Ellis J Johnson

In this episode, Dr Peter Blundell interviews Ellis J. Johnson.

Ellis is a qualified Psychodynamic Psychotherapeutic Counsellor and a queer, trans man of colour. He delivers training to counsellors in working affirmatively around gender and also delivers training in trans awareness, and anti-racist practice, to organisations around the country and internationally. Ellis describes his work as "explorative and largely non-directive" and influenced by spirituality and by Black feminism, taking into account how intersecting oppressive structures in society (and throughout history) can harm our mental, spiritual and physical health. His work is affirmative of gender, sexuality and relationship diversity (e.g. non-monogamy, poly, kink), as well as being sex-worker affirmative.

You can find details on Eliss' work on his website - https://www.transcounselling.co.uk/ 
To find out more about the training he delivers go here - https://www.transcounselling.co.uk/general-5

Dr Peter Blundell's details
Social Media: @drpeterblundell
Website: www.peterblundell.com 

#TherapistsConnect is a platform for connecting therapists.
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Origins of #TherapistsConnect

Transcript

0:00

Hello. Welcome to another episode at the therapist connect podcast. My name is Dr. Peter Blundell and today I'm back interviewing therapists encouraging our guests to talk about their views about the world of counseling and psychotherapy. But before I tell you about this one, this guest, I want to remind our listeners if you enjoyed the podcast and please give us a review on your favorite podcast platform or share the links for the podcast on social media or with colleagues as it really helps to raise the profile of the podcast. This month, it was a pleasure to interview Ellis J. Johnson, who is a psychodynamic psychotherapeutic counselor, and a queer trans man of color. He delivers training to counselors in working affirmatively around gender and also delivering training in trans awareness and an anti-racist practice to organize organizations around the country and internationally. On his website, Ellis states that his work is influenced by spirituality, by black feminism, taking into account how intersecting oppressive structures in society and throughout history can have an adverse effect on our mental, spiritual, and physical health. His work is affirmative of gender, sexuality, and relationship. As well as being sex worker affirmative, you can find all of Ellis' details in the episode. Show notes. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did recording it.

Peter: 1:16

Ellis welcome to the Therapist Connect podcast. It's lovely to have you as a guest.

Ellis J Johnson: 1:21

Thank you. It's lovely to be here. Thank you, Peter.

Peter: 1:23

I know we've met before, so I know a little bit about you, but I'm hoping we can get to know each other a little bit better through some of the questions that we've got today. Thanks for coming on and sharing your experience with us.

Ellis J Johnson: 1:33

Yeah, thank you very much. Thanks to be, it's lovely to be asked. Thank you.

Peter: 1:37

So the question that I ask everybody who comes on the podcast, I think people find this quite interesting to know about therapists and where they've come from. What drew you to this as a profession in the first place? What, why did you want to become a therapist?

Ellis J Johnson: 1:50

Yeah, it's, I think it's a really good question and I really had to rack my brains about this one to think, a little bit deeper than the, the kind of the general, this is my upbringing and having mental health difficulties in the family and being really interested in how to navigate those and what was going on, beyond a sort of natural curiosity I think that lots of people have. I remembered. I'm just trying to think about this question. I remember really specifically being drawn to the idea of not having to be a different person at work than I was at home. So I remember thinking, Oh, what a, what an amazing thing to live by your values every day. So live by, doing something that you. You care about and is, I think, helps you grow as a person, as well as the person that you're supporting or you're with, and I think I was really drawn to the how it seemed that you could be full of integrity, really, as a therapist, you were present, the ideas that I had in my head about it, you'd be present, you're connected you're yeah, doing work that maybe aligns with your values. And I think that's really what drew me to, to doing this alongside an intellectual curiosity, and fascination, I think, for me, I can't imagine a more fascinating thing to do with your time every single day than be with another person, profoundly, genuinely, in a, in the most connected way you can be. I just couldn't think of anything more, more wonderful actually. To do with my career and and luckily I still feel that way actually and I think that still is my experience. I think it's a magical thing to do and to experience. So I think my expectations of the job are, have been met. I would probably say that.

