Courage to think and know who you are often begins in depth psychotherapy
Courage Now: Psychotherapy as an Act of Courage and Resistance
By Joanna Poppink, MFT
Private Depth Psychotherapy for Women in Midlife and Beyond
Courage Now: Summary
Psychotherapy as an Act of Courage and Resistance explores how depth psychotherapy can serve as a powerful response to personal pain and collective injustice. Drawing on the author’s experience with renowned psychoanalyst Hedda Bolgar—who resisted Nazi oppression—the piece argues that therapy is not just self-care but moral action.
In a world where truth is censored and vulnerability punished, therapy helps individuals cultivate emotional resilience, inner authority, and the capacity to act from conscience. Featuring quotes from Carl Jung, Viktor Frankl, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and others, the article positions psychotherapy as a space for liberation, truth-telling, and courageous self-examination.
Courage Now
Courage is needed more today than ever. In a time of polarization, disinformation, and institutional cruelty, psychotherapy may seem quiet or irrelevant. But in truth, it is one of the most subversive acts a person can undertake. Psychotherapy is a path to inner freedom, truth-telling, and moral clarity. It is an act of resistance—not only against the wounds of personal history, but against the numbing and coercive forces of modern life.
Disagreement is treated like crime. Books are banned. Diversity is punished. Poor families lose healthcare. Surveillance and silence rise. People are detained in ICE SUVs and deported in the night and broad daylight. In such a world, simply turning inward to face what is true—without censorship or shame—is not weakness. It’s courage. And it’s needed more than ever.
The Train at the Station
Years ago, I stood at the downtown Los Angeles train station beside a massive engine. My head barely reached the center of its wheel. I imagined a train just like this one, filled with Jewish families, faces pressed to the windows, silent and exhausted, being taken to the concentration camps. I saw them as if it were real, in that very station. It didn’t happen in Los Angeles, but in my heart it did. And now, in a way, it is happening here—only the trains have become white ICE SUVs, and the ghettos are immigrant detention centers.
I once asked my analyst, Dr. Hedda Bolgar, about this. She had been a Nazi resister in Austria. When Jews were stripped of their rights and confined to ghettos, she and her friends filled supplies into a dark limousine, curtained, elegant, and slow-moving. It projected authority through the streets of Vienna. No one questioned it. Hedda used used o that limo to deliver food and medicine to Jewish families.
I asked her, “If I had been there—at the station, watching that train—what could I have done? If I screamed, ‘No!’ I would’ve been thrown on the train too.”
Hedda looked at me and said, “It would have been wasted effort. You would have been killed too. To fight injustice, we must examine ourselves from within our own world. What are your skills, your gifts, your connections, your community? That’s where you begin. You do the most you can with the little you have, from where you are.”
I never forgot that. And I remember it now. So I continue as a psychotherapist and I write.
Therapy Requires Courage—Especially Now
“Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”
—Maya Angelou
Therapy asks us to look within—to tell the truth, to remember what hurts, to imagine something better. This is not passive or self-indulgent. In a society that thrives on suppression, speed, and silence, therapy is active resistance. It’s a refusal to abandon the soul.
“Your silence will not protect you.”
—Audre Lorde
The Courage of the Client
Each person who enters therapy performs a quiet revolution:
- They initiate therapy despite stigma and opposition.
- They reveal secrets despite shame.
- They face grief, rage, and trauma despite fear.
- They challenge old patterns even when comfort tempts them back.
- They claim inner authority, even when their culture demands compliance.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
—Viktor E. Frankl
The Courage of the Therapist
Therapists don’t offer easy answers. We offer presence. And presence requires courage:
- To hold space for pain without fixing it.
- To challenge avoidance while respecting defenses.
- To witness truth even when it threatens systems—family, political, cultural, institutional.
- To stay human, especially when pathology is easier than empathy.
“A writer’s life and a therapist’s life are similar: to go into the darkest part of the self and the culture and return with something useful.”
—Toni Morrison (paraphrased from interviews and lectures)
Therapists, like writers and artists, walk into darkness not to escape, but to bring back light.
Psychotherapy as a Sanctuary for Free Thought
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
—Carl Jung
Symptom management, diagnostic codes, and productivity metrics increasingly dominate modern mental health care. But depth psychotherapy supports the deeper work: What am I afraid to see? What part of me has been silenced? What is worth living for, even now?
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
—James Baldwin
Reading helps. But being witnessed—truly seen by another—changes everything. Therapy becomes a sanctuary where free thought, personal truth, and moral responsibility can emerge.
Therapy as Moral Action
When a woman begins to speak honestly in therapy—about her trauma, her silence, her rage, her longing—she disrupts more than her personal history. She interrupts cultural patterns of erasure. She brings breath into spaces that were choked with fear.
Her healing becomes an act of moral resistance.
“Where love and rage meet, healing begins.”
—Marion Woodman
As Hedda Bolgar taught me: real change begins from within your own world. And that’s what therapy helps us uncover. What part of you has been exiled? What power have you left untapped? What vision for justice lies hidden inside your longing?
FAQ: Psychotherapy as Courage and Resistance
Q: How can psychotherapy be considered a form of resistance?
Psychotherapy allows individuals to confront truth, break free from cultural conditioning, and reclaim their inner authority. In a climate of repression and disinformation, that kind of honesty and emotional integrity is a quiet but radical act of resistance.
Q: Is therapy only about personal healing, or does it have broader social implications?
Both. Therapy helps individuals process trauma, grief, and identity, but it also builds the capacity for moral clarity and civic action. Personal healing often leads to more courageous choices in relationships, work, and community.
Q: Why does therapy require courage?
It takes courage to face painful memories, challenge internalized beliefs, and change lifelong patterns. For many, speaking the truth aloud—for the first time—is a profound act of bravery.
Q: How is this relevant in today’s political climate?
With rising polarization, censorship, and fear, psychotherapy offers a rare protected space for emotional freedom and dissent. The internal work done in therapy supports resistance to conformity and cruelty on a larger scale.
Q: What does the story of Hedda Bolgar add to this conversation?
Dr. Hedda Bolgar, a psychoanalyst and anti-Nazi resister, modeled how moral action can arise from grounded inner awareness. Her legacy connects depth psychology with direct humanitarian courage and reminds us to act from within our own sphere of influence.
Q: Who is this article for?
This piece speaks especially to women in midlife and beyond, therapists, activists, survivors, and anyone seeking meaning, healing, or courage in the face of injustice and inner struggle.
Q: What kind of psychotherapy does this article support?
Depth psychotherapy—an approach that honors unconscious processes, long-term healing, emotional truth, and the moral dimension of the psyche.
Resources for Further Exploration
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“Addiction to Perfection” by Marion Woodman
Invitation
If you feel overwhelmed, silenced, or frozen in the face of cultural cruelty or personal pain, psychotherapy may be your way through. It’s not quick. It’s not easy. But it is true, and it is yours.
I offer private, depth-oriented psychotherapy for women in midlife and beyond. Together, we can explore what it means to live with conscience, courage, and compassion—even now.
📍 📞 Free phone consultation available. e-mail me at
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