I have found myself thinking about Dr Jason Arday a great deal and wondering why it has taken me so long to write about him. That delay has become part of my reflection. I think I have been waiting for the right words and worrying about saying the wrong thing, about taking up space in a conversation that is not mine, or speaking from a position that could never fully understand his lived experience. At the same time, I have started to question whether, as therapists, our desire to be thoughtful and reflective can sometimes become a way of staying safely silent. Silence can protect us from discomfort, but it can also become a position.
Writing this has required me to begin with myself. I am a therapist of Cypriot heritage, and my cultural identity has shaped how I understand family, migration, belonging and difference. There is something familiar to me in the experience of being between cultures and carrying a history that does not always fit neatly into the dominant narrative. My Cypriot identity has given me an awareness of what it can feel like to be culturally different and how belonging can be more complicated than it first appears. At the same time, I have had to sit with the fact that experiencing cultural differences, does not mean experiencing racism in the same way as a Black person. I can recognise aspects of otherness in my own story whilst also recognising that I have benefited from whiteness and from systems that have made space for me. Both things can be true at the same time.
This has been one of the most uncomfortable and important parts of my reflection on Dr Jason Arday. Not because our experiences are the same, because they are not, but because his story has made me look more honestly at my own position. I have benefited from education, professional recognition and access to institutions that are not equally accessible to everyone. I have built a professional identity within systems that I also know can reproduce inequality. Privilege can be uncomfortable to acknowledge because it can be misunderstood as meaning that life has been easy. It does not. It asks us to recognise where aspects of who we are may have afforded us access, safety, credibility or belonging that others have not been given. As therapists, I think we have a responsibility to sit with that complexity rather than move quickly away from it.
Our clients do not leave racism, discrimination, class, culture, migration or oppression at the therapy room door. These experiences shape how people understand themselves and the world around them. Neither do we. We enter the room with our own identities, assumptions, privileges and blind spots. This makes the idea of therapeutic neutrality complicated for me. In fact, for me, therapeutic neutrality does not exist.
If we work with the psychological consequences of oppression, can our responsibility really end with helping people cope with it? Sometimes the person does not need to become more resilient. Sometimes the environment needs to become less oppressive. This is why I increasingly believe that therapists have a duty both inside and outside the therapy room to fight the good fight. Not to become saviours and not to speak for our clients, but to use whatever position we have responsibly. To challenge discrimination, question our institutions and notice whose voices are missing. To ask who is believed, who is labelled difficult, who is given another opportunity and who is expected simply to endure.
This is where reflection needs to become action. As therapists, we have a responsibility to look beyond the individual and towards the systems in which people live, work and seek support. We need to ask ourselves what role we play in creating, maintaining or challenging those systems. Anti-oppressive practice cannot simply sit within our language or our professional values, it has to be visible in what we do.
That means being willing to have difficult conversations about race, culture, class, disability, gender, sexuality and power. It means creating spaces where people can speak about experiences of oppression, without having to first prove that those experiences are real. It means being curious about whose voices are missing and asking why? It means looking at who has access to our profession, who is represented within it, who is listened to and who is given opportunities to progress. It also means looking closer to home. What happens in our supervision rooms? What language do we use when talking about clients? Whose behaviour do we describe as challenging? Whose distress do we pathologise? Who are we more likely to believe? What assumptions are we making about families, culture, communication or identity? Which policies are we accepting because they are familiar, rather than questioning whether they are fair?
These questions can be uncomfortable however discomfort is not necessarily something to avoid but it can be the beginning of change. We need to create professional spaces, where people can challenge one another, without the conversation immediately becoming about defensiveness. We need to be able to hear that something we have said, believed or participated in, has caused harm without making our own discomfort the centre of the conversation. We need to develop the capacity to listen, reflect, repair and change.
This is also where privilege becomes particularly important. Privilege is not simply something to acknowledge within ourselves. It is something we can use. If we have access to professional spaces, influence within organisations or a voice that is more readily heard, then we have an opportunity to use that position to challenge exclusion rather than reproduce it. We do not need to speak for others. We can use our own position, to make more room for others to speak.
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric has stayed with me because of the way she writes about witnessing. She asks the reader to remain present with experiences of racism that they may not have lived themselves. There is something powerful in that position. To witness is to acknowledge that something is happening, even when it is not happening to us. But witnessing cannot be the end point. If we see something, understand something and recognise something as harmful, then we have to ask what comes next.
For therapists, I think that means moving from witnessing to responsibility. It means creating anti-oppressive systems, rather than simply supporting people who have been harmed by oppressive ones, making space for dialogue, not just when something goes wrong, but as an ongoing part of how we work. Let’s be willing to examine the structures we benefit from and to ask whether those structures are serving everyone equally?
This is not about being perfect, although it is about being willing to remain accountable. Reflection should not simply make us better at understanding. But maybe it’s changing something about how we act. Where privilege becomes responsibility, could this be the invitation Dr Arday’s story leaves with us? Not simply to witness, not simply to reflect, but to ask what we are going to do with what we now see?
The question is no longer whether we have the right words. It is whether we are willing to use them…