Peter: 3:51

That's lovely. And it's it's reminded me of when you were talking about your values being aligned with your work, and I was thinking about the amount of jobs I've done in the past before being a therapist, where my values did not align with the jobs I was doing. The real incongruence and discontent. disconnect there for me and how lucky I feel now to be in this profession and doing something that I love. And then also that like the interest each day, like there's a constant process of learning and how exciting that is. And I, I still feel that, I've been qualified for over 10 years now, but I still have that magic, that excitement, that, every day that you're connecting with someone at such a deep level, it's unusual. Unusual job.

Ellis J Johnson: 4:30

Yeah, it is unusual. It's so unusual and it doesn't it doesn't really align with a lot of the expectations of what work should be like, right? Or what work really is and probably was for me as well before I was a therapist. So it is, I do feel very lucky every single day that I get to do this job. And I always say, I don't. I don't tend to get, which would, yeah, anyway, I don't get like the Sunday blues, it's a Sunday and I'm not like, Oh, I've got to go to work tomorrow. I'm like, I'm ready. I'm ready for it. And I'm engaged and interested. And that's such a, it's such a privilege to be able to do work like that.

Peter: 5:04

It's wonderful. Can you tell us then a little bit about your career so far

Ellis J Johnson: 5:08

So I qualified in 2016 and I was incredibly lucky because I remember coming to the end of my course, I remember very specifically saying to myself. Oh, this is exactly the kind of job that I want. This is what I want to be doing. So I'm a transgender man. I transitioned actually halfway through my course. So socially transitioned, started to medically transition halfway through the course and. I remember very specifically saying to myself, I would love to be able to offer free therapy to trans people, trans non binary questioning people. I thought, that's what an amazing thing. Maybe one day I'll get to do that. And literally about a month later, a job came up at an organization in London called Spectra which was offering free therapy to trans non binary people. They just set up a couple of months before and they were looking for a trans therapist. And I was like, Oh my God, you have just. Spoken into existence, this perfect job. And at the time, I wasn't aware of anything similar to that anywhere in the country, actually. And I think since some other services have popped up as far as I'm aware, that was one of the first, I think perhaps there was Clinic Q in London as well. But I think at that time, perhaps they were charging. I'm not sure about that, but essentially it was very rare to find an organization that was offering that. And I was lucky enough to get that role. So fell into a sort of dream job immediately hit the ground running was there for a good few years. I was also doing mental health advocacy work for another organization at the time. So I was doing for LGBTQ mental health organization. So I was doing things like helping people with their benefits, chasing up doctors, helping them with their health care running groups for people of color and people with suicidal ideation as well. And doing like a million different things. So if you've ever, anyone's ever worked, who's watching this has worked in the charity sector, you probably know that you get hired for one role and you do a million other things as well. So that was a kind of a baptism of fire as well, but it really gave me a grounding of, working in the community and really You know, really face to face with the, the real lived experience of people, obviously being part of the community is one thing and having friends and, is one thing, but working with the kind of intricacies of discrimination, marginalized lives that really, I think it's really grounded a lot of my work since then, actually. So that was a really yeah. Transformative. Period for me I ended up doing lots of training as well and delivering lots of training and and then I had a really horrible burnout, actually. So I'd, worked really super hard through, through the course, had these really incredible jobs. I was commuting as well, I was living in Brighton at the time and and commuting up to London to work twice a week. And, yeah, I just, I had, yeah, my, my body just stopped working, essentially, and to cut a long story short. Yeah, I had to, I couldn't work anymore, actually and it wasn't possible for me to keep up employment. So that kind of pushed me into doing private practice because I could do, however many sessions a week I could. Physically do at that point, at some points it was maybe three, two or three sessions a week that I could find the energy to do whilst I was healing from this burnout. And with many things like that, it turned out to be actually a really wonderful shift for me. I think I probably still would be toiling away in the charity sector for 60 hours a week if I hadn't have. Become very unwell at the time and then I've been in private practice since then. So that's what 2019 I went into private practice and and yeah, and I've been in private practice since working mainly online. Yeah, solely online. And and now I'm moving into also doing more training, offering more training around working with trans and non binary clients. So yeah, so it's been. Yeah it's such a, it's funny thing having to look back, isn't it? Because you just, you keep going and you keep going. But, I'm very lucky that I was able to come through the burnout, still healing from that. And and yeah, so it's. I've been incredibly busy. Like a lot of us aren't, right?

