Tag: gsrd

The mental and emotional toll of not being seen in training.

A member writes…

I’m a quarter of the way through my supervision training, and I’m having a strong sense of déjà vu. The coursework is intense, with much material to cover between classes. I’m strategising to make time within a busy work week to cover all the pre-class learning, much as I did when I studied my level 4 counselling diploma. I’m back in triads, practicing skills with classmates as we work through the theory we are all studying together. There’s a lot of discussion in the group chat about things that are coming up in the reading and reflections on what we’re learning. 

These aren’t the main things causing the sense of similarity, though. The feeling of history repeating comes from the fact that, in spite of having my pronouns clearly marked next to my name in the online learning platform and the group chat, so far no-one has referred to me using the correct ones.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose

In some ways, things are different. This course is different. We are all qualified and experienced therapists with at least a few years of therapy under our belts, in some cases many more years than that. 

We are also doing the course online and, although I completed the last two modules of my Level 4 online at the start of the pandemic, I did most of my counselling training in-person where I could share physical space with classmates and talk between teaching. The supervision course is quite rightfully enforcing screen breaks between teaching sessions on the classroom days. However, this means that you don’t get to talk to classmates informally.

The supervision course is communicating very clearly that it is aware of diversity. On the pre-recorded lecturers, the tutor is careful to point out the sexist nature of a lot of the idioms that are used in common parlance and is clearly taking care to refer to men, women, and people outside that binary. They invite people to approach them with any accommodations they could make for disability or neurodivergence. They are, in short, doing more than my Level 4 ever attempted. 

I made it clear that I was non-binary and used they/them pronouns with my diploma tutors and classmates on multiple occasions and, after the only other queer participant left after level 3, not a single person ever used my pronouns. My first interaction with people on the supervision course was at our first session where we were split into breakout groups to discuss hopes and fears for the course and one of the people in my group recognised my name from the group chat (where I also have my pronouns next to my name) and cried “oh! You’re the lady with the lovely dog in your profile picture!” Having spent most of my professional life working with queer and trans colleagues and clients for the past six years, I was so taken aback that I didn’t say anything.

Since then, not a single person has used the correct pronouns for me. I’ve had 12 hours of contact time so far. I have 24 hours to go. By the end of the second virtual classroom day, I was so exhausted, I immediately lay down and fell into a dreamless sleep.

Death by a thousand cuts

In my day-to-day life, I don’t really care what pronouns people who don’t really know me use to refer to me. I know that to a lot of people, I look like a middle-aged woman. I find it sort-of surprising when people refer to me with she/her pronouns, in the sense that I have a tendency to look over my shoulder for who they’re talking about, then realise it’s me. Even so, I don’t find it upsetting. I don’t expect people to know what I haven’t told them, and I don’t want to spend the whole of my life having conversations with shop assistants about gender.

It feels significantly different when it’s in a context where I’m surrounded by professionals who have been trained in entering someone else’s frame of reference and showing them respect and positive regard. The participant who called me “the lady with the dog” is the only person so far I’ve responded to and asserted my gender and pronouns. The response was to say “oh, I think someone told me about non-binary” without apologising or changing anything.

Since then, no-one has used the correct pronouns in any of the feedback from triads, which is the main place where I’m finding myself referred to in the third person. We are usually rushing through the practice and feedback so we can get as much out of the time as possible. 

The microaggressions and microinvalidations really do feel like death by a thousand cuts. No-one is being overtly horrible to me. Everyone I have directly interacted with so far is otherwise caring and considerate. I don’t feel like anyone is deliberately trying to upset me. There’s no sense that I’m surrounded by gender-critical people trying to make a point. I just don’t feel seen or acknowledged. It’s making me feel like I’m losing my mind. 

It takes so much more energy to do training that is already very intense when I’m also taking emotional damage. It is hard to describe the weight I feel going into the sessions knowing that I’m not going to be seen. Even though I have had specialist training in working with queer and trans people and have read studies on the impact of microaggressions and microinvalidations, I simultaneously feel angry and like I’m making a fuss about nothing. 

