by Christi Baker, AMFT

PROTEST 

As mass protests against the unjust Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids persist in Los Angeles - and spark similar actions in other cities - I find myself reflecting on the meaning of protest within both clinical and social spaces.

Protest, on any level, is an active stance. It is what individuals or communities do to express strong objections. Protest is a verb, a pulse. It lives in the body, in the breath, in relationships, and in the streets. It is a refusal that speaks through words or movements. It is visible disapproval, resistance embodied. To protest is to step out of line and dare to draw another. By nature, protest generates friction, often against the status quo and the mechanisms of power.

Protest can take many shapes—spoken or enacted, loud and unmistakable, or quiet and subtle. It can roar or whisper. Even the smallest protest, “no,” carries weight. But saying “no” isn’t rolled into Los Angeles at the President’s command.

To protest is to act with courage. It is a conscious use of voice or behavior to make a refusal visible and felt. It is the exercise of agency—a deliberate setting of boundaries around what is unacceptable. A protest insists on being heard, especially in moments when power refuses to listen.

I am reminded of therapists I know in community mental health. They are deeply devoted to the heart of the work – the patient, connection, and slow, sacred unfolding of care. But they resent the cold bureaucracy, impossible metrics, and documentation that encapsulate the work, eclipsing the humanity it was meant to serve. They often wrestle with a painful contradiction between lifegiving work and deadening requirements. Organizational demands prize speed, numbers, and compliance, while healing requires time, presence, and trust against a system that often centers itself rather than the people served by it. They may speak up to colleagues, but their protests vanish into silence. Still, they resist.

Quietly, they protest in the margins. They take the time their patients need and write reports with care rather than haste, refusing to reduce people to numbers. Their resistance is a quiet rebellion woven into every session, every note. They refuse to make peace with the tension. Rather than resolve, they reframe and commit to their work as a form of ongoing protest, of living inside the friction and letting it be productive. A way to keep choosing care, even when the system forgets.

Truthfully, I am equally in awe of my colleagues’ quiet resistance and the loud, collective protests against dehumanization, disappearances, and disregard. May my own stance be so courageously personal and political, protesting harm and standing on the side of humanity.