Adventures in Time, Gender and Therapeutic Practice

Systemic tools to depathologize your practice, support LGBTQI+ people and be a meaningful ally.

This teaching day will explore how historically psychotherapy has developed and perpetuated pathologizing practices when working alongside LGBTQI+ people, and how we can undo the legacy of these practices in our work. Starting with the binary gender system and moving to queer theory we will explore how the sociocultural landscape continues to show up in therapy today.  Exploring how to respond to and interweave these contexts into our work so that we might produce better therapeutic relationships and client outcomes when working with queer clients and families. We’ll explore systemic theories and tools we can use in our practice to better meet the needs of our LGBTQI+ clients.

The day will cover:

• Understanding binary gender as a pathologizing legacy of colonialism
• The history of LGBTQI+ people in psychotherapy
• Depathologising practices in clinical work
• Our reflexive relationship to gender and sexuality
• Use of self practices and the therapeutic relationship
• Intersectionality as a therapeutic device
• Allyship inside and outside the therapy room