Broaching perspectives: Encountering diversity amongst counsellor

This is a four week series of encounter groups for counsellors to prompt exploration of power, privilege and perception to foster curiosity and connection.

During counselling training and beyond, we may find ourselves prickly and at odds with colleagues or clients. Perhaps we felt othered, or had unknowingly othered someone else. What expectations, implicit or explicit, surround us and influence our day-to-day interactions?

As counsellors, we hold the initial power in establishing a relationship with our clients. How might this continue to play out when we consider diversity factors? What privileges might we assume? How might the client perceive our privilege and power?

In this four week series of encounter groups, Jen and Dhara provide prompts to broach diversity issues to foster curiosity and connection. As person-centred counsellors, we value a person’s congruence and hope that through modelling empathy and unconditional positive regard, participants can feel more at ease with this topic.

‘Broaching’ is defined as “the counselor’s ability to consider how sociopolitical factors such as race influence the client’s counseling concerns” (Norma Day-Vines et al., 2007). For us, diversity issues go beyond the protected characteristics to anything that makes us feel minimised or othered such as our family income, education, neurodiversity.

Aims of the group

• To increase our self-awareness and understanding on how power, privilege and perception influence our work as counsellors.
• To increase our self-awareness of how power, privilege and perception affect us individually.
• To use curiosity to foster honest and open communication within the group to support each other’s growing awareness and understanding.

In taking part in these group sessions, we ask for your commitment in attending all sessions. We invite you to take part as fully as you feel comfortable to do so, sharing your own experiences and supporting others to share and explore their own. Whilst some check-in activities will take place in small breakout groups; all main group discussions will be held together as one so that the here and now can be explored and supported as one.

To support the smooth running of these groups, all participants are asked to meet one of the facilitators one-to-one to discuss past experiences with group work and what they would like to gain from the group. There will be 10-16 participants in a group.

What this is not - To help clarify the intentions of this group, this group is not personal therapy, nor peer group supervision. We may broach topics that would benefit from further therapy or supervision, but the intention is to raise the awareness of such topics in the first place.

Dates

Four Wednesdays 10 am to 11.30am - 23 April, 30 April, 7 May, 14 May.

We ask that you reserve a backup on 21 May in case of a cancelled session.

Book here on EventBrite for Wednesdays. We are also running a group on Friday afternoons. 

Cost

£60 total for four sessions. 

Facilitators

Jen Mak (she/her) is a low and high brow foodie, British Born to Hong Kong parents in a takeaway. Here to hold and process struggles with a pinch of humour and lightness. As a person-centred counsellor and supervisor-in-training, she often uses the perspectives of loss and individual parts to support clients through grief and anxiety.

Her group work experience includes running network groups, such as founder of a staff network for women employees; BACP Leeds Private Practice Network; and currently co-facilitating the East and Southeast Asian Gatherings for BAATN (Black African and Asian Therapist Network). She has also trained to be a Therapeutic Groups Facilitator through Creative Counsellors.

Dhara Joshi (she/her) is an Autistic, person-centred counsellor, often describing her multicultural background as a Tree: with roots planted in India where she was born, a sturdy trunk in Oman, and branches extending to the UK. She strives to weave differing parts of her cultural identity into creating a warm, welcoming space where individuals can explore their own diverse experiences at their own pace.

Beyond her counselling practice, she co-facilitated a counselling skills course group and as a Home Educator, facilitates emotional support groups for parents involved in home education using a play based approach (and perhaps a few too many art supplies!) to navigating challenges.