Germany Goes To Therapy Substack-launch
Read how Jasmin formed a deep friendship and collaboration with LA-based artist and BLM Co-founder Patrisse Cullors to incubate Germany Goes To Therapy
Dear Substack readers,
In August 2024, Patrisse Cullors invited me into the Fellowship of the Center of Arts and Abolition to support me in the development of the healing justice project Germany Goes To Therapy. In June 2025, I spent two weeks in LA incubating with Patrisse and my fellows Kenturah Davis and Elad Nehorai. It was an intense time to build friendship and community and envision a new world together. In the coming weeks and months, I will share the stories and experiences I gained in LA and NYC as I was passing through on my way back home.
In this Substack-launch piece, Patrisse and I wrote down the story of how we first met and connected over our shared visions for moving beyond this particularly violent moment. This piece, mapping out the beginning and development of our friendship and collaboration, offers the story of the lead-up to my fellowship time in LA. I look forward to sharing my adventures and learnings with y'all, as well as take you along on the ongoing journey of developing Germany Goes To Therapy.
Germany Goes to Therapy is an international project of healing and reckoning with the violent culture of racial capitalism. You can read a more detailed description and mission statement on the About page.
Q - Jasmin: Hey Patrisse, how are you doing at the moment?
A - Patrisse: Well, witnessing the crumbling of systems is deeply disturbing, BUT also there is a clarity and liberation in the witnessing. I feel deep grief for the humans impacted in this moment, and send everyone such love and care.
Q - Patrisse: How about you?
A - Jasmin: I’ve been feeling deeply unsettled. I hear palestinian and jewish people say that there is life before and after October 7th. I very much feel the same. We were anxious and worried about the state of the world, the rising hatred and oppression and the climate catastrophe for years. But what already felt like intense anxiety before was multiplied past October 7th. Before, we were able to believe in international law and human rights and that we as humanity are moving in the direction of justice. In the past 20 months we have witnessed that the opposite is the case.
It feels like a daily trauma being aware of the degree of violence surrounding us and that a large number of people either deny, normalize, or justify it as necessary.
Q - Jasmin: Our collaboration was prompted by you feeling a strong alignment with my work around Germany Goes To Therapy. Since this work is profoundly relational in its nature, we both intuitively started off by building a deep friendship bond. Building strong relationships as a foundation for collaboration is a crucial element — that's why I wanted to start off by asking you to share the story of how we met and grew together.
A - Patrisse: Thanks for placing our relationship and collaboration as a center point to this conversation.
So, I was teaching a course called Abolition is… based off of my book, An Abolitionist Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World. And, you were a participant in the course. During one of the sessions you brought up this concept, Germany Goes To Therapy. I thought it was quite brilliant. When we discuss accountability of Western nations I think about the accountability Germany must truly subscribe to as a way forward for other nations like the United States. A country that is very well known for its harm and violence. What could happen if Germany actually went to therapy? How would this shape other countries? Whole communities? It is a profound concept.
Q - Patrisse: What inspired you to create Germany Goes to Therapy? Was there a specific moment or realization that pushed you to start this work?
A - Jasmin: Being a white native German, born and raised in Germany, the only German identity that I was ever able to adopt was that Germans have a historic and life-long duty to be active outspoken anti-fascists. There is a general assumption in Germany that NOW of course we all agree that fascism and authoritarianism is bad. This is kind of embarrassing now, but I sort of assumed we were all inherently anti-fascists. LOL. Obviously working in the health care system I had started to understand how deeply nihilistic and fascist capitalism is. This process of waking up to the reality of our identity started in 2014 or even earlier.
Then on October 7th 2023 we experienced an all masks-off-moment in Germany. The previously hidden decades-long silencing of Palestinian voices in Germany was suddenly visible. Between October and December 2023 I watched in shock how people were openly advocating for the bombing of civilians and how the brave jewish people who spoke out against this violence were publicly defamed as antisemites by German Nazi-grandchildren. I watched my entire country simultaneously dissociate from reality and move into complete denial while creating a narrative of moral superiority as a cover-up for cheering on extreme violence against an oppressed group of people - AGAIN!
Since the age of eleven, for the past 30 years I have been plagued by ONE question: Why did people let it happen?
It seemed utterly unfathomable to me. It is only now, that we are getting a front row seat watching everything unfold both in Germany, the US and across the entire West again, that we are getting real answers.
One answer is super obvious, yet I would have never been able to conceive of it without seeing it with my very own eyes. Ironically it seems to be one of those “you really had to be there” moments. Great evil is happening because the people committing it act with the conviction that they are doing the right thing. It is a complete and sickening denial of the truth. Colonizers told each other distorted false stories about “savage” indigenous people. Germans told each other distorted and false stories about the jews, the disabled or Sinti and Roma Jain people. Confederates told themselves deranged and false stories about Black and Indigenous people.
And what we can see clearly: the people doing the dehumanizing think of themselves as good people: liberals who want nothing but law and order. They normalize and establish revenge and punishment as moral and ethical principles. But these principles are based on lies and a complete denial of facts and are deeply immoral.
Of course the second answer to my eternal question is it happened because there was a critical mass of people who decided the best way to keep themselves safe was to stay quiet. The silent mass that always makes up the majority in all societies is the most lethal. The collective agreement that opportunism is THE way to survive a crisis is a problem we need to solve urgently. That's why I am looking for solutions that are based in human psychology and behavior.
