The AntiDiscrimination Focus (#TADF)

To help you develop practical skills you can use in therapy for ALL clients. This workshop is for all therapists including trainees.

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 skillful 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.

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)

• Undestanding the RC&I relationship challenges in society and the room
• Strategies for buillding 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

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 relevence 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 relevence 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 particuarly 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