Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and precious metals like gold, highlighting rather than hiding cracks. It reflects wabi-sabi: valuing imperfection, resilience, and the beauty of repair.

As a metaphor, kintsugi has long grounded Onyx’s work with people navigating chronic illness, disability, mental illness, trauma, and oppression. As a mixed-race Japanese American, these concepts are foundational to how Onyx practices. Asher’s lived experience at the intersection of trauma, chronic illness, and queerness also resonates with “tending to the cracks,” and they pair this with an ongoing interrogation of how their white privilege and internalized white supremacy shape clinical and business choices.

At Kintsugi Therapist Collective, this philosophy guides our work. We see trauma, illness, disability, oppression, grief, and mental health challenges as meaningful parts of a person’s story, not flaws to erase, and we are committed to disability justice, trauma-informed care, LGBTQIA+ affirming therapy, and sustainable healing.

Membership begins with enrollment in a yearlong Embodied Practice Cohort. All alums maintain evergreen access to the KTC virtual space.

You can listen to several of our members describe and discuss their experiences of being participants in the yearlong Embodied Practice Cohort in this podcast.

You can read testimonials about Embodied Practice Cohort and Mending With Gold — just scroll to the bottom of each page.

You can also refer to our Instagram and Facebook for additional content.

We do not see burnout as a personal failure or something “fixed” by better self‑care. It’s a predictable response to systems that demand constant availability and productivity while minimizing care workers’ needs and limits.

Drawing from disability justice, embodied practice, relational psychotherapy, and decolonizing approaches, we critique professionalism that values expertise over humanity, independence over interdependence, and productivity over sustainability. Therapists are often expected to be the “well provider” despite their own grief, trauma, illness, disability, and oppression.

KTC challenges the idea that therapists must appear untouched by suffering. Pressure to hide pain, fatigue, disability, or vulnerability disconnects care workers from their bodies and capacities—and burnout often follows.

From a disability justice lens, burnout is meaningful information: a sign of mismatch between a person’s capacity and the demands placed on them. Rather than urging therapists to push through or adapt to harmful conditions, we support deeper relationship with their bodies, needs, limits, desires, and sources of nourishment.

We also look at how ableism, capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, and cisheteronormativity fuel burnout by equating worth with output and treating rest and dependence as weaknesses.

Our work invites therapists to imagine professional lives rooted in embodiment, mutuality, access intimacy, community, and sustainability. Instead of striving to be perpetually “fine,” we support practitioners in being more honest about their humanity and more skillful in responding to it.

We believe therapists do not heal by transcending their struggles, but by staying in relationship with themselves, their communities, and their bodies—even when things are hard. Sustainable practice is not about eliminating vulnerability; it’s about creating conditions where vulnerability is held with dignity, support, and care.

Read more: “We Need Not Be Fine: A manifesto for mental healthcare workers who can’t go on like this.”

KTC Diversity Statement

Kintsugi Therapist Collective is committed to cultivating community rooted in disability justice, accessibility, equity, and collective care. We understand safety as a co-created experience that requires ongoing attention to power, privilege, difference, and accountability. We resist callout dynamics that demand being beyond reproach and instead strive for equanimity: the capacity to acknowledge harm, remain open to feedback, and engage in repair without foreclosing relational possibility.

We recognize how white supremacy, ableism, and dominant professional norms shape whose experiences are valued, whose needs are accommodated, and who feels safe enough to be vulnerable. As co-directors, we also recognize that our social locations shape who may feel drawn to our work. We are both intersectionally disabled, queer, nonbinary clinical social workers and parents who hold academic and class privilege. Onyx is mixed race; Asher is white. Our identities and experiences inform our work, but they do not represent everyone's experiences or perspectives.

Throughout the year, we are committed to examining how white supremacy operates both internally within us and structurally within the mental health professions. We seek to bridge differences without erasing them, creating greater spaciousness for diverse perspectives, access needs, and ways of being and participating. We understand meaningful inclusion as more than welcoming people into existing structures; it requires challenging and reshaping those structures so more people can belong without self-erasure. We approach this work with humility, a commitment to ongoing learning, and a willingness to be changed by what we learn.