Who Let the Foreigners In: Decolonising Group Analysis Training
Abstract
This paper examines colonisation within mental health care and therapeutic training through three lived experiences: navigating psychiatric systems in Ireland, art psychotherapy training in London, and group analysis training in India. I explore how cultures of disavowal and shame enable the systematic pathologising of human suffering whilst erasing the contexts that produce distress.
As an Irish person, I understand colonisation through my pores—it is not merely an intellectual framework but an embodied knowledge inherited through generations of silence, institutional abuse, and strategic erasure. I recognise the shape of colonisation: it moves through dehumanisation, disavowal, and the absence of shame. This is not colonisation of land, though Ireland and India both know that violence intimately. This is colonisation of minds, bodies, and ways of knowing—the imposition of frameworks that determine whose pain is legitimate, whose knowledge counts and whose humanity is recognised.
Drawing parallels between Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and contemporary therapeutic practices, I examine how training programmes perform epistemicide—the destruction of embodied ways of knowing. I call for accountability: the profession must face its complicity in harm and create decolonised practices that risk mutual encounter rather than maintain dehumanising professional borders.
Written for those who left, those still training who cannot speak, and those who stayed.
Introduction: What We Pretend Not to See
“Who let the foreigners in?”
These words were spoken in one of my first large groups during a residential meeting in Nepal. I had travelled from my home in Britain for group analytic training, imagining I was entering a space where our shared colonial histories might create deep understanding. Instead, I found myself muted and frozen. On St. Patrick’s Day 2023, thoughts about colonisation swirled in my head. This day mattered to me, culturally and personally. I spent most of that evening positioned on a terrace in the Himalayas, grounded with the warmth of one kind soul.
I chose to leave at the end of that academic year. I wasn’t the only one who left the training. I know of at least seven, maybe eight others. A group’s worth. All women. Since leaving, I’ve heard we’re called “problematic.”
This paper has taken years to write. Not because I lacked clarity about what happened, but because breaking cultural silence takes time. The very patterns I’m describing—disavowal, a distinctly Irish instinct of “whatever you say, say nothing” and the shame that keeps things unspoken—impact my ability to write.
When I think back, I wonder: what was so problematic? I attended this training with hope, curiosity, and deep vested interest in group analysis. But it was the not speaking that I could not tolerate.
The World We Train In
When I first wrote this paper in 2022, Russia had begun violently stripping Ukraine of sovereignty. We were still in the Covid-19 pandemic, which had made borders hypervisible. A genocide was soon to unfold in Gaza.
Therapy training occurs within this context—within a world where humans inflict violence on each other, where borders are enforced through force, where entire populations are disappeared. Yet in our training groups, when these contexts were raised—and some did try to speak them—they were often quickly contained or treated as
disruptions to the learning. This erasure of context is itself a colonial move; the pretence that therapeutic spaces exist in some neutral, apolitical realm where power doesn’t operate.
The Shape of Colonisation
I recognise the shape of colonisation—the same patterns appearing in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, in psychiatric systems and in therapeutic training. Colonisation moves through a consistent process: dehumanisation, disavowal, and the absence of shame.
This is not colonisation of land, though Ireland and India both know that violence intimately. This is colonisation of minds, bodies, and ways of knowing. It is the colonisation of subjectivity itself—the imposition of frameworks that determine whose pain is legitimate, whose knowledge counts and whose humanity is recognised.
First, dehumanisation: people are reduced to categories, diagnoses, “material” to be studied and managed. Their complexity is flattened into pathology. Their context is erased. In Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, women became “penitents” and “Magdalenes”—categories that justified their imprisonment. In psychiatric systems, I became a diagnosis— reduced to a label, watched through that lens and treated as a collection of symptoms rather than a person navigating impossible circumstances. In therapeutic training, those with lived experience become patient-like in the transference even when we are peers, trainees and future therapists. This is the colonisation of identity—the violent renaming of who someone is according to dominant frameworks of normal and pathological.
