Crossroads

“Every new beginning comes from other beginning’s end.“

LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA (4 BC – AD 65)

Stoic Roman philosopher, statesman, dramatist and satirist 

I check my biases at the crossroads, review personal, organisational and global history, language and expression. As I write and rewrite this text, I take stock for what’s to come.

My particular way of working and relating engages the authentic self and invites critical reflection (Mitchell, 1992). I require time and I am taking time to reflect about my professional role as a psychotherapist at this particular juncture.

Throughout my practice, language has held significant weight in shaping both the therapeutic process and the lived experiences of those I work with. It is through words, and how they are used, that identities are formed, systems are built, and realities are framed. Non-verbal communication underlines, deepens, deconstructs and illuminates conflicting, double-binding narratives (Bateson, 1972) – as an embodied practitioner, I value it, use it and train clients to do the same. It all communicates: that which is acted out and that which is not, that which is hidden, withheld or remains unspoken, that which is said and how it is spoken.

My self-reflexive considerations about verbal communication start with the acknowledgment that I am a multilingual native speaker of one single language. I am quite aware that I practice differently in English, Portuguese and Spanish – as cultural means of communication, each of these languages shape my interactions with others differently (Burck, 2005). I do not presume nor pretend otherwise.

I am also aware that I approach private practice with lived experience that informs my understanding of the human condition, identity in the cross-cultural frame, power and oppression (Hardy, et al., 1995). I do not judge, but I feel – e.g., I feel empathy for those who suffer, I feel moral injury when betrayed in my personal and professional ethos, and I feel ethical anger for self and others, which requires action (Vau, 2019; Dean et al, 2019 and 2024; UKCP, 2021; Lewis et al., 2020; Moreno, 1994). I shall expand on this when and where appropriate, but not today – it is not timely, nor necessary.

Healing and change are individual and collective endeavours, a co-creative journey in systemic contexts. I aim to build therapeutic alliance based on respect for diversity, enable non-judgemental reflection about human experience, facilitate authentic expression, promote freedom from stuck patterns, and enhance connection. How do I propose to do this?

Co-creative systemic action

At the heart of my psychotherapeutic approach is what I call ‘co-creative systemic action’, an integrative set of practices that foster collaboration, creativity, and systemically framed intervention. As a psychodrama psychotherapist, I offer individual clients, groups, and organisations the possibility of exploring the social, psychological, and somatic roles through which the self gains expression in its relation to another, the body and parts of self (Moreno, 1994). In this embodied approach, the therapeutic experience is a dynamic space where roles are enacted and re-enacted, revealing old patterns and movement possibilities, individual and collective.

Co-creating means creating together – creating something new, freer and wider than the sum of individually created parts. As psychodrama director, I hold space for creativity and spontaneity to operate, and I am not removed from what is created. On the contrary, I facilitate the creative process intersubjectively – I feel the responsibility this entails and embrace it wholeheartedly.

In the therapeutic context, and in simple terms, creative action means role play and creative expression, facilitated by a creative psychotherapist, trained in action methods. This entails interpersonal exchange, embodied experience and contained representation of the psyche or internal world.

As a psychodramatist integrating systemic approaches to working with individuals, groups, families and organisations, I map out social roles, help identify patterns, facilitate insight into the contribution of each role to given patterns, and strive to foster positive change where it is safe and creatively possible. The psychodrama director frames and promotes the exploration of interpersonal, somatic and psychological aspects of functional and dysfunctional roles, and the systemic practitioner promotes systemic perspective-taking, widening and deepening the framework, enhancing insight potential, and empowering responsible change agents.

Reflecting on content and language

Although insight into patterns and the potential for change may be grasped fairly quickly in this approach, I don’t recommend fast tracking change upon insight. I assess pace adjustments to meet identified client needs, but I don’t prescribe immediate, real life action and I do not model that. Personally, I am not on the highway, rushing to get somewhere – I am on a life-long, cross-cultural, multidisciplinary path of co-creative development, sometimes arrested, sometimes traced back in its bends, bumps and intersections.

When I begun to write these lines, I found myself reflecting about personal and professional choices, creative expression and emphatic use of critical language to impact first order change in organisations – the type of change that implies adjustments within a system that do not impact its underlying structure or purpose (Watzlawick et al., 1974: p. 10). In its previous versions, this text entailed intersectional and systemic considerations that are better suited for a reflective journal at this stage; it is time to process rather than upload such reflections to an online (b)log.

On another hand, there are long overdue reflections and insight to share about my use of language in published literature (Gavin et al., 2022).

