#TherapistsConnect Podcast – Therapists Challenging Racism and Oppression: The unheard voices

In this event, Caz Binstead chairs a discussion with Neelam Zahid and Rachel Cooke about editing and contributing to the book 'Therapists Challenging Racism and Oppression: The unheard voices'.

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Dr Peter Blundell 0:00

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Therapist Connect podcast. Today, we are doing one of our throwback episodes where we highlight some of our previous work that you might not have heard about. So this episode is a shortened version of an event recorded for the Therapist Connect birthday in January. If you'd like to hear the full version of this episode, then you can search for us via our YouTube account, where we have lots of other discussions, debates, and interviews there waiting for you. In this episode, Caz Binstead, Therapist Connect co lead talks to the editors and book chapter authors of Therapists Challenging Racism and Oppression, The Unheard Voices. And I'll let Caz do the full introductions.

Caz Binstead 0:36

I'm blessed to be here with the editors of the book Neelam and Rachel. Hello.

Neelam Zahid 0:41

Hi.

Rachel Cooke 0:42

Hi. Great to be here. Thank you.

Caz Binstead 0:44

To have you here. I'm actually just going to start by reading the blurb. for the book, for anyone who doesn't have any idea of what it's about. So this book is about racism and its intersections with other forms of oppression within the talking therapist's professions, told from the therapist's perspective. These rarely heard voices speak honestly of the pain of being silenced, shamed, excluded, violated, rendered invisible and deeply wounded by their experiences in training and in practice. But there are also stories of strength, courage, resourcefulness, and growth. Some therapists may find recognition and affirmation in these accounts, as well as hope and healing. Others may better understand how their own fragility and bias have led them to similar behaviors and harmful mistakes. This essential read brings together personal, psychological, societal, and political insights to better imagine and further the discourse around what might facilitate meaningful change. Just to properly introduce you both I'm just going to read your bios. Okay Neelam Zahid is an Integrative Counselor, Psychotherapist and Clinical Supervisor, accredited by BACP. She has practiced as a therapist since 2003, having previously worked in higher education for more than a decade, and currently has her own private practice. She is also Deputy Course Leader for the Foundation Year at the Minster Centre, and teaches on the Introduction to Counselling Skills course. In addition, she is currently a visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster, teaching on the BSc Psychology and Counselling and Introduction to Counselling Skills courses. Her area of interest are intersectionality, difference and diversity, and she has contributed to several publications, including the Handbook of Transcultural Counselling and Psychotherapy. And black identities and white therapies, race, respect, and diversity. And we have Rachel Jane Cook, she, they, who's a queer integrative psychotherapist, supervisor, and educator from Ireland in practice since 2009. She's based in London, runs an online therapy platform, consults to charities and social enterprises. And has a longstanding weekly radio segment on sex and relationships, where she often discusses identity, privilege, and oppression. She regularly speaks on podcasts and hosts talks and workshops for the public, for therapists, and for organizations on topics such as intersectionality, trauma, attachment, health and wellness under neoliberalism, embodiment, feminist therapy and gender, sexuality and relationship diversity. Rachel is passionate about training therapists committed to social justice, particularly through embodied and relational practice. And you can read more about her work at RachelJaneCookWithAnE. com.

Neelam Zahid 3:57

I thought before we start going into the book and talking about our own chapters, as well as the other chapters, I thought it'd be, or I felt it was important to kind of name the chapters, but also, name our contributors so that they kind of have a space here, um, even though they may not be physically here. Um, so I'll read through the contents page. Um, and as I do this, um, I, I'm also mindful of the pronunciation of certain names that I'm, um, unsure of. So Rachel, do jump in if I've mispronounced a name. Um, and also if we collectively mispronounce the name, then I would encourage, um, the contributor or someone else with that name to tell us what the right, right, or correct pronunciation is. So I'll do my best here. And I suppose I just want to say that in context of my own chapter, I think kind of the names part is quite important. So, uh, but I know we'll go on to talk about that in a second. So, um, the first couple of chapters is by myself. Um, what's in a name, uh, why I matter, why names matter. The People of Colour, um, the second chapter is by Rachel, Rachel Cook, cultivating intersectional nuance, uh, within the dissociative confines of capitalism. The next chapter is, uh, written by Ohema N. Kansa. Uh, Dwamina, hopefully I pronounced that correctly, attempting, attending to self, attending to others, the impact on the black therapist of client presentations of racial trauma. We then have Anita Gasper, Call Me By My Name. That's the following chapter. The one after that is by Joanna Trainor, A Need for Deep Learning, Not Training. Chapter 6, Racism and Coercive Control in an NHS Counselling Service, by Anja Amrith and Rashmi Lovett. Chapter 7, Confronting the Colonial History of Transphobia, by Sam Hope. Uh, Inter, Chapter 8, Interracial Transference, a Case of Projective Identification, by Jaspreet Tihara. Um, chapter nine. Uh, and I can, I cannot pronounce this word. Uh, do you want to go on Rachel? Healing. A multidimensional approach to therapy by Uy Egoro. And the final chapter, um, chapter 10, my journey to visibility using congruence to explore racial microaggressions within the supervisory relationship by Rajita Rajeshwar.