Second, disavowal: we know harm is happening, yet we look through it as though it is not there. We see suffering and call it “evidence.” We witness violence and call it “treatment.” We participate in erasure and call it “best practice. The first Magdalene Laundry in Ireland was founded in 1767 under British colonial rule. Ireland didn’t just inherit these institutions—it sustained them. Ireland sustained them—for 74 years after independence, 1922 to 1996, and they continued operating whilst society looked through them. Families knew where their daughters, sisters, and mothers were sent. The state funded these institutions. The church ran them. Yet collectively, we maintained they were not there—or if they were, they were necessary, beneficial even. In my own therapeutic groups in Ireland, we knew we were living through economic collapse, that many of us carried histories of gendered violence and that we were navigating a culture still processing institutional abuse. Yet none of this was named. The professionals knew. We knew. But we collectively agreed to locate all problems within our individual psyches. This is the colonisation of reality—the insistence that the oppressive context does not exist or does not matter.
Third, the absence of shame: institutions that should feel collective shame for harm instead celebrate their evolution. Professionals who should acknowledge complicity instead maintain composure. The shame that should belong to systems is transferred onto individuals—onto those who are pathologised, who “fail to be resilient,” who become “problematic.” In 2021—25 years after the last Magdalene Laundry closed—Ireland’s Taoiseach finally acknowledged that “all of society was complicit.” But where was the shame during those 74 years of operation? Where was the shame in the decades after they closed whilst survivors sought recognition? The shame was transferred onto the women imprisoned there—they carried it as stigma, as secrecy and as the belief that they had done something wrong. Similarly, in therapeutic training, when I could not tolerate pedagogies that dehumanised and silenced, the shame was placed on me. I was “too sensitive,” “not resilient enough,” “problematic.” The institutions felt no shame. The trainers maintained professional composure. The shame I was meant to carry was the price of naming what I witnessed. This is the colonisation of emotion—the displacement of collective responsibility onto individual bodies.
Irish-born psychoanalyst Michael O’Loughlin describes psychoanalysis as “fundamentally a colonising discipline” because it shapes subjectivity according to dominant cultural frameworks (O’Loughlin, 2020). This is what he means. Mental health systems colonise how we understand ourselves, what we are allowed to know about our own suffering and who has authority to name our experience.
This shape operated in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. It operates in psychiatric systems. It operates in therapeutic training. Until we interrupt this process—until we refuse dehumanisation, name disavowal, and reclaim shame where it belongs—nothing changes.
Who I Am
I am white, Irish artist, mother and inhabitant of Britain. I practise as an art psychotherapist and twenty years ago, I navigated psychiatric systems. I grew up in Ireland with connections to County Meath, Wicklow and Cavan, a border county between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
As an Irish person, I understand colonisation not as an abstract concept but as something lived in my bones, passed through generations, embedded in cultural silence. I know it through my pores—in the saying “whatever you say, say nothing”, in the institutional abuses that were hidden in plain sight, and in the disavowal that allowed whole populations of women to be imprisoned and erased whilst the nation looked away.
Borders define who belongs inside and who must remain outside. They determine whose movement is legitimate and whose is transgression. This position—always at the threshold, watching from the borderlands—has shaped everything I know about power, silence, and who gets to speak.
Audre Lorde wrote: “We have been socialised to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of the silence will choke us… it is not difference which immobilises us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.” (Lorde, 1977)
This paper is written for psychotherapists who are afraid to speak. It is a conscious choice not to write about the people I work with in therapy. Instead, I share reflections on my own encounters with systems of power. I will show you how the shape of colonisation appears across three border crossings—three moments where I encountered the same patterns of dehumanisation, disavowal, and displaced shame.
Part One: Three Border Crossings
First Crossing: Being a Patient
Almost twenty years ago, I crossed a border into psychiatric territory. I was given diagnoses, heavily medicated and eventually connected to group-based support in hospital, then in a therapeutic community. At the time, I felt relieved—professionals were naming what I was experiencing.
I didn’t yet understand that diagnosis creates borders. That once you cross into acute mental health patient territory, return is not guaranteed. My being here today was not guaranteed.
