17/07/2025
Really looking forward to this :)
I will be speaking on Thursday 20th November. Day ticket holders to the symposium will be able to join the pre-symposium (online community meeting and live-streamed keynote speech) online, so if you are planning to go for just the Friday or Saturday you can still catch me online on the Thursday. (And if you’re coming in person on any of the days it’ll be lovely to see you!)
Sonny Hallett will be delivering their keynote speech as part of the 2025 PCE Europe symposium on Thursday 20 November (pre-symposium event). The title and abstract of their keynote speech is below.
For more information about Sonny and the other Keynote Speakers, visit https://www.strath.ac.uk/humanities/psychologicalscienceshealth/counsellingunit/cpd/pceeuropesymposiumglasgow2025/keynotespeakers/
TITLE: Be Yourself. No, Not Like That - Normativity in therapy training and its impact on all of us
ABSTRACT: The person-centred approach is grounded in the idea that we thrive through realness, congruence, and trusting of an individual’s experience. Therapy training, however, can often feel intensely un-trusting, implicitly demanding incongruence - something which particularly impacts trainees from minoritised backgrounds. When trainees can’t find ways to be themselves and also meet the assessment criteria, they risk difficulty, dropping out, even finding the training process traumatic. This isn’t just a ‘diversity and inclusion’ problem— it’s harmful to the profession as a whole, with impacts on all trainees, therapists, and clients, as we carry these pressures on into our practices and ways of being as person-centred therapists, and pass them on to our colleagues and clients.
This keynote will explore how the conditions in training shape the therapists we become, and by extension, the spaces we make for our clients and communities. I argue that diversity isn’t the problem. Instead, the discomfort that institutions and trainee cohorts feel around difference is a symptom of how deeply ingrained normative expectations can be. The resistance to diversity, equity, and inclusion, shown so starkly in the news every day, I think comes from an anxiety about the loss of dominance of normative ‘standards’ for how to be: uncertainty about the many ways of being a person - and indeed a therapist. Real person-centred practice requires courage: a willingness to be present with uncertainty and fear, and to embrace difference. Without active challenge, our trainings will inevitably reflect the same normative pressures present in wider society, and our therapy practices will unwittingly reinforce it. Training, therapy, and communities of practice become difficult and constraining places for growth, when they could be so growth-promoting and expansive.
As a neurodivergent, trans, mixed-race therapist and supervisor, I draw on my own experiences—as a trainee who navigated these difficult waters, and now as someone who helps others through them. If we are serious about person-centred practice, we have to ensure that our trainings and communities are spaces where every student and colleague can develop their own idiosyncratic, congruent ways of working. If we want diverse cohorts and communities of practice, we need to be able to imagine more diverse ways of being a therapist, and to welcome that into our trainings and practice.
