A Master Class in Race, Culture & Intersectional Therapeutic Practice (RC&I)
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TADF
Description
Join Race, Culture, and Intersectionality (RC&I) experts Mamood Ahmad (UKCP Psychotherapist) and Sam Jamal (BACP Therapist) as they help you develop practical skills and interventions in integrating Race, Culture & Intersectionality into your therapeutic practice. This training will teach specific skills, strategies and interventions which could apply to all clients and in particular consideration of Race, Culture and Intersections such as Class, Gender, Sexuality, and Disability.
This training will equip you with the foundational knowledge, skills, and strategies you need to assess and conceptualise client problems and build cross racial-cultural and intersectional relationships. As client outcomes have been shown to be mediated by therapists’ own intersectional identity awareness self-awareness, this training will lead you through experiential exercises to help you reflect upon your own cultural context(s), racial-cultural & intersecting identity, intersecting sociocultural position, and worldview. In doing so you will develop yourself as well as skills you can use straight away with clients.
Background
In psychological training, the therapist can often be left without the necessary knowledge and skills to build cross racial-cultural & intersectional relationships, understand clients’ cultural contexts, or explore clients’ group identities and experiences of discrimination. The link between social-cultural conflicts, intersectional identities and clients’ presenting problem may never be made, even for those of a European heritage. This can leave an important factor out of therapy and consequently lead to a shortfall in the service provided or, worse – and particularly for People of the Global Majority* (PoGM) [Ref 1,2,3] – lead to negative experiences. Thus, it is essential for us to create a therapeutic service that is safer, more inclusive, more complete, and more skilful for all clients.
Overview
The training is structured into eight units with case examples, experiential exercises, and expert strategies provided throughout. There will be opportunities to reflect, ask questions, bring your own experiences, and consider client roleplays. You may attend both or a single day depending on your needs.
Day 1
1: Therapeutic skills to explore and conceptualising client identity related experiences
• Understanding RC&I concepts and theories
• How RC&I is universal to all clients and thus an essential part of therapeutic practice
• A review of current therapeutic challenges and barriers based on Race, Culture, Class, Gender & Sexuality, Disability & NeuroDivergence
• Broaching and exploring narratives around difference, identity and social location
• Exploring racial-cultural & intersectional identity and client impacts
• Conceptualisation RC&I against clients presenting problems
2: Therapeutic skills to discover and work with clients worldviews, cultural contexts, identity and familial context(s),
• Exploration clients cultural context, heritage, and lived-in cultural experiences
• Discovering and conceptualising client difficulties based on societal, identity and cultural group values and worldviews
• Discovering and working relative to client worldview(s)
• Focusing in on clients relationship with RC&I
3: Therapeutic skills for RC&I Relationship development (Case Study, Roleplay, and Reflection)
• Understanding the RC&I relationship challenges in society and the room
• Strategies for building the RC&I relationship
• Relational RC&I difference broaching, including racism intersecting discrimination
• Common therapist pitfalls, including racial-cultural othering and microaggressions
• Reflections on a roleplay
Day 2
4: Therapeutic skills for Anti-Discrimination Practice
• Principles of Anti-discrimination in Therapy
• Creating an Anti-discrimination therapeutic space
• Client advocacy and client empowerment strategies and skills
• Social allyship for diverse and marginalised groups
5: Therapeutic skills for working with clients identity and acculturation difficulties
• Working to understand and develop client RC&I identity
• Working with migration, acculturation and citizenship challenges
• RC&I congruent interventions and therapeutic adaptations
• Integrating Religious, Spirituality & Ultimate meaning
6: Therapeutic skills for working with Racial-Cultural & Xenophobic Discrimination
• Broaching racism and /-isms and psychoeducation
• Working with racial-cultural and transnational identities
• Working with internalised RC&I oppression and affects
• Working with RC&I Stress and Trauma
Ending: Embedding RC&I into practice
• Principles of integration, learning, and self-development
• Group reflections on client experiences
• Situating your next level of development
• #TADF: Race & Culture 2.0 Competency Framework & Call to Action
Audience
Any psychological practitioner, such as counsellors, psychotherapists, and psychologists. It is also suitable for trainees. We will provide guidance on readiness to work with clients during the training so you can self-assess your development.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course, you will:
• Understand and be able to explain various aspects of RC&I, such as its scope, universal relevance to therapeutic work, and associated psychological theories.