The groups I attended were populated by women and non-binary folx—carrying experiences of trauma, self-harm and violation. We were living through the economic collapse that followed the Celtic Tiger. It was about ten years after the last Magdalene Laundries closed. Yet in our therapeutic spaces, we did not discuss cultural issues, class,
sexuality, gender, colonial legacies or transgenerational trauma. The framework we were given located all problems within individual pathology. We were unwell and in need of curing.
Here was the shape of colonisation in action:
Dehumanisation—we became diagnoses, symptoms to be managed. Our complexity as people navigating economic collapse, cultural trauma, and gendered violence was flattened into pathology.
Disavowal—the professionals knew about the context we were living in. Yet these realities were never named. We collectively agreed to look through the context and focus solely on our individual “illness.”
Absence of shame—the systems felt no collective responsibility for our distress; instead, shame was transferred onto us for being “unwell.” We carried the shame for failing to cope with conditions designed to harm us.
This is what colonisation looks like in therapeutic practice. The systematic erasure of context. The insistence that your pain is a private, individual failure rather than a reasonable response to oppressive conditions. As Palestinian psychiatrist Dr Samah Jabr says: “What is sick, the context or the person?” (Goldhill, 2019)
Back then, I did not consciously know about Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries—institutions operating between 1922 and 1996 where women and girls who didn’t conform to Catholic standards were imprisoned, forced into unpaid
labour, and subjected to severe maltreatment. I didn’t know because I was cloaked by the same culture of disavowal that allowed these institutions to exist. This wasn’t simple ignorance. It was a collective turning away from what was happening in plain sight.
My feelings were not hidden from me—they were embedded in my behaviour. But I lacked safe spaces and language to express them meaningfully. One of the founding members of the Institute of Group Analysis, Patrick de Maré, articulated this precisely: “It is not the individual who is unconscious but the culture that does not allow the thought to be voiced” (De Maré, Piper, & Thompson, 1991, p.77).
The professionals involved in my care were living in the same culture. Their role was to restore me to a state where I would blend back into normative expectations. What was happening for me socially, culturally and politically wasn’t acknowledged. I moved forward carrying judgement, stigma and shame lodged deep in my body and mind.
Second Crossing: Training as Border Enforcement
After moving through psychiatric systems, I qualified and worked in a different career before eventually pursuing art psychotherapy. During training at Goldsmiths university, I still carried the mark of having crossed into psychiatric territory. I still identified with “unwell-ness”—when I wasn’t sick. No one questioned this medicalised framing. More significantly, no one acknowledged that my lived experience might constitute legitimate knowledge.
My peers seemed to inhabit the therapist role with ease. I was often pathologised and repositioned on the patient side of the border. Senior lecturers told me multiple times that “we are all lived experienced”—as if all experiences carry equal weight. For a time, this silenced me. I felt I was performing “therapist” wrong. I carried tremendous shame. I was colonising myself, learning to police my own thoughts and to question my own reality.
The pattern repeated:
Dehumanisation—my lived experience was acceptable only as “personal material” for therapy, not as legitimate professional knowledge. I was divided: the part of me that had been a patient remained patient, could never fully cross into therapist.
Disavowal—the trainers knew some of us carried psychiatric histories. But this knowledge could not be acknowledged as potentially valuable. We looked through it, pretended it wasn’t relevant to our capacity to practise.
Absence of shame—when I struggled with this split, the shame was mine alone. I was “too sensitive,” not professional enough and an imposter, failing to perform the role correctly. The training programme felt no shame for creating conditions that required us to erase parts of ourselves.
I completed my art psychotherapy training with distinctions. But I had not consciously integrated my personal and professional identities. The border remained.
But as an artist and art psychotherapist, I had art. Thankfully, unconscious processes within my artmaking acted as touchstones towards truth. The art was always listening—analytically. In my qualifying year, the only way I could accurately capture what the course felt like was to take photos as I waterboarded myself. (I did not know that’s what I was doing! This was pointed out several years later.) Some of these images found their way to Goldsmith’s University website. They have been there for about ten years now. In fairness, I could not see the link to torture, violence and colonisation at the time either.
