08/07/2025
As a white therapist, I’m always learning about my privilege and how it shapes the work I do. As someone who is also chronically ill and neurodivergent, I recognise that while I experience marginalisation, it’s not the same as the experiences of other communities whose histories and ways of being have been systemically excluded or overlooked.
These books have been shaping my practice by helping me move away from narrow, Western ideas of therapy and towards approaches that are relational, community-centred, and grounded in lived experience.
Here’s what’s on the shelf right now:
📖 Yarning with a Purpose – A First Nations narrative practice text that centres community-led healing and deep listening through yarning.
📖 Narrative Therapy: Reflections on Gender, Culture and Justice – A powerful collection of therapeutic work that disrupts dominant discourses and centres culture, gender, and structural justice, including q***r and trans affirming practices.
📖 Embracing Neurodiversity with the Safe House Framework – A neuroaffirming guide to creating safe, inclusive care for neurodivergent people, developed by an autistic clinical psychologist.
📖 Traditional Healers of Central Australia: Ngangkari – A powerful collection of stories from Aboriginal Ngangkari (healers), sharing cultural and spiritual approaches to health, healing, and wellbeing in the Central Desert.
📖 How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color – A sharp, vital unpacking of how mainstream feminism has excluded and harmed women of colour.
📖 Justice-Doing at the Intersections of Power by Vikki Reynolds – A must-read for therapists, support workers, and change-makers navigating burnout, solidarity, and ethical practice; it includes reflection on q***r justice as part of a wider justice-doing lens.
These books continue to remind me that therapy can be a space for solidarity, resistance, and repair. 🧡
📚 What’s on your reading list this NAIDOC Week?