I am carrying an emotional weight into the sessions that impacts my ability to participate in the work. It’s infuriating. As I put in my feedback from the most recent teaching day, it is adding to my cognitive and emotional load to be in an environment where my obviously displayed pronouns aren’t being used by anyone I’m interacting with. We have so little time in the breakout sessions that I don’t want to mention it. I don’t want to use the limited time we have to discuss skills practice on educating people about gender or managing other people’s emotions about being pulled up on getting it wrong. It’s making me dread going to the sessions instead of enjoying them and letting myself be myself freely, making mistakes and learning from them. 

I feel sad. For myself, for the trainee counsellors all over the country who may also be carrying this additional emotional weight, and for the countless clients of so many counsellors who may experience similar invalidation. I wish I had answers, but I don’t want to add to the burden of other people going through this by offering suggestions on how to call your colleagues out, and I am in no position to influence training organisations to do things differently. I am now in a position where I feel like this might be the last such qualification-focused course I do in my career, because I simply don’t have the energy to manage the ongoing emotional impact.

Inspiration for inclusive practice and creating safe(r) spaces

This book review comes from another of our members.

Supporting Trans People of Colour: How to Make Your Practice Inclusive. By Sabah Choudrey

London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2022

Paperback, 208 pages, £16.99. ISBN: 978-1787750593

I begin by acknowledging the lens through which I read this book and am writing now: I am a trans/non-binary psychotherapist; I am white, in my 50s, middle-class and neurodivergent.

On beginning to read Supporting Trans People of Colour: How to Make Your Practice Inclusive, I was struck by the author’s approach: Choudrey combines their own lived experience with voices from the community (via an anonymous survey) and with the voices, frameworks and tools of elders, researchers, leaders and organisations (for example, BARC Collective, adrienne maree brown, Brené Brown, Justice Founders and many more). This was a very powerful thread throughout the book and I experienced the writing as though it was flowing from a broad collection of lived experience and wisdom.

My second impression was of the holding and educating that is done by Choudrey. While the first section (Identity and Intersectionality) provides an extremely helpful resource on terminology, language, white privilege, cis privilege and the experience of trans people of colour in the UK in various areas (criminal justice, healthcare, faith, etc.), I wish that such education did not fall on the shoulders of those within the community and I acknowledge the effort it must have taken to put this book together.

The chapter Creating a Safe(r) Space was illuminating to me. Safety is such an important theme for the trans community and the encouragement to think about not being able to guarantee safe spaces but to “be accountable to harmdoing and transparent to risk taking” (p.67) in order to create safe(r) spaces, was very helpful for my own thinking about safety and the spaces I offer as a therapist, raising my awareness of my own responsibility. Equally, asking the question: “safer for whom?” (p.67) has already proven helpful to me in group and institutional settings to think more deeply about privilege and how I inhabit spaces. 

Similarly, the chapter Holding a Safe(r) Space outlines the need for us to be active in this endeavour, especially given the fact that trans people are often not allowed by society to take up space. Choudrey continually encourages us to think about intersectionality and overlapping areas of oppression, and this chapter offers helpful sections to understand not just race and gender, but also sexuality, dis/ability, language, access, and class. I admit that class is not an area that I have given a lot of thought to, and this section highlighted my hesitation to think about class privilege, providing me with a great starting point for doing some personal work in this area. The recommendations and discussion in this section have helped me to begin my reflections on how class and classism might impact my work.

Any topic around oppression can feel overwhelming to tackle, but this book offers many practical and manageable starting points for professionals and organisations (therapists, healthcare professionals, charities, educators, and others). The range of subjects covered is broad but always comes back to lived experience and meaningful actions. For example, there were some small actions I could immediately take in my therapy practice, even as I was reading the section on Agreements, contracts and policies. I reviewed my contract and added more detail to provide greater transparency. I also added a task to my calendar to review it regularly because, as Choudrey reminds us, inclusion is an ongoing process. In the chapter Celebrate and Commemorate, I found the calendar of cultural, historical, and social events useful – I know how isolating it can feel if a significant day is not acknowledged by those around us, and educating myself about events important to other communities feels like an easy, supportive step to take.