There must be so many things that people on these trainings do not recognise until decades later.
Screenshot taken from Goldsmiths University Website, December 2025 – of me and my artwork.
This is how I arrived in India. Still carrying that shame. By now, I was at least semi-conscious of it. I was searching for a learning space where things might be different.
Third Crossing: India
Maybe it was madness—or hope—to think I could train as a group analyst in India.
It was a new course. This appealed to me. Because of Ireland and India’s shared colonial history, I expected deep understanding. I was searching for a learning community led by lived experience. But I was naive. I hadn’t realised how far the pathologising of human suffering has spread globally.
I joined imagining a therapeutic community. That’s not what I encountered. Instead, it echoed the course in London. From what I know of Irish and other EU group analytic trainings, India’s course likely echoes them too. Why are these international courses replicated so faithfully?
Group analysis is a highly regarded profession. I imagined that when themes like Islamophobia, casteism, racism, ableism emerged, we’d support each other to think and be together. Groups form microcosms of wider society, so these issues would inevitably appear in our small groups, large groups, in the papers we read, and in what and how we learned.
I became an obstacle to learning. Not consciously or deliberately. My body simply couldn’t tolerate certain ways of learning—the othering, the tones, the dehumanising and the silencing. For some of us, group analysis is already a way of being, an innate way of sensing the world. When we sense colonial patterns of injustice, we respond.
The BPD Lecture: The Shape Made Visible
Before the lecture, we were asked to read a 1999 paper on borderline personality disorder from an attachment perspective. The timing was significant: this was our first block weekend after returning from Nepal, with no time to process the transitions we’d just navigated.
The lecture positioned those with BPD diagnoses as a category apart—a “them” to be studied and managed. The framework located pathology firmly within individuals, particularly focusing on maternal relationships. For those of us carrying direct lived experience of psychiatric diagnosis, the framing was deeply problematic. The response in the room was telling: silence from those with lived experience, followed by noticeable absences.
The shape again, unmistakable:
Dehumanisation—people reduced to a diagnostic category to be studied and managed. “BPD” became an object of clinical fascination rather than recognition of human suffering in context.
Disavowal—the lecture proceeded as though no one in the room carried lived experience of being pathologised. Though some of us sat there holding that knowledge in our bodies, it could not be spoken. We were expected to participate in discussing “them” whilst our own experience remained invisible.
Absence of shame—no acknowledgement that this pedagogical approach might cause harm, might silence voices and might replicate the very dynamics that traumatise. The shame was on us for being “unable to tolerate” the learning and not on the training for creating intolerable conditions.
This is epistemicide in action: the systematic destruction of certain ways of knowing. Our embodied knowledge of what it means to be pathologised could be acknowledged and mined as “material for personal therapy,” but it could not cross the threshold into legitimate professional knowledge. Meanwhile, participants with indirect experience— family members or clients they found challenging—were eager to learn “how to work with BPD.” This approach wasn’t serving anyone well.
The dynamic reminded me of patterns I recognised from Irish history—the categorisation and institutional management of women deemed problematic and the collective silencing that enabled harm. I had travelled to India hoping for something different, but the same shape was present.
Part Two: Understanding the Pattern
What Ireland Taught Me About Institutional Silence
On the island of Ireland, the veiling of harm under cultures of silence and disavowal is a well-versed process. Operating between 1922 and 1996, Magdalene laundries were part of Ireland’s network of “shame industrial complexes” (Hogan 2019). Church run and state funded, they housed women and girls—some as young as 12—who did not conform to Catholic standards. These women were imprisoned, forced into unpaid labour, subjected to severe maltreatment. Many bore the social stigma for crimes of rape and incest committed against them. They had done nothing wrong. They had simply crossed invisible borders of acceptable femininity. The punishment was exile within their own country. Hidden away. Erased. Made to not exist.