• Develop a deeper awareness of your own and others’ racial-cultural and intersecting identity, worldview, and their meaning and relevance to the relationship and anti-discrimination practice.
• Learn to develop narratives around your own and clients’ cultural context(s), psychological conflicts, and migration and acculturation challenges in preparation for therapeutic work.
• Be better equipped to assess and conceptualise aspects of race and culture as part of a client’s overall problem presentation.
• Develop strategies to build the relationship, broach racism and intersecting social identities, and build racial-cultural identity narratives.
• Learn common mistakes therapists make in working with diverse groups which form (often invisible) barriers to the relationship and impact outcomes.
• Situate your learning and edge of development in working within a racially-culturally informed manner.
• Understand and be able to explain what racial and minority group stress and trauma are, to identify key characteristics of racial and minority group trauma, and to compare those with PTSD and stress models.
• Be better equipped to assess and conceptualise racial trauma and stress as part of a client’s overall problem presentation.
• Be better prepared to help clients manage potentially unsafe environments and incorporate anti-discrimination strategies within the room, as well as within service provision.
Standards of competence
This training aligns with our leading Race and Culture 2.0 standards based framework particularly racial-cultural discrimination (Free Access & Video lesson here: link here).
Aftercare
We have specific protocols to keep the environment as safe as possible for all and particularly for people with lived experience of racial stress and trauma. The instructors will be available between breaks and after the training for upto 30 minutes to support you.
About #TADF
#TADF is a network of psychological practitioners who work with individuals, institutions and training providers to embed anti-discrimination practice into their cirriculum, service design and organisation structure. Our clients include training providers, CPD training providers, awarding bodies, membership bodies and mental health institutes.
* Adapting and living where your lived in-cultural experience is within multiple cultures where there are challenges typically within the dominant one
** People of the Global Majority (PoGM), such as people from African and Asian Diaspora as well as people of visible mixed race identities.
[1] Mercer, L., Evans, L. J., Turton, R. & Beck, A. (2018). Psychological therapy in secondary mental health care: Access and outcomes by ethnic group. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 1- 8.
[2] Lawton, L., McRae, M., & Gordon, L. (2021). Frontline yet at the back of the queue – improving access and adaptations to CBT for Black African and Caribbean communities. Cognitive Behaviour Therapist, 14, e30. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S1754470X21000271
[3 ] Williams, M. T. (2021). Microaggressions are a form of aggression. Behavior Therapy, 52, 709–719. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. beth.2020.09.001
Previous Testimonials
The training was a brilliant experience. It was informative, insightful, and hugely valuable – both personally and professionally. I would most definitely recommend it to other therapists.
I have learned a little more humility as regards how I come across as a white therapist. I really valued the feedback both yourself and Sam offered me about working with Black, Brown and clients of Colour. I need to watch for coming across as ‘a bit holier than thou’!….when attempting to own my whiteness. I learned more about the importance of sensitivity when bringing up racial differences and racism….. that there isn’t a right way necessarily…. but that openness and willingness to learn is key.
I thoroughly recommend this course to every therapist. I think it should be mandatory on our training journey and I am ever so happy and relieved that I have found it before I qualify.
Sam and Mamood showed great care, professionalism and deep understanding of past, present and future of othering. They provided us with a safe and welcoming space to be authentic, to meet in our differences and to find the courage to look honestly at our personal biases and systemic assumptions too. They provided us with a vast amount of precious theory and finally with really good, practical suggestions on how to implement those learnings in our practice.
The course was amazing. I have become more aware of my learnt internal racism and am finally tuning in to what affects those of diverse heritage. I am losing friends as a result but I am comfortable with that. My white goggles are coming off finally. I do have much more learning to do.
I have developed more confidence in challenging my white colleagues, for example if they are expressing their colour-blindness or possibly not seeing the bigger picture (e.g. systemic racism). The reality of being white and privileged is dawning on me much more and it feels like a painful and necessary shift.