Language plays a pivotal role in both constructing and deconstructing identity. Acronyms like BAME (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) have been used as shorthand for racial and ethnic identities, but fail to capture the diverse realities of individuals within the categorised groups. I have used the former in a Practitioner’s Guide entitled Global Perspectives on Interventions in Forensic Therapeutic Communities, and I want to set the record straight: I reproach and retract my use of the ‘BAME’ acronym, as I am aware it groups together different racial, ethnic and cultural identities, dismissing the distinctions that are crucial to understanding the complexity of human experience (Crenshaw, 1991). I also apologise to the individuals I labelled, without their input.

The Practitioner’s Guide were I used this acronym was published in February of 2022, a month before the UK Government itself formalised its “commitment to no longer using BAME following a review on the causes for race inequality in the UK by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities” (Bryan, 2024).

The term does not stand the test of time, and indeed clashes with a racial justice approach that frames my personal and professional conduct: i.e., critical race theory (CRT), which asserts racism is not an aberration, but a foundational and enduring aspect of society. I recognise systemic and institutional racism, perpetuats inequalities and unhelpful narratives of neutrality and colorblindness (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017, pp. 7-11).

What follows does not minimise nor excuse my use of the acronym. I want to take personal responsibility for my use of an inaccurate term and voice my reflections about language and its use now that I know better and can express myself without compromising the anonymity of individuals that were wrongly labelled. I welcome further discussion with editors and co-author; here, I use my own voice and self-reflexiveness alone.

I own the choice of second-guessing my unease as non-native English speaker and foreign national; rationalising, accepting, and justifying the use of the term with the need to safeguard and protect the anonymity of volunteered testimonies, alongside institutional contact limitations at time the chapter was edited.

As I started to train in systemic approaches, I was invited to consider the term ‘global majority’, coined by British-Jamaican academic Rosemary Campbell-Stephens in 2003, to describe the diverse communities outside of the White British demographic, including individuals of Black, Asian, ‘ethnic minority’ and ‘other White’ backgrounds. The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust suggests different labels for the latter background (Jemmott et al., 2024) – this might or might not reinforce ‘global majority’ as a step toward a more inclusive, decolonised narrative that acknowledges the global history and presence of ‘global majority’ communities. It is not meant to be mere a linguistic change – it is meant to be a shift in perspective, repositioning non-White communities as the majority, both globally and historically, and highlighting their significance and presence in a world that has often been framed through a Western-centric or Eurocentric lens (Campbell-Stephens, 2021).

The term ‘global majority’ challenges the dominant narrative that marginalised non-White communities, by reframing them as historically, demographically and ethnographically central to Human experience, rather minorities.

While ‘global majority’ reflects global demographics better, it still groups individuals from different racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds into a broad category, including individuals from diverse backgrounds, who may originate from countries that colonised other countries.

In my therapeutic work, the shift is not in getting terminology right as opposed to wrong, but in seeking permission to be curious, creating context and providing containment for fair representations of real experience though which clients are seen, heard, and understood in ways that go beyond labels. Language is powerful, and it is a therapist’s responsibility to be mindful of the words and the impact they have. Self-reflexivity and and cross-cultural supervision are critical for a inclusive, nuanced approach.

My decision to move away from saturated, alienating ‘global’ terms wherever possible reflects my own commitment to use language co-creatively with clients and communities, in alignment with lived experiences and cultural traits.

I wonder if there is a better word than ‘global’, one which sounds and feels less void of substance and meaning due to its use as generalisation and misrepresentation of all that which is diverse and unique, conforming and non-conforming, all over the world.

Looking back and bowing down

It is true: I have not been thinking globally when acting locally (Howard, 1915; Ferguson, 1980) – not as I did during my earlier professional chapter as a communication specialist. My focus was on corporate social accountability (CSA) and sustainability (Vau, 2005). In that structured world, strategic communication, CSA frameworks, systems and global interconnectedness were lenses I used to diagnose, plan, recommend, help implement and communicate socially and environmentally responsible practices by corporate systems.

Once I closed that professional chapter, having started my training-practice as an actor, I plunged into the world of improvisational, non-scripted, community-building theatre. For 10 years I trained and developed my practice and therapeutic application of playback theatre (PT), which invites audiences to connect by sharing their true stories, and asks that performers listen deeply and honour true narratives rather than scrips, emphasising immediate, relational experience. PT allows for a unique fusion of spontaneity, creativity, and deep interpersonal connection.

Eventually, my path led to psychodrama psychotherapy, where I became laser-focused and immersed in role dynamics. The here-and-now became my professional domain, and I began to see macrocosmic chaos and madness of our world as distractions.