In January 2021, Ireland’s Taoiseach Micheál Martin issued an apology:
“We treated women exceptionally badly. We treated their children exceptionally badly… As a society we embraced judgementalism, moral certainty a perverse religious and control which was so damaging… what is so striking is the absence of basic kindness… One hard truth in all of this is that all of society was complicit in it” (Martin, 2021).
The Taoiseach names it: the absence of basic kindness is dehumanisation. The judgementalism and moral certainty that allowed harm to continue is disavowal. And his acknowledgement arrives in 2021—decades after the harm— because shame was absent when it should have driven action.
I did not know this history because I was living inside its aftermath. The same mechanisms that kept the Magdalene Laundries invisible—dehumanisation, disavowal, and the absence of shame—are the mechanisms I encountered in
psychiatric systems and therapy trainings. The authors of Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice explain how Ireland’s respectable classes deployed “disavowal as a strategy” to maintain supremacy and protect “the foundations of respectability and control of knowledge on which they assume and enact their superior power” (McGettrick, O’Donnell, O’Rourke, Smith, & Steed, 2021, p.113).
Disavowal is not the same as not knowing. It is knowing and refusing to acknowledge. Seeing and looking through, as though something is not there. As James Baldwin wrote: “Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have” (Baldwin, 1972). But disavowal allied with power is even more dangerous. Because it carries the additional violence of conscious refusal.
The Pattern Repeats
‘The Best of Times?’ report on the social impact of the Celtic Tiger concludes that the economic boom’s benefits outweighed any damage to quality of life (ESRI, 2007). The report fails to account for: structural barriers preventing equitable access to prosperity, harm inflicted on those who didn’t conform to conservative norms, how many people were pathologised and medicated, Ireland’s treatment of refugees seeking asylum (documented by Melatu Uche Okorie in This Hostel Life, 2019), and exploitation of labour in countries with lower working standards.
So much disavowal. And where is the shame?
This pattern—declaring progress whilst disappearing those who paid the price—is precisely what I encountered in therapy trainings. Where the profession celebrates its evolution whilst continuing to extract knowledge from marginalised bodies without acknowledgement.
Conversations After Leaving
Recently I met several people still involved with group analytic training in India. One person told me that qualifying as a group analyst was about resilience. Oh—so I wasn’t resilient enough to withstand… what? If we know there is harm within a culture, it isn’t resilience to collude. To be the silent observer and not act makes you complicit. That’s not resilience. It’s performance.
Another person said: “I heard you are saying the course colonised you. What exactly do you think you know about casteism?” I said, “I didn’t know much about casteism. I didn’t grow up in India. I don’t know. But I could feel how much was being unspoken. I could see the patterns.” Then they explained how difficult it was for them to speak on the course about their caste. Their tone softened as they began to tell a little bit of their story.
Working group analytically goes far beyond the piece of paper that says you qualify. It’s in authentic dialogue through groups that we discover who we are. I recognised the shape of colonisation because I know it intimately. They recognised it too.
Part Three: The Profession’s Complicity
What Shame Does
At the 2021 landmark event Decolonising Group Analysis: What are we fighting for?, organisers cited Bell Hooks: “…we all have the capacity to act in ways that oppress, dominate, wound (whether or not that power is institutionalised). It is necessary to remember that it is first the potential oppressor within that we must resist—the potential victim within that we must rescue—otherwise we cannot hope for an end to domination, for liberation” (Hooks, 1984).
In training to be an art psychotherapist, and then attempting to train as a group analyst, I went to war with my own mind. Colonising myself. I muted my authentic voice. I complied. I silenced myself. I internalised the borders, made them my own and policed myself. I am ashamed that I knowingly censored myself in pursuit of professional acceptance. That I participated in border enforcement—on myself and, inevitably, on others.
In The Abolitionists Handbook, Patrisse Cullors explains how “Whole groups of people in our culture deny harm is associated with that harm they participated in” and stresses that “we practice accountability so we can break cycles of harm caused in our families and communities” (Cullors, 2021, pp.182-197). Holding myself accountable is what decolonising work looks like.
The Profession’s Shame
Therapists practise and train within the same neoliberal culture that medicalises and stigmatises human responses to harmful contexts—that pathologises natural reactions to what humans are doing to each other. That draws borders between normal and pathological.
