“To colonise is to capture, to take, to control, to disconnect, to disenfranchise, disidentify. To decolonise is to reclaim, to reconnect, to honour, to recognise our interconnectedness with all living things.” Dr Thema Bryant.
Colonialism and white supremacy, has a 500 year plus historical legacy that is deeply embedded in our minds, our systems, and our society, resulting in huge global injustice and inequality, in particular towards people of colour, black and indigenous people. This webinar is an introduction to the complex and long journey of learning and exploring how we can start to decolonise our practice.
Counselling and psychotherapy as a profession has grown from predominantly, European, white, male, intellectual, non-disabled, heteronormative, privileged roots. Therapy today is still very white centred.
I will offer a framework to explore how we can support and work with oppression, intersectionality, and marginalisation. Working with the complexity of our own, and our clients lived experience of marginalisation, power, and privilege.
This workshop is an offering, part of a global collective enquiry into the ways in which we can decolonise therapy.
How can our profession engage with the ancestral and current trauma that experiencing ongoing social injustice and systemic oppression, can inflict upon people from marginalised communities? Can a deeper understanding and empathy towards those experiencing social injustice be embedded into our therapeutic approaches? How can therapy challenge the notion that that distress is located in the individual, and instead offer a robust understanding of its collective, cultural and social origins.
I’ll be exploring what non-normative therapy approaches, and specifically Body Psychotherapy and Wild/Ecopsychology, can offer a journey into deepening our understanding of decolonising our practice.
Working with embodiment can open the door to exploring the lived experiences of oppression, intergenerational marginalisation and intersectionality. Ecosystemic and Wild Therapy reminds us of our interconnectedness, our interdependence, of the sentient aliveness of all beings. I’m interested in re-centring liminal, non-manualised, wild, embodied, playful, creative practice.
I hope the morning will be enlivening, collaborative, and interactive. As a white woman, it feels important to me, to use my developing awareness of my power and my privilege to raise these issues. I’m curious and drawn, to what we can explore, challenge and co-create together.
Please contact me if you wish to have a concessionary place at £35. This would act as a useful taster for the Playing with Fire nine-month online training starting in October 2024.