The present article discusses the role of emotions in translating critical awareness of social inequities into action. Our work is premised on the assumption that emotions play a key role in social justice work by not only fueling capacity for resistance but also hindering ability to resist injustice effectively or even prompting unwitting contribution to oppression. Drawing from the clinical psychology literature, we introduce the concepts of psychological flexibility, emotion regulation, and mindfulness to the discourse on social justice in therapy and counseling. We argue that emotion regulation enhances our capacity for social justice work. We entertain the following questions: Is social justice work influenced by emotions? Do emotions hinder or fuel our work to dismantle systems of injustice?
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García et al. (2015) studied this question.
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