We enact the shape: we dehumanise by turning people into “clinical material.” We practise disavowal by writing about vulnerable people without centring their voices or acknowledging our stakes. We demonstrate the absence of shame by continuing these practices whilst calling ourselves ethical, evidence-based and progressive.
As Audre Lorde wrote: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde, 1984). We have dressed up the extraction and control in the language of ethics and evidence. But the colonial logic remains unchanged.
It has become standard practice for therapists to write about their work without clearly stating relevant aspects of their own lived experiences, motivations and political positions. This unmarked position—the invisible expert who observes and interprets without acknowledging their own stakes—is itself a position of power.
What happens when children or young people therapists have written about grow older and read the therapists publications? Or what about when adults with limited capacity regain or develop capacity? Even if consent has been provided in one moment – do therapists consider potential harm? Do you think about how they might feel reflecting on the power differential and the therapist’s narrative authority over their subject’s experience? The people you work with are not subjects. They are human. They will not forget you. But the profession teaches us to see them as material. Clinical material, research material and teaching material.
Why has it become standard practice for therapists to publish about group work without co-writing with or centring the voices of the people they discuss? Is it truly radical to suggest that therapists share platforms so people can speak authentically or lead research?
Or does the suggestion itself reveal how deeply invested we are in maintaining our monopoly on interpretation? Group analyst Christopher Scanlon and researcher John Adlam describe how “divisions, fear, suspicion and toxic projections” have become normalised. They ask whether those of us “sitting pretty upon the proceeds of conquest, colonisation and domination” are unwilling to relinquish privilege and “ill-gotten gains” (Scanlon & Adlam, 2022, p.8).
The Cost of Silence
Within cultures of disavowal and silence, the most vulnerable face highest risk of becoming collateral damage—just as they did in the Magdalene Laundries and just as they do in wars and genocides we pretend exist outside our training rooms.
The pattern repeats: dehumanisation allows us to see suffering as data. Disavowal allows us to extract knowledge whilst denying harm. The absence of shame allows us to build careers on others’ pain.
On 14th March 2022, educator in anti-oppression therapeutic praxis Sage Stephanou wrote: “Who’s afforded praise when naming inequality, violence and harm? Who is afforded credit and respect by diluting and regurgitating the words of marginalised people? Whose reflections are palatable, communicated calmly and ‘compassionately’? Respectability politics is white supremacist” (Stephanou, 2022).
The gap in epistemic knowledge has grown so large that pain and suffering—including the mental distress created by what humans do to each other—can be easily exploited in publications for professional advancement. This is the hostile environment in our field: the colonisation of knowledge and capitalising on inequality, dressed up as
‘evidencing practice’ and social justice. This appropriation of knowledge gained from someone else’s suffering is repetition of injustice. It is the epitome of colonial politics.
Tell your own story. Your reality is valid. It’s not a defence or troublemaking. It’s knowledge.
Recognising Our Own Shame
I did not realise until recently that I was mistaking illusions of professional composure in my peers for what was actually suppression of shame combined with intense pressure to succeed. The training environment can be competitive and unforgiving. If you can’t keep up—academically or if you experience a crisis—the group won’t wait. You might be dropped. This steamrolling instead of circling is its own form of violence.
The shape protects itself: we dehumanise those who struggle by calling them “not resilient enough.” We practise disavowal by pretending training exists outside structures of harm. We maintain the absence of shame by never questioning what these institutions demand we become.
In Dr Dwight Turner’s words, “Politically driven assimilation” allows the status quo to persist (Turner, 2021, p.53). It serves therapists’ professional interests not to examine their shame.
Literature on group therapists’ shame is sparse. Group analyst Jerome Gans points out “there is a basic human tendency to bypass shame because of its noxiousness and its tendency to feed upon itself… We are ashamed of feeling shame” (Gans, 1989, p.22). He argues: “As group leaders we can best overcome our patients’ resistance to dealing with their shame through our willingness to acknowledge, bear and work through our own” (p.22).
