Exploring an Embodied, Relational and Wild therapeutic approach. How can working in these ways, enrich and support the decolonising of our therapy practice?

 

“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.

 

The themes of relationship, embodiment, wildness, and decolonisation are interlinked. We’ll spend some time exploring each of them and their entwined natures. 

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Relationship 

We are pattern makers and our experiences in early childhood go on to shape and inform our patterns of relating throughout our lives. When we meet with another, we each shape and mould the other. We will explore our interconnectedness through thinking about Embodied Relating, co-transference, enactments, and mutuality.

 

Bringing an awareness to the power dynamics within the client therapist relationship and having an understanding of our own intersectional identities, deepens this work. We will explore how our particular mix of our privilege and marginalisation, interacts with our clients' intersectional experiences and identities. How this impacts the work and reveals hidden biases, as well as depths. 

 

We are all interdependent and our individual trauma often results from the systemic injustices we experience. On this course we will embrace the stance that therapy is political, looking for ways to work with individual psychology within the context of a collective, cultural, and social view of the origins of our distress.

 

 

Embodiment 

We will explore how to amplify and work with both our own and our clients’ embodiment. Offering tools to support a deepening into present lived embodied experience, however far it is from a normative idea of how we should be. 

 

We will focus on some of the channels least supported by our profession, including movement and touch and finding creative ways to play with our own embodied experience in the moment.

 

Oppression lands heavily on our bodies, which carry our lived experiences of oppression and intergenerational marginalisation. We will explore how we can honour and support the exploration of the embodied trauma that comes from experiences of oppression. 

 

 

Wildness and Eco-psychology

Supporting our clients to explore their relationship with the other-than-human and more-than-human. We will have structured experiences of connecting with wildness and working outside.

 

A central theme in the course will be working from ‘Wild Mind’ - that part of us, which is embodied, animal, spontaneous, dreamlike, non-linear and wild. When working from Wild Mind we centre our practice on a wild, indigenous, local, ‘gatherer’ consciousness. Indigenous perspectives are an important part of this exploration.

 

We are all part of systems that we are co-authored by, influenced by and are participant in creating. We will think together about our collective colonial exploitation of the Earth and its people, and our interdependence, and inseparability from the sentient land, from the perspective of an eco-systemic approach to psychotherapy. 

 

 

Decolonisation 

Colonialism has a historical legacy that is still deeply embedded in our minds, our systems and our society, resulting in huge global injustice and inequality, particularly towards black, brown, and indigenous bodies.

 

Such systemic injustice privileges certain bodies above others. White, upper, and middle class, male, intellectual, non-disabled, heterosexual, cis gendered people are privileged, and seen as the norm by which all other bodies are judged (sometimes openly, often covertly) both as inadequate, and as other.

 

Decolonisation is the process of examining our internalised hierarchies and our assumptions. There is a wealth of insights, coming from marginalised communities, offering leadership in these times. Inviting the potential of non-normative thinking to nourish and enrich all, including the mainstream.

 

A decolonised therapy practice offers the possibility of a different paradigm of what it means to be helpful and human. Embracing creativity, therapy as play, going into the unknown, dreaming and a spirited life.