MCEFT warmly invites you to take some time out from your working week to explore Anti-Oppressive Practice, part of our continuing theme in working with marginalised groups.
Dr Gávi and Phoenix are founding co-facilitators for the Honouring Diversity, Examining Privilege, and Challenging Oppression (HDEPCO) ACEFT Peer Development Group.

This session is being offered by and for EFT practitioners to advance ICEEFT’s international efforts to increase awareness and skills in dealing with systemic oppression, marginalisation, and discrimination. Anti-oppressive practice (AOP) is an approach to psychotherapy and counselling that treats advocacy as a professional responsibility of all therapists. This approach moves beyond lip service and token gestures, asking those in the psychotherapeutic community to take actions toward establishing cultural safety, promoting social justice, positioning ourselves and our privilege within the context of our lived experiences instead of adopting a supposedly ‘neutral’ stance, and challenging oppressive power structures within and beyond our professional networks. The Anti-Oppressive Practice (AOP) framework goes beyond the limitations of ‘diversity positive’, ‘affirmative’, and ‘person-centred’ approaches. AOP models prioritise cultural humility over notions of ‘cultural competence’, emphasise the need for critical self-reflection and accountability, and challenge the privileged notion that therapist ‘neutrality’ increases safety.

This session will introduce EFT practitioners to the core principles and micro-skills of AOP, such as positioning, acknowledging and addressing privilege, critical self-reflection, institutional accountability, and what it means in an EFT context to treat therapy participants and their communities as ‘experts’.

Dr Gávi (he/him) and Phoenix (she/her) will explore examples from our therapeutic work of applying AOP to EFT practice. We will explain some core needs of people with lived experience of systemic oppression and how integrating AOP with core aspects of EFT practice can improve therapists’ skills in identifying and meeting these needs. This session will provide an introductory ‘taster’ inviting EFT practitioners into AOP. EFT therapists who wish to apply this model in practice are encouraged to enrol in the extended AOP clinical training courses offered by Dr Gávi and Phoenix.

Event Details:

Date:  Monday 26 July 2021
Time: 1.30pm-4.30pm (30 minute break at 3.00pm for afternoon tea)
Location: Online in the MCEFT Zoom Room
Ticket Price: $55.00 Non Members
(Members receive a 20% discount on checkout- when prompted, enter coupon code “Member”)
Contact: Sue Coonan 0411 696 496  |  Linda Murrow 0421 999 839

Dr Gávi Ansara (He/him) (PhD Psychol, MCouns) is a psychotherapist, clinical educator, and community activist living on sovereign Boon Wurrung land. Gávi has 20 years of international Anti-Oppressive Practice alongside people and communities with marginalised lived experiences. Dr Gávi served as Guest Editor for a special issue on anti-oppressive practice in counselling and psychotherapy in the Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia. He is an AAFT-Accredited Clinical Supervisor, AAFT-registered Clinical Family Therapist, PACFA-registered Clinical Psychotherapist and Relationship Counsellor, and Pink Therapy Advanced Accredited Gender, Sex, Sexuality, and Relationships Diversities Therapist (AAGSRDT). He also holds specialist qualifications in trauma, grief and loss, paediatric palliative care, youth and refugee mental health, international and cross-cultural health, and African-centred approaches to African Studies. Gávi is a hybrid polycultural man of faith who grew up in urban and rural China, unceded Eora land, and elsewhere. His work is informed by lived experience of disability, poverty, homelessness, racist violence, and gender, body, kinship, and sexuality oppression. He strives toward cultural humility regarding his literacy, verbal, allistic, binary gender, sighted, and non-Aboriginal privilege in an allistic-centric, ableist, binarising, colonising, and racist society. Gávi serves as Convenor of PACFA’s Diversity in Gender, Body, Kinship, and Sexuality Leadership Group and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Transgender Health. He received the American Psychological Association’s Transgender Research Award for original, significant research, the UK Higher Education Academy’s National Psychology Postgraduate Teaching Award for excellence in teaching psychology, and the University of Surrey Vice Chancellor’s Alumni Achievement Award for outstanding contributions to standards and policies in international human rights and social justice.

Phoenix (She/her) (MCouns, Grad Dip Psych, B Biomed Sci Hons) is an openly queer and neurodivergent early-career psychotherapist with a background in research neuroscience. Phoenix has lived experience of prejudice and discrimination against non-normative relationship styles, and she also carries white, cis, able-bodied, verbal, literate, middle-class, and educational privilege. These intersections have taught her the necessity for clinicians to acknowledge, examine, and address their own axes of both privilege and oppression to inform and enhance their clinical work, especially with people who have lived experience of marginalisation, discrimination, and oppression. She is currently undertaking a formal mentorship in anti-oppressive practice and is passionate about working toward meaningful change within the psychotherapy profession. She holds a particular interest in practicing EFT within an anti-oppressive framework to best support the attachment and safety needs of people with lived experience of marginalisation.

Dr Gávi and Phoenix’s clinical work centres and prioritises people who are often pathologised, invalidated, or erased by therapists because of their ways of being, living, and loving. This includes, but is not limited to, people who have neurodivergent, disability, asylum seeking, racialised, colonised, colourised, BDSM/kink, multi-partnered, asexual, aromantic, transgender, intersex, bisexual, pansexual, queer, lesbian, and gay lived experiences, as well as many people with lived experiences for which these English terms are inadequate