From Compliance to Conscience: Building a Liberatory Counseling Practice

Denise Takakjy is a visionary movement architect, counselor educator, and public scholar whose work is transforming the field of counseling into a site of conscience-centered, liberatory praxis. As the founder of *Counselors for Liberatory Practice* (CLP), she leads a national coalition committed to dismantling white supremacy in counseling and reimagining the profession through curriculum reform, coalition-building, and strategic publishing. Her leadership is marked by radical attunement, systemic imagination, and a refusal to replicate harm under the guise of neutrality or cultural competence. Denise’s journey began with a deep reckoning: witnessing how counseling education and clinical norms often reproduce racial harm, silence dissent, and pathologize resistance. These experiences catalyzed her commitment to building alternatives rooted in abolitionist theory, decolonial scholarship, and Black feminist thought. She draws from thinkers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Mariame Kaba to reframe counseling as a tool for collective care, accountability, and transformation. Her qualifications span curriculum design, ethical supervision, and public scholarship. Denise has curated liberatory reading arcs for master’s-level counseling programs, revised syllabi to reflect emergent justice-oriented scholarship, and trained supervisors to recognize and interrupt racial harm. She operationalizes theory into scalable tools—reflection prompts, decision-making models, and movement-building frameworks—that help institutions shift from performative inclusion to structural change. Denise is currently writing a book on white supremacy in counseling, designed as both a scholarly intervention and a movement artifact. She is mapping aligned publishers and crafting a proposal that positions the book as a foundational resource for counselor educators, practitioners, and justice-oriented institutions. Her public scholarship bridges academic rigor with movement relevance, and her facilitation style fosters generative critique, deep listening, and co-creation. Her long-term vision is to establish liberatory standards for counseling education and practice nationwide. Through CLP, she is building the infrastructure for systemic change—where counseling is no longer defined by compliance, but by conscience. Denise’s work invites the field to move beyond reform and toward transformation, offering a blueprint for healing, resistance, and liberation.