grid healing centers, guiding cacao ceremonies around the world, facilitating healing through yoga, ritual, and earth-based practice—I began to notice a different absence: activism. Social consciousness. The fire of collective responsibility.

For the past ten years, my devotion has been to bridging these two worlds. To see what becomes possible when activism and spirituality are not separate, but braided together in service of wholeness, liberation, and embodied change. This is the heart of my practice—both in private sessions and group work.

I offer Integrative Therapy—a term I use with care, reverence, and intention. While some have encouraged me to rebrand this work as coaching for legal simplicity or safety, I remain aligned with the lineage and spirit of the word therapy, which comes from the Greek therapeia—to attend, to serve, to heal. This is the essence of my offering.

Yes, in many states, licensing boards claim ownership over terms like therapy and counseling. While these systems often present themselves as protective, they also act as gatekeepers—profit-driven structures that make it harder for many to be recognized as legitimate. Licensure can be a privilege that is inaccessible to people impacted by poverty, disability, neurodivergence, incarceration, undocumented status, or other forms of systemic marginalization.

Meanwhile, countless healing lineages—yoga therapy, somatic therapy, expressive arts therapy—continue to use the word therapy with integrity, relational ethics, and depth. Even more importantly, Indigenous healers, earth-based practitioners, and those working within shamanic and ancestral traditions have been offering care for thousands of years—long before licensure existed. Their practices are not less valid because they are not “evidence-based” by Western standards. In fact, the very concept of evidence-based care is itself shaped by colonial frameworks that have long dismissed the legitimacy of intuitive, ceremonial, and relational ways of knowing.

My work belongs to that lineage of care. A lineage that honors lived experience, sacred practice, and the wisdom that emerges from right relationship—with land, lineage, community, and spirit.

I understand that using this language may invite critique, especially from those within more traditional medicalized frameworks. I don’t take that lightly. But I also know that healing doesn’t belong to institutions alone. There are many paths to healing—some credentialed, some ancestral, some emergent, some reclaimed.

I am not a coach. I don’t fix or advise—I walk with people as they navigate their return to wholeness. That is the essence of Integrative Therapy: to restore connection between mind, body, spirit, culture, and the collective. It is healing that weaves together the personal and political, the sacred and the everyday. This is the work I am devoted to.

And to be clear: I hold deep respect and compassion for those who have chosen the clinical route. For many, licensure is necessary—it creates access to care for people who rely on insurance, it provides structure and protection, and it offers a language that some clients find supportive. There are brilliant, heart-centered clinicians doing beautiful work within that system. And for some practitioners—and for some clients—that structure works. It just doesn't work for me. What I need to offer, and how I am called to offer it, can’t be contained there. My decision is not a judgment of others—it is an act of alignment with my own truth.

I believe there’s room for many ways of healing, and we all have a role to play. We need therapists. We need community healers. We need peer support, somatic workers, body-based guides, spiritual leaders, grief tenders, and elders. We need everyone, as long as the work is done with integrity, care, and a commitment to do no further harm.

I didn’t choose a path that grants institutional legitimacy. I chose one rooted in soul, in relationship, and in the ancient knowing that healing was never meant to be standardized. My legitimacy isn’t given—it’s lived, practiced, and embodied in every session, every ritual, every moment of real care.

This is the work I am here to do.
And I trust it.

To all of you doing this work—inside or outside the system—I see you. I thank you.
My heart remains open.