Stepping in to the social contexts of counselling

Do the following questions interest you?

As a counsellor, is it helpful for me to know about the social contexts of the people I am counselling?

What about my own social context, and experience of being different?

How do I recognise and experience the power of others, and how do I recognise and experience my own power?

Should counsellors leave politics out of the therapy room or is counselling inherently a political activity?

Here at the academy, SPACE an understanding of social contexts has been integral to our counselling model and the work we do as listening helpers or therapists for the past 30 years.

Following growing grass roots interest and calls for focused training opportunities, we have been encouraged to offer our social contexts training online. We are making a start by offering this ‘toe in the water’ workshop, with more substantial training to follow if the interest is there.

Our hope is that this further training will sit alongside and complement offerings from other forums or organisations in the field and will highlight the works of writers/speakers with lived experience.

This workshop:

• will introduce some questions to get us started
• will introduce some theory and suggested reading
• will include exercises and a reflective space in which to explore our own experience
• will enable discussion in small groups, to share ideas and experiences

We will strive for a sense of safety and community, whilst acknowledging that we are all in different places in our learning. We know that exploring our own relationship to power, discrimination and oppression, can elicit strong emotions and is not always comfortable.

The process of raising our own awareness about these issues can be a challenging one, for we can belong both to oppressed groups and privileged groups at the same time. I hope that we can move forward together.

For further info and tickets: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/107734314234