The AntiDiscrimination Focus (#TADF)

This certificate training consists of six days of live online training plus on-demand video lessons to support learning. 

Day 1: Developing Cultural Competence for Therapeutic Practice

“All relationships are cross-cultural relationships. We differ by our contexts, beliefs, worldviews, and geographically situated socio-cultural lived experiences”

This training will help you develop awareness and skills in working relative to the client’s cultural context(s)*, belief systems, worldviews, and conflicts of acculturation. This training will move you towards a deeper and more empathic understanding of clients’ difficulties relative to their lived cultural experiences for all clients. As client outcomes have been shown to be mediated by therapists’ own cultural identity awareness, this training will lead you through experiential exercises to help you reflect upon your own cultural context(s), worldview, and conflicts, and develop skills in developing cross-cultural relationships. You will have the opportunity to apply your learning interactively and in small group sessions in readiness for therapeutic practice. This foundation will form the basis of working with difference, diversity, and marginalisation.

*Cultural contexts such as geographical, continental, social / group identities, national, group, family, work, and the psychological effects of displacement, movement, and acculturation within the dominant society.

Day 2: Working with Difference & Diversity using Anti-Oppressive Practice & Intersectional Foundations (DD&A)

Difference, Diversity using Anti-oppressive practice (DD&A) considers the social context, intersectional identity, otherness, and empowerment aspects of working with difference, especially for clients who occupy diverse intersectional identities including gender, sexuality, trans, race, culture, disability, neurodivergence, religion, nationality, and class. This training will help you towards integrating DD&A foundations as standard practice for all clients. You will develop the foundational knowledge, awareness, and skills in relation to working with diverse identities including current socio-cultural challenges, impact on mental health, psychological theories, and structural and theoretical concepts in relation to marginalisation. We will then explore the implications of practice which describe common building blocks we must understand and instill in our practice that can be applied to all client work.

Day 3: Client Case and Peer Supervision Exercise
 (Peer Group Led)

You will meet in small groups to consolidate the knowledge you have learned so far using a guided case study for reflection (self and client).

Day 4: Embedding Difference, Diversity & Marginalisation in Therapeutic Practice

This training will walk through our common tools (13) that emerge from theories and theorists of difference and diversity which can be applied practically for all client work and in your own self-development. These exercises, reflections, and case examples are designed to move you towards embedding difference, diversity, and inclusion as standard in self, therapy, and your profession.

We explore theories, structural narratives (psycho-social-structural), identity development, working with experiences of marginalisation, inter-identity relationships, power dynamics, cocreated helping, group trauma, worldviews, justice, allyship and empowerment action, and factors associated with negative and harmful experiences that recreate exclusion and marginalisation. By being able to apply these tools and skills you will develop foundational knowledge and practical skills in building a more just, inclusive, complete, and ever-improving psychological practice, whether working with clients and their experiences of otherness, marginalisation, and exclusion, within the therapeutic practice of one or within a mental health organisation.

Day 5 (1) : Neurodivergence 101 - Trainer with Lived Experience Led 

Day 5 (2) : Class and Positionality - Trainer with Lived Experience Led 

Day 6: Working with Race-Based Stress and Trauma*

This training day will help you work with clients’ experiences* of racism, racial stress, racial trauma, and intergenerational racial trauma. This training will give you a deeper understanding and equip you with the expert strategies and skills you will need to help clients narrate, heal, and empower from within their wounds of racial stress and trauma. The ubiquitous nature of the race construct is explored as an overarching theme of human (thus client) difficulties.

Day 7: Race Process group* - Includes White/PGM/Mixed/Other Spaces as needed (Not Recorded)

“I’m not going to trust you. Not until you can let me transform you” ~ m.a.

Group work is a crucial part of therapists’ racial and cultural identity self-development. This is a personal experiential encounter for you to meet the racial self/other and engage in personal dialogue. There is nothing required of you other than bring your “self” personally in sharing and responding to opinions, experiences, and feelings about race and how it intersects with other identities such as gender. Everyone will learn through experience and relationships rather than through study. In our experience, these encounters are powerful, and healing and have the potential for enormous shifts in racial awareness.

Please note access to supporting resources is recommended e.g., community, supervision, and therapy. We will provide aftercare if required.

*Client experiences on these days relate to People of the Global Majority (PoGM), such as people from African and Asian Diaspora as well as people of visible mixed race identities.

After live attendance and completion of Day 6, subject to observation, you can be listed on our therapist directory. 

OPTIONAL: Case Study & Panel Assessment (Needed for Assessed Status) 

If you wish to gain assessed status for this course you will need to submit a reflective case study and also attend a panel interview. The assessment is based on our evolving competency standards for anti-discrimination practice.