To mitigate shame, Gans says therapists must replace “grandiose professional ego-ideals” with “realistic professional ego-ideals” that “accept the limits of our power, knowledge and love” (pp.35-37). “In the process we unburden our patients who pay a substantial price for our narcissism and defences against the shame it evokes” (p.37).
From an Irish perspective, psychoanalyst Michael O’Loughlin wrote in the Irish Times that “We need to be more ashamed of ourselves” (O’Loughlin, 2016). He questioned why shame remains so taboo in Irish society. He concluded: “it’s clear we sorely need some kind of psychotherapy for the entire country, to get at the deep roots of our shame” (O’Loughlin, 2016).
The same could be said for therapists and our trainings.
Part Four: A Different Way Forward
Hosting an art psychotherapy group supervised through the diploma course with Group Analysis India, I chose not to position myself as an all-knowing authority standing safely behind professional borders. I am not a blank canvas. I refuse to perform that dehumanising stance.
When a group member asked whether I had navigated psychiatric systems, I said yes – without providing detail. I named my border crossing. They told me they could tell by how I spoke. That I didn’t sound like someone relying purely on “academic knowledge.” That my tone carried “respect” and was “non-judgemental” in a way that suggested I knew something about emotional distress from the inside. As the group continued, I experienced an unexpected moment that felt like falling through air. It wasn’t frightening. It was trust. I was trusting the group and the process—in the role of group psychotherapist. Authentically, the group carried on.
This is what decolonised practice feels like. Not the performance of professional authority from behind fortified borders, but the risk of mutual encounter in borderlands. Not the extraction of knowledge from those we work with, but the acknowledgement that we hold knowledge the group needs. Not the maintenance of professional boundaries that protect comfort and superiority, but the willingness to be changed by what we witness and learn.
Decolonised practice interrupts the shape: it refuses dehumanisation by honouring full humanity—mine as the group psychotherapist holding the space and theirs as people attending the group. It names disavowal rather than participating in it. It reclaims shame where it belongs—not on individuals for their suffering, but on systems and
professionals for complicity in harm. Not pretending we exist outside the world where humans harm each other, but acknowledging we are implicated in it.
Conclusion: Breaking the Silence
My first draft was rejected whilst I was on the course. I was told that making all of these links at once was “too much.” I was encouraged to “be more humble.” Several years have passed and I have circled back to this original draft.
In this paper, I have included things that were said to me by competent psychotherapists, group analysts in training and now qualified group analysts. I am doing this to prompt and deepen the dialogue—in an open way. In the future, I sincerely hope that I will read or hear about—why letting foreigners in was such a problem? Why resilience and harm within cultures was defining the border of who qualifies and who does not? I hope to hear more about what it was like to train while remaining silent about deeply significant themes. Also, for those that left—why did you leave? What was the catalyst?
Whatever needs to be said, I look forward to continuing the conversation on the outside—where we are beyond the borders and limitations of training.
The question becomes: who will respond? What becomes possible when we stop performing resilience and start naming complicity? When we interrupt the shape of colonisation—refuse dehumanisation, call out disavowal, and insist that shame belongs to systems that harm, not to individuals who name that harm?
These themes are not problems to be solved in a single paper. They are ongoing work. The work is to refuse dehumanisation in every interaction. To call out disavowal wherever we see it. To reclaim shame and place it where it belongs—on institutions and professionals who perpetuate harm whilst claiming to heal.
Change requires more than individual reflection. It demands that we listen to those who left alongside those who stayed. It requires us to interrogate why “being too much” is grounds for exclusion when someone names what they see. It means accepting that some knowledge cannot be contained within the boundaries of professional training—it must transform those boundaries entirely.
Maybe I will always be the foreign voice. But I am no longer speaking alone. The conversation continues and the work is to ensure that the next generation doesn’t have to choose between authenticity and belonging. Between their lived experience and professional legitimacy.
I recognise the shape of colonisation and I hope now you do too.
The shovel is there. The ground is waiting. Who will pick it up so we can get to work?
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