The book contains moments to pause: breaks in the text in the form of boxes with points to reflect on. I found these challenging, inspiring, interesting… There were parts that raised questions requiring deeper self-examination and ongoing work, such as: Where do I hold influence in my life? How can I take responsibility for widening my circle and experience? Where is my collusion? What do I not see in my much-valued trans spaces?

The other chapters in the book include one entitled Practice (especially helpful for organisations, covering tokenism, visibility, and accessibility – whether your spaces are online or in-person – advertising and recruitment, and partnerships and funding) and one called Exclusion and Inclusion, which includes a 10-point summary for making your practice inclusive.

The care I have experienced in the trans community is something that is very precious and supportive to me, it helps me thrive in life. This book brought into sharp focus the whiteness of my trans spaces, and I realised with sadness that I do not think enough about how these spaces could be safer for trans people of colour. I want our community to be accessible and welcoming to all. Supporting Trans People of Colour provided me with practical ways to think about transforming my community spaces, as well as a wealth of information and points for further reflection. I ended the book feeling empowered.

A book review: The Queer Mental Health Workbook

We asked some of our members if they would care to read various books around working with LGBTQ+ topics, and write book reviews. Here is a review from one of our members, who has approached the reading of this book from the point of view of being a therapist who might want to explore this book as a way to work with clients.

The Queer Mental Health Workbook
A creative self help guide using CBT, CFT and DBT
Dr. Brendan J. Dunlop

Dr. Dunlop’s book definitely fits the criteria of self-help, and shares some of the positive and negative features of this genre. On the positive side, it does offer practical (rather than creative, if I’m being picky) exercises that are easy to complete and buying the book gives you access to downloadable versions of resources too including some colouring sheets which, while not being exactly creative, does encourage the reader to get their felt tip pens out.


Dr. Dunlop puts his ideas in a broader context which helps get perspective and adds meaning to what we are reading or being encouraged to try. He often writes as if he is speaking directly to the reader which gives it a pleasant immediacy and directness and moments of honesty and familiarity would definitely, in my opinion, make a reader feel less alone (for example the list, in the chapter on identity, of very recognisable comments that queer people might find themselves exposed to).


Other useful aspects included in the chapter on self-acceptance and self-compassion, a table on what might be behind things such as self-harm, substance misuse, disordered eating and self-neglect, and Dr Dunlop offers a deep dive in side boxes in the test (for example, giving some background to Section 28 [the prohibition on teaching about ‘homosexuality’ in high schools that was in place 1988-2000/2003 depending on whether you lived in Scotland or England and Wales] and how it could have impacted queer people’s mental health).


The book is very broad, so there’s bound to be something in there for almost everyone and readers are encouraged to go directly to the chapters that will be most relevant to them. However, in this breadth comes some of the aspects of the book that I found less helpful. The exercises, because they are designed to be accessible and applicable to a wide range of people, can come across as quite simple and for me, did not have enough depth and the text was similarly general. 

Some concepts or ideas about concepts were presented as facts without acknowledging that they might not be true for all and a several concepts felt over-explained and overly simplified. I felt frustrated at what felt like ‘talking down to’ the reader.


As a therapist, I would recommend using exercises from this book in a personalised way in sessions with clients, tweaking them to suit the needs of your clients and guiding clients through them rather than just handing it over to a client. I felt, in its current form, it would be best suited to teenagers but for them, the patronising (in my opinion) feel of much of the voice could alienate and annoy them, making them feel that things are being overexplained. Having said that, when the author does go deeper (for example the activity on ‘identity in context’ in chapter 4), it seemed to me to be a lot more useful and beneficial.


In summary, do selectively read this book and choose the exercises you would share carefully, personalising them to your clients and putting them in the context of your clients’ lives and experiences. To be fair to Dr. Dunlop, this is hard to do in a very generalised book, and he does make it clear that a reader should choose the parts that work for them. There are some useful parts here, and it is worth making the effort to find them by zooming in directly to the chapters that seem relevant to your clients and personalising what you offer so it is meaningful to them and presented with respect, with free choice and with acknowledgement that one size certainly doesn’t fit all and ‘facts’ are to be handled with caution.