BAATN Online Conference 2024 Speakers

Decolonising: Empowering ourselves and our communities

Dionne St. Hill | Jasminder Bahia

Collective Dreaming, Collective Healing: Decolonised Therapy Practices

“So much of the work of oppression is policing the imagination.” – Saidiya Hartman.

Dionne and Jasminder offer a heartfelt exploration of therapy practices reimagined for the global majority. Drawing from their journey in the BAATN 10-week counselling skills course, they’ll share how embracing a decolonised approach creates a space for individual and community dreaming and healing.

As Audre Lorde said, “There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living.”

“Collective Dreaming” with Dionne is an invitation to come together and co-create, to reimagine new systems, dream, plan, and honour our ancestors and their stories.

In “Collective Healing,” Jasminder shares the traditions and practices of ancestral healing and moves on to collective communal healing, using the power of imagination within our body, mind and spirit.

This session is a declaration of a space where we can go beyond the lived injustices, where healing and dreaming are embraced.

Dionne St. Hill is a holistic therapist, writer, workshop teacher

Jasminder Bahia is a chartered psychologist and clinical supervisor – trained in CBT and EMDR.

Dr Joyline Gozho (City Sanctuary Therapy) Clin Prac. MA, UKCP, NCPS

The Invisibility Complex: Moving Towards Visibility and Empowerment

This talk addresses the conundrum therapists of colour in the 21st-century experience: the painful place of being hyper-visible due to the small ratio of non-white therapists in the field yet feeling invisibility due to experiences of insignificance, inferiority, and being the “window dressers”. The window dresser analogy depicts internalised feeling of being an imposter—false, figurative—not good enough and only being present to meet the equal opportunities agenda. This can lead to a sense of not belonging, being unseen, misunderstood, and insecure as a practitioner. These experiences were brought to light through the narratives of therapists of colour who participated in a research study on the impact of racial differences in the therapeutic encounter. The study was titled “Does racial difference between therapist and client impact the transference relationship? If it does, how does it emerge, and how do therapists engage with it to establish a therapeutic relationship: An Interpretative Phenomenological Approach.

A big part of the therapist’s subjective feelings reflect societal issues around what is considered good and pure (white) and bad and impure (black), and an act of macro projections (societal level), and micro projections (individual). These projections can lead to therapists of colour internalising limiting beliefs that affect their sense of self and profoundly inhibit their ability to function as competent, capable, and resourceful therapists. These beliefs can be conscious or unconscious and powerfully shape one’s sense of self, clinical practice, ability to work autonomously, and robustness. The isolated and subjective nature of psychotherapy leaves these experiences muted and unexplored; they are never acknowledged collectively, as there is no such platform or process to do so.

Dr Joyline Gozho will address how therapists of colour can pivot from the place of pain and invisibly to prerogative self-assertion and radical empowerment, placing themselves within a multicultural framework. This process is central to decolonising our practice by way of contextualising race and racial difference as realities that shape our experiences, despite the pedagogical lack of theoretical underpinnings and literature.