THE

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POLITICIZED

PRACTITIONER™

CLINICAL & ORGANIZATIONAL CONSULTING

Anti-oppressive, psychodynamically informed psychotherapy, supervision, and consulting for clinicians, teams, and queer communities.

Who is The Politicized

Practitioner™?

I'm Rahim Thawer, an anti-oppressive therapist in Toronto, clinical educator, and organizational consultant. I work with patients, therapists, clinics, and organizations to bring political clarity into mental health practice. The goal is care that is safer, more honest, and more effective for people navigating the sharp edges of power, race, gender, and desire.

Here you'll find clinical tools for practitioners, community-centered resources for patients, and consulting services that bridge the personal and the political.

What’s so political

about practice?

Therapy is never just private work. What shows up between a clinician and a client is shaped by laws, institutions, the distribution of resources, and social meanings attached to race, gender, class, sexuality, and desire. When those forces go unnamed, clinical decisions — what we notice, what we diagnose, how we interpret behavior, whether we advocate — default to the status quo.

WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE IN EVERYDAY WORK

• Material Conditions & Policy Clients' distress is often bound up with housing, income, criminalization, or health-policy decisions. A safety plan only goes so far when structural barriers remain. (See client vignettes in On Being a Politicized Practitioner).

• Identity and Power
Race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, and disability change how people are treated by services, employers, and the law. They also shape how clinicians' countertransference shows up in the room.

• Diagnosis, Language, and Pathologizing
Labels carry moral and political weight. Who gets described as "difficult" or "noncompliant"? Who is assumed to be making bad choices? These are decisions with political consequences.

• Transference & Countertransference as Political Work
A client's anger at government policy, a family's shame about sexuality, or a coworker's microaggression are clinical material and political signals. They shape what is safe to say, how power moves in the room, and what clinicians must hold.

• Workplace Culture & Ethics
Clinical practice exists inside organizations that hire, fire, fund, and set scope-of-practice rules. Ethical practice often requires reading those organizational politics and acting accordingly.

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HOW I WORK WITH THIS QUESTION

I help clinicians and organizations translate political clarity into clinical craft: reflective supervision about countertransference, case formulations that include systems and policy factors, interventions that hold both symptom relief and structural realities, and team-level assessments that produce safer services.

WHY IT MATTERS

Naming the political dimensions of care improves clinical accuracy, protects clients from retraumatizing practices, and helps clinicians make ethical choices that don't reproduce harm. It makes therapy safer and more useful for the people most affected by injustice.