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.
Therapists Against Conversion Therapy and Transphobia 