So there are two things that I really care about in my research and practice: How do we break the cycle of silence, the reflex, the impulse to “stay out of it” in order to save one's own skin, which leads to the slow boiling frog phenomenon. The "slow boiling frog" refers to the process of people failing to notice harmful changes because they happen slowly over time. Because the very impulse to stay silent and passive leads to a society that ultimately will be lethal for everybody. Everyday a new form of violence is accepted and becomes the new normal. The pace of moral collapse of our society is so fast it often makes me dizzy.
It must be said every day: Saving your own skin through silence really is the worst and most dangerous strategy. So I am tryign to figure out how we can get people activated. How do you foster courage, confidence and tangible solidarity in people? The lack thereof might be the thing that will lead to the ultimate climate catastrophe or the nuclear blackout.
I also want to reintroduce kindness and compassion into the culture as the natural driving force of human connection. In practice this means that we respect people's differences in roles; seek to collaborate and network with as many different people as possible, pursuing diverse strategies. A movement that's diverse in strategy and people in terms of background, tactics, inclinations and skills will naturally be the most resilient.
How We Met
Jasmin: when we met in your online course “Abolition Is” in April 2024, I was three months into dreaming up the vision of taking Germany to Therapy. The biggest gift in participating in your course was getting to know you. I was deeply touched by the way you were able to create a space of kindness and generosity and how you offer your own vulnerability as a teaching tool.
Especially your authenticity and the way you approach your work with a deep emotional intelligence touched me deeply. Because you managed to do something that very few people are able to do: you created a space without hierarchies. This is something I am very sensitive about and pay a lot of attention to. I consider non-hierarchical spaces to be an important piece of the puzzle as we tackle authoritarianism around the world. So seeing your ability to create this with such ease instilled a lot of trust in you.
Experiencing you in this intimate space made my heart expand towards you in a way I had never expected possible via Zoom. But I developed a very deep love for you. And it is a love that carries our friendship and our collaboration to this day. It is very fitting because Germany Goes To Therapy is amongst many other things a love-project. Also a science project, because as I always tell my pain clients: being kind (to yourself) is scientifically proven the correct way to live, LOL. It's sad that I have to point to science, but it's the truth and we live in a world that has strayed so far from love and kindness, that only talking about these things is looked upon and branded as hippie-dippie shee shee. That's why I have to resort to science to get people to pay attention to kindness. In the post-capitalist world it has become a disturbing fact that we now need permission and evidence based practice to live a heart-centered life. It’s incredibly sad, but that sadness is also what prompted me to initiate this call-in to the world, a call that says: “Hey, we need to talk, we need to find our way back to what it means to be truly human.”
Patrisse: Jasmin, that is really kind of you. I feel deep gratitude for your generosity and honesty. That course was a big moment for me personally because after the right wing attacks I forgot who I was. I was so insecure and wasn’t sure I could lead ever again. Every time you spoke in the course your clarity and vision was really powerful and palpable.
That is why when I first heard you speak about GGTT, I immediately felt its power. I’ve spent years working to reimagine justice beyond punishment. The work I’ve done within the abolitionist movement has always been about truth-telling, about reckoning with harm while refusing to replicate cycles of violence.
I saw in you a leader who understands this—not just in theory, but in practice. Your work as a hypnotherapist and pain coach isn’t just about addressing the individual; it’s about breaking generational patterns of harm, helping people access the parts of themselves they’ve buried under shame. That’s what drew me to you. And that’s why I believe in GGTT as an intervention not just for Germany, but for authoritarian regimes across the West.
Q - Jasmin: How do you connect this project to your own experience and to what's currently happening in America?
A - Patrisse: I believe deeply in your leadership. You don’t approach this work from a place of theory alone—you bring lived experience, deep spiritual practice, and years of guiding people through pain in real, embodied ways. I think your background as a hypnotherapist and pain coach allows you to see how unprocessed trauma, shame, and guilt live not just in individuals—but in the body politic and collective psyche.
In a world increasingly shaped by authoritarian thinking, GGTT becomes a spiritual and political intervention. It’s not just about Germany. It’s about what happens when nations are unwilling to truly heal. It’s about how avoidance of accountability calcifies into fascism. GGTT reminds us that confronting trauma—without replicating violence—is one of the most radical and necessary acts of our time.
What’s happening in Germany mirrors what’s happening in the U.S. We see a country that refuses to fully reckon with its founding violence. Instead of investing in healing, America doubles down on punishment, surveillance, and control. When I look at the rise in book bans, anti-Black backlash, kidnappings by I.C.E., and the criminalization of protest, I see a culture afraid to be accountable.
GGTT offers a counter-framework. It asks us to sit in the discomfort. To trace the roots of harm. To transform—not through shame, but through deep witnessing and repair. This is a transatlantic intervention: one that connects the dots between the echoes of fascism in Europe and the legacies of slavery and white supremacy in the U.S.
This project touches something very personal for me. In the wake of 2020, I watched a global movement for Black lives rise up—and then watched institutions, media, and even parts of the public try to destroy that movement by scapegoating its leaders. I became one of those scapegoats. The shame-based culture we live in weaponizes guilt and refuses to allow space for human complexity or transformative growth.
GGTT is, in many ways, a balm. It gives us permission to imagine an alternative: a world where harm is not hidden, but held; where leadership is not torn down but nurtured; where we build new tools because the old ones are rooted in domination.
I want to live in a world where accountability is sacred. Where we can heal without fear of being destroyed for having been wounded. That’s why I said yes to GGTT. That’s why this work matters—everywhere.
Thank you for taking the time to read about our journey and this work. We hope to stay in community and build a new world together.