Caz Binstead 6:48

Thank you. Thank you. And yeah, we're not going to have a lot of time in this discussion to touch on all of the chapters, but we do want to acknowledge all those authors. To get started, you talk in the introduction in the book about the reasons for writing it and your own individual processes in that. So would you just for the viewers say a little bit about that.

Neelam Zahid 7:13

Should I jump in first? Rachel, take us off. Neelam, please. So for me, I think really this book has been a culmination of years and years of racism within the field of therapy. And, from the time of my training up until now, there have always been different forms of experiencing racism within the field, whether it's as a client in the kind of client chair, whether it's. as a therapist and the therapist chair in training my initial training with other peers or tutors or work colleagues. So it for me, there's just been a list of one thing after another. And I think within the last kind of five or six years for me after having attended some workshops where that happened again, I felt like I really couldn't keep silent anymore. And yeah, it was just coming from that place of, I really want to speak up about the racism within our field. And I don't think it gets talked about enough for me. It's, racism is out there. And it happens out there in the outside world. And it's only now recently that we started thinking about it in terms of, and in context of our therapeutic work. And I think that's why I wanted to break the silence around that. So for me, that's what the book has been really about and to give a voice not only to give myself a voice, but to give all of the other contributors and hopefully other people who will be reading this a voice To break the silence around racism within the field.

Rachel Cooke 9:00

Rachel. Yeah, follow on from that. I was, really flattered and delighted to be asked by Neelam to support her in this project, and to be yeah, to co edit. It felt like a very synchronicitous sort of timing very kind of rousing, it was what, 2019, 2020. We both had separately, before we knew each other, just a lot of experiences, a huge amount from what Neelam has shared of experiences of trainings that were just poorly held in terms of like intersectionality and difference in general, but particularly around race. And so it felt like that was just incredibly needed. Far too many trainings that were just woefully ill equipped in holding, yeah, diversity really, and approaching training with kind of true intersectionality. What it's really made me think about is how therapy is political. It feels like we're only starting to really touch on what that means, that kind of everything is political or can be political and how therapy has stayed apart from that for a long time in many ways, particularly white Western therapy and through. Speaking to people and delving into this kind of area and topic, we discovered just so many therapists who've had horrific experiences in training in organizations and institutions, organizations that they work with in private practice with their own clients. in their own therapy and supervision. And so what we thought was going to be more of a, let's say, maybe handbook, I think to begin with ended up being a collection of stories because it felt like we recognized that there are more spaces now for People to talk about race and racism, but there we don't really know of any books and not many kind of podcasts or resources where therapists, particularly therapists of color have the opportunity to really speak about their own personal experiences on their kind of professional experiences with race. So it felt like, my involvement, I really wanted to use my privilege and power to support therapists of color to be heard and to be published. We wanted to get as many. People on board who haven't been published before, although some of them have been and to just share the platform with different and similar kind of marginalizations. And because I guess through this we've also recognized that nearly everybody has some aspect of their identity that is marginalized, and but that doesn't make them more equal. And yeah, it was a real. Yeah, pleasure and honor to be able to be part of this project with em. And, the amazing contributors that we have met, both the, all the people who've been published and also the ones who have didn't end up making it into the book.

Caz Binstead 11:38

Neilam, what you say there about the silence. I think that's such an important point. We were talking about it off screen a moment ago. We are a talking profession and actually being able to. talk about these things and share stories and be human beings and share our stories. One thing I really love about this book, the fact that, like you say Roche, you decided to go down the, people's actual accounts and stories. I think it makes it a really powerful book.

Neelam Zahid 12:10

Yeah, I think so. And I think It's a daring book. I was thinking about this just a couple of days ago how much courage it takes to speak out and speak out within a profession where, although we are told to speak out and to be congruent and authentic and real. But actually there were certain things that we. Encouraged almost not to and I'm just thinking about the traditional quite traditional psychotherapeutic model where it just focuses on the internal, the internal system and internal yeah, our kind of internal space and really divorce it from the external world. And as Rachel said, therapy is political, and it is really important to bring that into the room, and I feel like there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of fear within the therapy world of, what if we get found out, what if I say the wrong thing what if, there's lots of what ifs, I've had conversations with lots of people who, We'll say, I'm really afraid, I'm really afraid that I'll get it wrong and that somebody will call me racist. And I think that's what prevents us from speaking out. And it feels like a real representation of kind of what happens in the outside world. That, that fear of speaking out and breaking the silence. And it is an incongruence within our field of, as you say, it's. It's a talking profession and yet there's certain things that we were bracketing and not really being really tentative with.

