My Approach
It is my aim in both counselling and supervision to de-pathologise and de-colonise experiences of structural violence, and natural life distress, and to honour the ways in which we have sat in our power, resisted, and persisted. My approach is collaborative and non-judgemental.
I am guided and held accountable by the values and ethics of anti-oppressive practice, intersectional feminism, narrative therapy, and the healing justice movement which views personal healing and societal justice-doing / activism as irrevocably intertwined.
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I am a qualified social worker registered with the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW). I graduated the BSW in 2019 with First Class Honours and the University Medal and have since been working full time as a therapist in the fields of mental health and drug and alcohol, with experience in both hospital and community settings. I am currently a PhD Candidate at The University of Sydney, an approved NSW Victims Services Counsellor, and teaching university classes including a unit on Critical Mental Health. I engage in regular training in various modalities for therapy. I also engage in regular, long-term supervision.
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That's the nitty-gritty! The other part is about the therapeutic relationship, which research shows time and time again is the strongest predictor of therapeutic 'outcomes'. It's so important to find someone who relationally is a fit for you, and that's okay if I'm not that person! But how do we know if people are 'relationally qualified'? You won't know until you spend some time speaking with the person, but to give you an idea of who I am in the therapy room I can tell you that I privilege authenticity, honesty, kindness, understanding, non-judgement, collaboration and choice, harm reduction, not taking the position of 'expert', and whenever appropriate - humour. I am also dedicated to accountability and repair.
I have extensive experience sitting with and listening to folks with deeply complex experiences of pain, suffering, and distress. I used to have a list here of those different experiences, but it started to feel a bit like a checklist, and I was discomforted by the idea that a person could be an 'expert' in a list of life experiences of others. Instead of putting distress into different boxes, my experience in my own life and in hearing about the lives of others, as well as simply looking around me, is that living is full of both diverse and interconnected types of distress, some of it a part of being human like grief and loss, and much of it a part of existing in the contexts that we live in with many broad, political influences and inequalities. The latter also can include grief and loss, and some other words that come to mind include anguish, despair, loneliness, and wanting to die. The broad political contexts I'm alluding to include poverty, racism, fatphobia, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, bullying, isolation, displacement, genocide, to name a few.
I welcome questions about this, and enquiries about how I might work with people with any particular experience they are having.​​
I also work with social workers, counsellors, and community workers in navigating organisational issues, ethical dilemmas, and remaining shored up in this work that we do. I am especially interested in how we maintain an ethic of social justice in difficult situations, how we avoid privatising people's pain, how we remain accountable to each other, and how we do all of this with an ethic of care.
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