Why I marched in protest of the rise of the far right.

What drew me to the world of Psychology wasn't just the idea of helping people, though that mattered deeply, it was the revelation that Psychology offered a way of understanding the why and the how of human beings and the systems they create. It gave me a language for what I had felt intuitively: that people are shaped by forces larger than themselves, that behaviour makes sense when you understand its context, and that real and lasting change comes from understanding rather than judgement. In a worldthat so often seemed to place profit above people, psychology was a profession that had chosen people. That was enough for me.

As a Psychotherapist, my work involves paying attention to how systems shape people; how the world we live in, the structures we are born into, the policies made in rooms we never enter, all combine to determine who we become, what we believe and crucially, what we feel we deserve. That interconnection between our external and internal worlds is what I see every single day in my work.

I have worked for years with disenfranchised and impoverished people across London, and the pattern is always the same. The barriers standing between them and a decent life are not personal failings, they are structural ones. Poor access to opportunity, poor access to education, poor access to stable housing and sometimes poor access to the most fundamental of human needs: safety, warmth, dignity. The systems that are supposed to support people rarely understand their backgrounds or their struggles, and so rather than being helped, they are penalised. You know how it goes, and perhaps you've lived it: if you have money, the inconveniences of life remain inconveniences. If you don't, those same inconveniences become walls. It is almost impossible to attend to your inner world when you are simultaneously trying to keep the lights on, when your home is riddled with damp that nobody will fix, when you are trying to navigate the labyrinthine complexity of HMRC forms, when you are receiving cold, bureaucratic letters threatening deportation that keep you in a state of permanent anxiety. Psychological safety is not a luxury, it is the foundation on which everything else is built and for so many people, it is simply out of reach.

I believe that how we treat the most vulnerable among us is the truest measure of who we are as a society, and who we are choosing to become. But cynicism and apathy found their way in, as I found myself asking whether a protest march is really worth it. What will actually change, what will it meaningfully do for the people in need who live in a world that seems to move so slowly toward justice? I kept coming back to the same answer: that it is simply better, morally and humanly, to be part of something than to watch it unfold on a screen from a distance, feeling the helplessness of the uninvolved. Caring is a doing word, after all. And once I was there, swept up with friends, with placards, repeating chants, “the people united, will never be defeated”, surrounded by the beat of drums, it was hard not to feel something shift. Unity matters in a way that is difficult to describe until you are standing inside it and having allies who show up, visibly and publicly, matters enormously to those who feel most alone in their fear. When was the last time you felt that? That sense of being part of something larger than yourself, the way you might at a football match watching your team win, or at a concert belting out the songs of your favourite artist with thousands of others, or being in a crowd that is all pulling in the same direction? This was that feeling, but for something that reaches further than a scoreline.

Protests are a basic human right, and the act of exercising them is itself meaningful. If you have, through whatever combination of fortune, privilege, or hard work, already managed to climb the ladder, then the responsibility that comes with that is to fight for everyone still trying to get up behind you. That is not a radical idea, it is just decency.

Therapists understand that everything within a person is connected; that trauma in childhood echoes through relationships in adulthood, that unexpressed grief finds its way into the body, that nothing happens in isolation. But that principle of interconnection does not stop at the boundaries of the self. It reaches outward, into communities, into nations, across borders. I am not literally, directly connected to the person whose home has been destroyed by conflict on the other side of the world, but they are human, and so am I, and I know what it is to feel pain and loss and fear. They know it too, often in ways I have been fortunate enough never to have to face. That shared humanity is not nothing, in fact, right now, it might be the most important thing we have.

The world is in a genuinely frightening state. The rise of the far right, here in Britain and across the globe, is not separate from the inequality, the fear, the disenfranchisement, and the desperation I have witnessed in my work. It grows directly from it and it cynically exploits it. Understanding that connection is part of what it means to pay attention.

There is something else, though. Marching through the streets, I found myself wondering whether, in fighting for something out there in the world, I was also fighting for something in myself, perhaps a reminder of my own capacity for compassion, for empathy, for the fearlessness that comes from knowing what you believe and acting on it regardless of who is watching. We live in a world that is very good at making you feel small and cynical, and sometimes you need to be physically surrounded by people who hold the same things dear, to feel those parts of yourself come back to the surface. Marching is, for me, partly an act of solidarity with others, and partly an act of solidarity with myself. Being in the company of people who genuinely care, who are connected to something greater than their own immediate lives, replenished something in me that I hadn't realised had been running low. In times like these, I think we have to be intentional about seeking that out.

I am curious as to what would bring you to march?