Luan reflects on: their ‘why pronouns matter’ article, the resilience bank, paper cuts. They share the 5 things they do to maintain their resiliency.
Luan’s article ‘why pronouns matter’ is here to help bust some of the myths around gender diversity and to demonstrate how small changes in our interactions can have a huge positive impact on those with diverse identities.
As a psychotherapist and supervisor in private practice they reflect on their experiences within the therapeutic community regarding diversity, particularly gender, sexual and relationship identity. Their thoughts can be readily transposed to any area of diversity. Their aim is to offer some insights here into how we might better serve our clients, supervisees and colleagues. All examples are anonymised.
Whilst they recognise that change is slow within wider society they feel we have a duty as counsellors, psychotherapists and supervisors to be robust enough to challenge, be challenged and expand our knowledge and understanding, rather than live in a bygone era of oppression, judgement and ignorance. LGBT+ hate crime has increased by 78% in the last five years1. It matters to clients, supervisees and supervisors. Indeed it needs to matter for change to occur. Resilience and why pronouns matter.
“People are simply people”. Whether you’re a counsellor, psychotherapist or supervisor I would like to think that together we could enable people to simply be people, wear whatever they feel comfortable wearing, using names and pronouns that they feel most comfortable with, doing jobs and hobbies that make them feel fulfilled, loving whoever they happen to love. It’s a vision I still hold most dear but fear we as a profession are not there yet.