Should Therapists, Coaches and Healers Even Exist?

What she said to me in that cosy chat raised this rather prickly but necessary question in me again.

Good question, right? Or maybe the most ridiculous thing I have ever said out loud, given the widely accepted mental health crisis and global state.

It’s a question that surfaced for me recently through a series of real-life conversations that landed not just in my mind but in my body. In that place where truth starts as a sensation long before it becomes language.

And it feels important enough to bring here. Not to offer a tidy answer, but to open the door to a deeper inquiry about the purpose of healing work, how far we’ve drifted from collective care, and why practitioners may still be essential in this particular moment in history.

The Conversation That Sparked It

Back in September I was chatting with a peer, a fellow coach. In the middle of our conversation she said something that really inspired me: “My aim is to get to a place where my job is no longer needed.”

I took a sharp inhale of breath, followed by a long sigh and said ‘yes, this and thank you’. Because isn’t this the heart of ethical healing? Not creating dependency. Not being the authority. Not positioning ourselves as the solution.

But supporting people back into a relationship with their own inner authority, their own body, their own wisdom.

The best healing work makes us obsolete ...eventually. Or at least, it should.

And currently a lot of the wellness industry operates much like a pyramid scheme (not all, but healing through a western capitalist model does and always will be susceptible to this. If we do not ask these necessary questions and if we do not set the compass to a far greater, bolder destination).

A Moment That Brought It Home

Shortly after that, a lover asked me: “Do you want to talk about your week?” (He knew it had been an emotionally dense one).

I said, “I can’t, it’s confidential. But don’t worry, I have my therapist, my supervisor. A hug would be nice.”

He paused, hugged me, and then said: “So you’re all just passing it between each other - this trauma.”

I paused because, in a strange way, he wasn’t wrong. It echoed that same thought: Is the wellness world just one big pyramid scheme?

Not maliciously but structurally. A network of humans supporting humans because we are still trying to find our way back.

But back to what?

Before colonisation, before capitalism, before the nuclear family model… we healed in community. We healed as a relational field, ritual, land, co-regulation, and shared nervous systems.

We were never meant to heal alone. Never meant to carry our grief, our fear, our transitions, our trauma as individuals.

Humans were designed to metabolise pain in groups through presence, witnessing, song, movement, touch, elders, rituals, initiation.

So when my lover said we’re “passing trauma between each other”…part of me thought: Yes. Because that is exactly how humans were built to heal. And for the most part were much more active in matriarchal times. Those in a helping profession are just filling some rather large gaps in a broken society.

So, Should Practitioners Exist?

I don’t know whether they should in an ideal world. And where there should there is shame - so let’s take a different approach. How might we imagine the world could be with or without?

In a world where community was intact, land was central, elders existed, and bodies were honoured…perhaps there would be fewer therapists, coaches or healers. At least in the form we recognise today.

But in this world. Steeped in the reality of violence and imperialism raging rapidly and unapologetically from those very systems that are supposed to support us? The one marked by chronic stress, digital disconnection, fragmented families, systemic oppression, and collective nervous system overwhelm?

Yes. They are needed. Deeply, there is a mental health crisis with increasing prevalence and with service demands for therapists bigger than their capacity.

But what if they were not saviours? Not replacements for community. But bridges.

Bridges back to connection. Back to the body. Back to our emotional literacy. Back to each other. Back to the parts of us that never got to be held.

A More Honest Truth About the Healing Landscape

We are currently asking single nervous systems to hold the weight of:

• systemic injustice

• intergenerational trauma

• capitalism-level productivity

• ongoing global crises

• the emotional labour of families and workplaces

• the chronic absence of community care

That load was never meant for one person. Not psychologically. Not somatically. Not spiritually. So the good, grounded, ethically trained practitioners become temporary scaffolding. Not the structure. Not the solution. Just the scaffolding that allows people to rebuild their connection to themselves and the world around them.

When we consider this, what my colleagues’ comment reminded me of is the number of organisations that have such ‘extinction’ or ‘obsolete’ goals. Those that seek to empower or problem-solve themselves out of extinction, like many community empowerment NGOs or climate-focused NGOs, for example.

What this Means for the Future of Healing

This reflection isn’t an answer; it’s an opening. An invitation to imagine:

What would healing look like if community care was restored? If we lived in environments where emotional expression was normalised, not pathologised?

How might our nervous systems feel if we weren’t carrying everything alone? If co-regulation was available in daily life, not only in scheduled sessions?

What role does somatic work play in a society that is starving for communal nervous system resources? Is our work a stopgap? A bridge? A remembering?

My sense is this: I like the idea of having a compass that is set towards societies that may not always need therapists, coaches or healers in their current form. But for now and for the foreseeable long road ahead, in a world this dysregulated, disconnected, and structurally isolating, their presence matters.

Not as the answer. But as a necessary tether until community, land, and collective care can be restored.

And at the same time, holding a compass that encourages practitioners to actively engage in changing the systems that are causing the oppression, is the compass that maybe we need.

So maybe not the most ridiculous questions posed in a way but maybe a useful pause to reassess - what are we actually doing here if we do not do our small part to actively change the systems we are part of. Are we not just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic if not?

I dream of a time when my job may not be needed. And so when you ask me why I have made therapy political over the last few years I would say I haven’t. Healing has always been political, it is just that I, like a number of others have been stepping into that space fully, publicly and privately, awkwardly and gracefully and not without backlash.

Grateful to my colleague Madeline, for this conversation and new words to my compass.

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