Rachel Cooke 13:55

Hugely. And I suppose, yeah, adding into that, but the kind of the hierarchy that exists and how this book really made us look at, I was already interesting, interested in the concept of decolonizing therapy. In fact, I felt passionate about it. But again, it's something that only over the past few years, are we really looking at how the kind of Western medical model has placed people suffering within the individual in kind of faulty Neurochemicals and brains not working kind of thing, as opposed to being able to really look, which is not the same as saying that everything is about the fact that you grew up, poor or working class or black or whatever it is, but it's recognizing that. the context, the social context, your environments are going to have a huge impact on your well being, what you believe is possible for your life, all of those things and how, you're what we call mental health, but I personally prefer psychosocial well being or biopsychosocial, in order to really look at that context, because even the term mental health, Makes us think about that being localized in the individual which we've discovered through these chapters and other, the research that we've done through this, that it's just, it's not helping us and it's very part of a kind of capitalist and very kind of white historical culture, cultural approach towards yeah, being and the kind of lack of community or separation from community in that individualization that has occurred.

Caz Binstead 15:24

I know you're going to say more about that, Rachel, when you talk about your chapter in terms of the other authors I know this has been quite a long process, actually, because obviously it happened over the pandemic period. How did you go about finding contributors? How did that kind of play out?

Neelam Zahid 15:43

I suppose contact the networks, certainly for me the kind of networks that we were. Or I was part of and reaching out to people calling for chapter contributions personal networks as well. So it's really tapping into the kind of people I know and. people that they know and really trying to get people who, as Rachel said earlier, hadn't contributed to, hadn't written anything before, hadn't been published, but really wanted who felt like they wanted to tell their story. And That felt like a really important part that this wasn't actually just an academic piece of work because we had lots of people wanting to just write about theory. And this isn't just about theory. This is about real life. And this is about our experiences. So it was really yeah, finding people who wanted to do that, wanting to really be vulnerable and what we asked people to do wasn't easy. And I really recognize the, how much we asked from our contributors. The amount that they had to go into their own trauma, their own racial trauma, as well as other traumas. So the vulnerability, the courage that it took it just felt yeah, it was a really important part of this book is being able to tell that story. Yeah, but I think that's the how we did it and we had lots of people drop out as well along the way. For some people it was things around practicalities. It didn't work out for other people, it brought up lots of things for people. And I know for myself, it brought up lots of things for me and it was just too difficult to do. I'm sure Rachel will say a bit more about that, but yeah, that's how we went about trying to. to find people.

Rachel Cooke 17:34

My process was a little bit different in that I was also reaching out to my network, but I also did quite a social media drive on that where I approached some people usually not cold but there were a few people where I heard that this person might be interested and then I approached them and said, hey, this is something that we're doing. And ended up with a lot of kind of conversations and contacts through that, but, as Neelam touched on there or mentioned, we had to try and balance that. How much are we going to be able to have the time, how much time and energy are we going to have ourselves with, our own private practices and different, Neelam teaches and the different things that we're doing, supervising, having, our lives, Neelam's got, children and, Just being able to really do justice to the contributors where we could have a really full mixture where it wasn't about having, a kind of tick box of, every kind of marginalized identity, but we still wanted it to be as diverse as possible. But we had to recognize that we were as Niamh said, asking a lot of these, of the contributors And also we wanted to be able to support them as much as possible. So there was this big process of how much do we share each time that we make a change with the book, each time that someone's chapter changes, or, we had a rough idea of how many people from different particular backgrounds we would like, but that shifted over time. Some people dropped out because of, yeah, the timing for them because the project went on for Nearly three and a half years in total and we thought I certainly optimistically thought in the beginning that we would probably Manage to get it published within about 18 months. I think Neelam was much more realistic than I was but that was also something where some people had written something earlier on and then as time went on that You know ended up being published being they were in a different place at that time. Later on for other people, they came in right at the end and didn't have anywhere near as much time to be supported by us. And so each of those had a lot of kind of complexity and required having, what I've come to see as having both thick skin and thin skin at the same time, like needing to be thin skinned in, in remaining sensitive and really listening and being attentive to people's feedback. And also not wanting to overcrowd them with how much communication we were having or the way in which we were editing. But then also needing to be quite thick skinned in how people, both, contributors, Or people who even put in kind of proposals were sometimes having reactions to, it could be me being involved as a white person or what they felt that the book constituted before knowing more about the book. So we had to really span that as well, which, yeah, took that kind of time and energy and being as conscientious as we could be.