I wanted to free therapy spaces from the global frame, for lack of better terms. I actively avoided this frame and global news, trusting and observing themes relevant in the here-and-now would surface, contextualised and contained by therapeutic alliances based on authentic human connection and earned trust.

Ever so often, the individual and collective trauma I have vicariously felt and processed in the last decade has been echoing global tragedy. I might freeze-frame trauma narratives, look at microcosmic snapshots, and approach human drama with clients doing personal work in role as flies on the wall, in an observing ego position. The latter is nor rigid and the following is not prescriptive, but I prefer not to revisit a trauma narrative directly.

I have intervened systemically, but consistent systemic thinking has remained elusive.

Now, as a psychodramatist and systemic therapist in training, I realise that global and systemic dysfunction is not ‘out there’ in the macrocosm; it reverberates within the microcosmic individual and collective therapy spaces. Working cross-culturally has taught me this. Clients bring their unique cultural, historical, and social narratives into the therapy room, and these narratives often have collective trauma in international news as a backdrop.

In moments of deep reflection, I recall insight and change I had the privilege of witnessing in some clients. In my mind’s eye, I see these as ripples extending outward into the broader fabric of humanity. These memories offer solace and a sense of purpose, yet they are tempered by a deep grief for lost meaning and the disconnection that pervades modern human systems. Emotional detachment from regressive, reactionary forces within small, large, and global systems has become a coping mechanism, yet it also comes at the price for our shared humanity (Freud, 1917, p. 243; Moore et al., 1990, pp. 45-46; Bowlby, 1980, pp. 85-95).

Systemic approaches demand that I hold both perspectives simultaneously: the individual experience within its immediate context and the larger, interconnected web of historical, cultural, and global influences. This dual focus constantly challenges me to bridge dimensions – the subjective, the intersubjective, the collective – whilst managing complex, multilayered, interconnected emotion, because these is emotional work to do and I do work with emotion, including my own (I am not numb).

In my work, I honour individual experience while acknowledging its place in transgenerational, global narratives. I do this with negotiated therapeutic goals, but without a script.

Looking up and moving forward

Trained and developing psychodrama and systemic therapy practitioners hold a unique position. Self-reflexivity, curiosity, and responsibility are enhanced by both modalities enabling effective work with diverse groups, transcending the limitations often imposed by dominant social structures. Leadership and organisational culture thrive when they do more than tolerate difference, and actively nurture individuals and teams that break the mold. These are essential for the survival, assimilation and transformation of multicultural, ecologically sustainable systems.

“’Are we attempting to create systems in which all people can thrive? What kind of world and what kind of workplaces are we cultivating?’ These questions […] must first be answered by ourselves, [recognising] our own role in perpetuating harmful biases that come to define institutions” (Jana et al., 2018, adapt.).

With insufficient scrutiny, smaller systems (like families and small organisations) may become particularly toxic within whilst presenting as nourishing in the public domain. Their plight for survival or growth can render them regressive, perpetuating patterns of exclusion or power imbalance.

Sensitive interventions by systemic practitioners become essential in such scenarios. As Kimberlé Crenshaw argues, the intersectionality of identities and power dynamics must be understood to prevent fragmentation in movements for change. “The better we understand how identities and power work together from one context to another, the less likely our movements for change are to fracture” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1245).

My identity as a migrant intersects power in a particular manner, in that I am also a middle-aged ‘other White’ woman without children. Migration is a recurring theme in my family history, but it has been experienced differently thus far – it hasn’t been this lonely, punctuated, and fractured (McGoldrick, Carter and Garcia-Preto, 2012, pp. 350-370).

My psychodramatic and systemic training lead me to act as a mirror, reflecting both idiosyncratic and systemic vulnerabilities (Brown, 2012). This role is not without its challenges; not all organisations are prepared to confront the truth, nor acknowledge the biases and blind spots embedded in their culture and structures.

As a practitioner, I embrace the responsibility of being in the driver’s seat of my own journey. What I offer includes a dynamic mix of normative, complementary, and alternative strategies designed to catalyse change, foster equity, actualise potential, and empower marginalised individuals and communities. Protecting vulnerable ecosystems – social, cultural, or environmental – invites co-creative systemic action, flexible and bespoke.

Moving forward, I want to practice with more (not less) curiosity, self-reflexivity, safely held discussions, linguistic permission-seeking, and responsive feedback mechanisms. I will continue to document my approach and, where appropriate, how it facilitates growth in individual clients and their systems.

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