A short update 😊

Hi everyone!

I wanted to give you a bit of an update seeing as it’s been longer than I intended since I posted anything here or on the podcast.

There’s been lots going on over here. 

For starters, I’ve been wanting to expand my offering to include psychotherapy or counselling of some sort and this has turned out to be a real journey with highs and lows! I have some requirements of the training I undertake because I will not settle for a school of thought which medicalises and pathologises normal human experiences nor will I settle for one which perpetuates or ignores systemic power imbalances. I need the training I undertake to honour the experience of marginalised people and the impact of trauma - whether personal or collective. I started to re-discover person-centered counselling and quickly realised it’s not for me. I was then more hesitant to hand over money for training if I wasn’t fairly convinced there was a chance of it suiting my needs. After discussing it with my supervisor, I started to look more seriously at Transactional Analysis (TA), an approach I have some experience of and affinity with but no formal training.

While on the TA101 course, which is an intro to the world of TA, I just knew. This is what I have been looking for. It felt like my entire being took a deep breath in and just relaxed on the out breath. 

I have since put an application in for the first course required to become a TA psychotherapist, had an interview and they’ve made me an offer of a place! This is the beginning of my psychotherapy training journey and I’m so excited! I’m excited not just for me, but also because of what it means for the people I serve. I know it will be a number of years before I can offer psychotherapy, but in the meantime I will be able to use some of what I learn on the course within the coaching I do with people because some of it does translate over.

I am also in the process of writing my first article to submit to The Psychologist, a monthly magazine that gets circulated to various people involved in the field of psychology, including but not exclusively psychologists. I don’t want to say too much before I’ve submitted it and had it approved. But I have high hopes for raising important issues and starting some necessary conversations across the field of psychology that directly relate to how LGBTQIA+ people can be better served. It is not a quick process though and I am having to work it around everything else.

On this note, I have attended the Pride in London march again with the British Psychological Society’s (BPS) Section of Gender, Sexuality & Relationship Diversity. It was an amazing day and we are still calling on and working on getting the politicians to ban conversion therapy for everyone. Trying to spread the message that none of us is broken or needs fixing - at least when we could be heard over the music from nearby floats! This year Pride in London was in the run up to a general election and that seems to have increased the emotional load and poignancy for a number of us who marched.

This election has carried a lot of anti-trans talking points which weighs heavy on so many of us. I know some have been loud in their views both for and against trans and gender diverse people’s rights and others have found it all too much. There’s been a lot of division and anti-LGBTQIA+ talk with regards to the oppression of the Palestinian people too - with people dictating who can or, more accurately, can’t stand against Israel because of the treatment of LGBTQIA+ people in Palestine. In amongst all of this, some lesbians, bisexuals & pansexuals, aromantics and asexuals have felt either completely overlooked and forgotten about or unfairly targeted over the past month, at least. 

This stuff weighs on me because it is personal, like it is to many of you. I see my role here to require me to pay attention to what is going on, to hear people’s stories (not just the stories of the people I directly work with) and to find a way to advocate for all of us. There are lots of articles I want to write for here as well as for other publications and podcast ideas which are jumping at me to write about and record. It may take me time to find a posting frequency that suits me because putting pressure on myself to publish one article and one podcast episode a month is too much and you all deserve better from me than to rush and publish content that isn’t quite good enough. It is my sincere hope that through adjusting my expectations of myself, the quality you receive from me in my writing and my podcast will be higher!

Hoping for the best for you all