When the Institution Harms: Repair Through a Justice Lens

THIS WORKSHOP IS FOR GLOBAL MAJORITY TRAINEES AND THERAPISTS ONLY. FUTURE WORKSHOPS WILL BE OPEN TO EVERYONE.

Counselling and psychotherapy training institutions often present a paradox, they market teaching care, relational depth and ethical practice while running internal systems that prioritise institutional protection. Complaints procedures, grievance frameworks, and fitness-to-practise processes are frequently designed to manage risk to the organisation and not to repair harm to students. When harm occurs during training, students can be pushed into navigating processes that reproduce the original injury through minimisation, procedural fog, confidentiality pressure, delay, and retaliation risk. Students frequently find themselves moving through systems that were never built with their well-being in mind, leaving them unsupported and further harmed. For Black students and other students of the Global Majority, disabled students, queer and trans students, and students navigating migration, class precarity, this isn’t an exception. It’s a predictable outcome of how institutions preserve power.

As Sara Ahmed tells us: “It is the people who have more need to complain who are more likely to be stigmatised as troublemakers.” (Ahmed, 2025, pp3)

This workshop names the central dilemma, the gap between institutional rhetoric and institutional reality as a harm pathway, not an administrative inconvenience. We will interrogate why conventional redress so often fails students from marginalised intersectional identities. We will also sit with critiques of repair, when “moving forward” becomes a tool for erasure of what happened, and how transformative justice frameworks can shift the frame.

Drawing on Beverly Engel’s three components of meaningful apology, we will build a practical, student-authored model of repair and accountability. Participants will move into small group work that is organised around Engel’s three R’s of apology and repair:

• Regret: What does it mean for an institution to genuinely acknowledge harm? What does acknowledgement look like when it is not performative
• Responsibility: What does accountability look like in practice. Who holds responsibility? And to whom?
• Remedy: What would actually make things different? What does repair look like beyond apology? What do students impacted need? Who gets to decide?

Each group will get to develop and imagine what repair can look like from where they stand. Participants will leave having collectively built a student authored model of institutional Repair and Accountability Blueprint they can take back to training contexts.

THIS WORKSHOP IS FOR GLOBAL MAJORITY TRAINEES AND THERAPISTS ONLY 

Workshop led by:

Dr Eiman Hussein:

I am an integrative relational psychotherapist, supervisor, educator, occasional writer, and poetry-maker. I was born in Sudan and now live in the UK, and I hold many intersections and complexities that come with movement, memory, Blackness, and colonial histories. My pronouns are she/her. A Black feminist at heart.

I am a senior tutor at Headstrong Academy, where I teach on the Level 5 Diploma in Psychotherapeutic Counselling. I hold a background rooted in medicine and public health, and over sixteen years of experience in the charity and NGO sector, working on women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. My work has mainly centred on anti-FGM advocacy and trauma-informed care.

My therapeutic, supervisory, and educational practice is grounded in an ethos of anti-oppressive praxis, interweaving Black feminist thought, care-making, and a commitment to social justice. This is work that recognises the embodied impact of colonial and systemic injustices, and allows space for these stories to unfold through care and the liberatory potential within the therapeutic.

I am also deeply engaged in creative, curatorial, and archival practice, honouring my late father’s legacy and work in partnership with King’s College London.

My experience has taught me that harm is never only personal. It is also embodied, historical, institutional, and political. This workshop matters to me because I care deeply about what happens during /with /and after harm, especially when people seek justice and are met with process, disbelief, silence, or institutional self-protection. I want to hold spaces where truth can breathe, where repair is not rushed or performed, and where care, responsibility, dignity, and change can be imagined.

And

Dr. Anne-Sophie Bammens: I am a Counselling Psychologist and the Founder-Director of Headstrong Counselling. Over the past seven years, Headstrong Counselling has delivered more than 200,000 counselling sessions across the UK and has supported over 1,500 trainee counsellors on placement, from Level 4 students through to doctoral trainees. During this time, I heard many trainees share their experiences of harm within counselling and psychotherapy training, particularly experiences of racial harm, exclusion, marginalisation, and institutional injustice. Alongside colleagues, we have often found ourselves challenging training institutions where concerns about fairness and discrimination had arisen.

These experiences became one of the driving forces behind establishing Headstrong Academy in 2024. I wanted to create a learning environment where conversations about difference, race, power, identity, and institutional harm could be engaged with; where students could examine both the strengths and shortcomings of our profession; and where dialogue and challenge were encouraged. What began with an initial cohort of six students has grown into a learning community of more than 300 students across advanced counselling diplomas, supervision diplomas, and couples counselling training programmes.

As a white practitioner and Founder-Director of a training institution, my contribution to this work includes reflecting critically on the role of institutions, accountability, allyship, and the responsibilities of those in positions of power when harm occurs. I am interested in how we move beyond defensiveness and towards meaningful dialogue about repair and change within our profession.