Neelam Zahid 20:21

And actually it just to add on to that as well that some of our requests were received with some annoyance and some anger that we were asking people of color to write about their racial trauma or the racist experience racist experiences that had been through for essentially not a fee. And as we all know. writing books, these kinds of books, academic, books, there is no money to be made in this, we're not making millions at all. And there was that kind of, and rightly I think in some ways of, you're asking us to write about our own, our racist experiences and we're not getting anything in return for this. Which I really do understand. And I suppose it, it, for me, it's like yeah, actually that is a massive thing to ask somebody. So I suppose someone had to be in a, I was going to say. In the right time in their life where they were able to share that part of themselves for the greater good, so to speak, rather than being a place maybe more fragile or delicate place or. Wherever they may have been. Yeah, that's, that, those were some of the challenges as well that we came across when calling out to people and asking them to, to write.

Caz Binstead 21:48

Actually, as you both know, one of the reasons I really this book is because it's very like community, it's community activism in a book, which I think is just amazing. But as a community lead myself, I really identify with a lot of the things that you're saying there, Neelam, asking people, do you want to do things, but we can't pay you. And, but there's the pros to that, but then, cons like that asking people to give their time and things. But it also strikes me that there's a lot of difference between a book and your job. As editors, we're actually, as editors, you have to be, because it's a book you're producing, you have to Rachel, you were saying the thick skin, thin skin a bit of a yeah, holding, wearing lots of different hats and things. So in some ways that's even more of a challenge then because you're giving space to people, but like you say, you, it's not a closed space, it's an open space for the world.

Rachel Cooke 22:45

Yeah, totally. We were trying to be everything to all people in some ways and also having to manage that in ourselves because it, we were, I think, certainly for me, I felt incredibly lucky that the way, even though Neelam and I worked quite different ways and had different, we had different periods over the three and a half years where one of us had more availability and more bandwidth than the other. And we worked quite differently in terms of how we edited. But for whatever reason, certainly speaking for myself, I feel incredibly grateful and appreciative that it overall felt like we really gelled. It doesn't mean there weren't times where we disagreed, but it felt like we were able to really, be responsible for ourselves and to each other. Which was an amazing part of the process because considering we were having to have so many conversations about how much we would include contributors in different decisions and changes that were being made to the book and holding, all of those things around people dropping in and dropping out and all of that, that we were really lucky, I think, that would have been A mentally different process to not have a co editor or something like that.

Caz Binstead 23:53

Okay. I'm mindful of time. So is there anything else that either of you want to add anything we haven't talked about that you'd really like to mention or.

Rachel Cooke 24:05

Yes, the final just note that I wanted to share was about, it goes back to the political aspect of this, something that I've really noticed is the the reticence of a lot of practitioners, and understandably, for many different reasons. For some people, it's frightening in private practice. For some people, it's frightening working for people, it's frightening. the NHS or different organizations, but around speaking out against injustice. And I've seen that particularly with what the kind of therapist silence around Palestine over the last few months, that it feels as though it's now becoming more accepted to call what's happening a genocide. And also it's been, really quite striking how little I've seen practitioners, now, maybe there's a lots of private discussions going on, but publicly there's been very little so far, and I'm guessing that a lot of that is out of fear but I think we're only beginning to find the language after three months of what's been happening there to be able to say that, critiquing a government's choices is not the same as casting discrimination on a whole people or the people who, who live in that place. And, that this is something that I really hope that we are going to be talking more about because the silence has been pretty deafening.

Caz Binstead 25:20

Such important points. It comes back to, let's talk to each other. It's open.

Neelam Zahid 25:27

Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose for me, and thank you, Rachel, for saying that. I think that's been a really yeah, I feel deeply moved by what's happening in the world. And I think, yeah, it goes to a place of real hurt and upset. And I think for me, the work that we are doing have done. If it's a stone in, in, in a pebble in that sea, that, that vast thing, then actually it's. It's worth it. So for me, the vulnerability, the pain that we go through in the Western world in kind of this, the UK that we live in, despite the choices of our government it that, that makes it worthwhile for me to open up and put this kind of piece of work out there. And so really a heart. Heartfelt thanks to all the contributors for putting themselves out there for doing some of this kind of, and again, I'm struggling to say the words because I think it's brilliant. It's important. It's difficult work. It's vulnerable work. And actually, yeah, I just want to say thank you to everyone for doing that. Yeah, I think that's what I want to end with.

Caz Binstead 26:55

tHank you so much for joining us, everyone. Here's the book. Go and buy it. You're going to definitely learn something. Thank you so much, Rachel and Neelam for joining me today. Yeah.

Neelam Zahid 27:07

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for inviting us to speak today.

Dr Peter Blundell 27:17

We hope you enjoyed this episode. It is a shortened version of an event recorded for the therapist. Connect birthday in January. So, if you'd like to hear the full version of this episode, then you can search for at via YouTube account, where we have lots of other discussions, debates, and interviews waiting for you. If you'd like to support the podcast and please leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform.