Cultural safety and countertransference
Webinar · South African College of Applied Psychology (SACAP) · December 2021 · 1 hr 37 min
Many of us became practitioners because we wanted to support people who struggle the way we once did. There is nothing wrong with that motivation, but working in a community you belong to can be tricky. In this webinar from SACAP's Practice Dialogue series, Rahim explores cultural safety and countertransference for practitioners working within LGBTQIA+ and other communities of belonging.
Rahim traces cultural safety to Indigenous and Māori health and education settings, where it means recognizing the histories behind inequality, tolerating not knowing and setting professional expertise aside. Clients increasingly look for practitioners with shared lived experience, which spares them from educating the therapist. Drawing on Jonathan Shedler, he describes transference as the client's old templates and expectations coming alive in the relationship. It is central to the work, not a distraction. Countertransference is always present, not only when it is negative. His examples include a supervisee who promised a severely neglected client homemade cookies and then forgot, unknowingly re-enacting deprivation, and quieter signs such as bending the frame for a weekend session.
The heart of the session is five practitioner cases, with participants suggesting supervision questions in the chat. A queer therapist over-emphasizes neutrality with a young woman praying to become straight, and the client leaves. Here Rahim asks what the client might have been recruiting the therapist to act out. A therapist who is a survivor of intimate partner violence lectures a new mother to leave her husband, raising questions about over-identification and urgency felt on the client's behalf.
In the third case, a Muslim school social worker comes down hard on a student who removes her hijab at school. Rahim reads this as being trapped in one's own path to survival and in the burden of representing a community. In the fourth, a Black queer therapist feels deflated when a non-binary client describes a humiliating circumcision rite that he himself experienced positively. Rahim names this as grief and shame on recognizing one's own privilege. Along the way he shares his own experience as a queer Muslim therapist with a client who challenged whether he could be both.
The final case concerns a Black woman in a social justice practice who receives mostly Black referrals and is more tired, and earns less, than her colleagues. Rahim explores the weight of bicultural, bilingual work, guilt about turning people away, resentment at being pigeonholed, and the reassurance that specialized depth has real value. He closes by recommending further reading on privilege in psychotherapy, cultural safety and contemporary psychodynamic therapy.
What it covers
- Cultural safety
- Transference and countertransference
- Over-identification
- Self-disclosure in shared communities
- Burnout and specialized practice
- Supervision strategies
Related on this site
Archived record: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19037447