Peter: 9:31

It sounds it. There's a few things that struck me there, and one of them was the kind of getting to burnout but almost, horrible experience, but it sounds like something came out, out of that. It's something shifted for you and you were able to make changes to stop that from happening and maybe do some healing from that. And then the other thing I was thinking about was when you were talking about working charity sector kind of services and support services and something really resonated with me in terms of before I qualified as a therapist, I did a lot of support work. I worked in third sector organizations and charities and advocacy roles and how much more I think I learn about kind of social justice and. And supporting people and yeah, people from different backgrounds and stuff like that and how I learned much more doing those roles than I did through my therapy training, actually. And so something resonated with me when you were talking about that in terms of the knowledge, I think, that is there in those communities.

Ellis J Johnson: 10:29

Absolutely. And I think you can't. You can't really imagine, what people's lives are like, it's hard to, it's unimaginable. Actually, I think sometimes some of the things that, I was supporting people with, you couldn't write, you couldn't make it up some of the difficulties. And I think, sadly, unless you've been in those situations yourself, and perhaps even say for me, having burnout and not being able to, lift up a kettle to make yourself a cup of tea, not being able to go to the shop for a pint of milk, or going and then having to rest for three days afterwards. I think unless you've experienced that, it's very difficult to imagine what it's actually like to be disenfranchised, to be vulnerable, to. Worry that you're not going to have a roof of your head next month. So I think the charity that I work for they do, that I used to work for, they now do a really wonderful thing called the human library and they do this for some sort of local universities. What they do is they get people in who use the services and it's actually for trainee, trainee therapists they can have a one to one conversation with. All these different people, it's so the volunteers are like human books, basically. So you come and sit with them and they tell you a bit about their experience and their life and what you might want, they want you to know. So you get to choose which kind of. Experiences you might be interested in. And it's a really, yeah, it seems to have a really big impact on trainee therapists to truly, and I think, if we're going to talk particularly about trans and non binary experiences there's so much noise. In the media about trans people it's actually quite rare for people to hear a trans person talking about a trans experience or to sit down with a trans person and have a chat with them. So whenever I do my training, I always say, you might think you've never met a trans person before. You probably have, but you didn't know it. But if you've never met a trans person before, now you have. And I'm, I exist in the flesh and you can talk to me and ask me questions if you want to but the chasm I think between perhaps people who are privileged or have privilege and those that don't, it's, it's very wide and it seems to be widening. As well at the moment. I think it's invaluable. Really the work. It sounds like you've done as well with actually seeing the day to day lives of people who disenfranchised. Absolutely.

Peter: 12:55

And I suppose one of the things I was thinking about is as therapists sometimes, obviously we work with people who are going through difficulties, but sometimes very marginalized communities don't have access to therapy and actually therapists can maybe be saying. not be seeing people from those communities and so might not have an insight or an understanding because they're not doing that work like other types of services are.

Ellis J Johnson: 13:16

Yeah, I think that's there. And I think there's also a question of therapy can only do so much as well. So what happens if you, if someone comes to you and says that, I don't have any food in my house. And I'm going to get kicked out. In a month's time therapy can only help with that so much it's a shame that there aren't more advocacy services out there really that, that are supporting marginalized clients.

Peter: 13:40

Absolutely. How do you find, define your therapeutic approach and has it, has that changed at all since you qualified?

Ellis J Johnson: 13:48

Yeah, so I trained psychodynamically, and that definitely forms the most part of my work, I'd say. I Think I've become much less rigid in the way that I work, and I think everybody lots of therapists I know would say the same thing. I've become less Stressed if I, haven't got the same glass this time as I had last time for my water or, become much less concerned or yeah, much less rigid and a bit more fluid, I think. So I'm also aware that I've had supervisors that integratively trained, I've had therapists myself that are integratively trained. So I think again, always coming back to a person centered, the core conditions I was. Hold them very closely. And I also think incorporating those other elements of social justice anti racist practice a practice that is I think, perhaps more. How would I put it? Practice that can address the issues of today as well, right such as incorporating social justice elements understanding intersectionality, intersectional oppressions, those kind of things that is really here in my work as well. And and I think also Elements of kind of spiritual practice. Something that I is here for me in a lot of the client work that I do, and it tends to be that clients who are spiritually inclined seem to make their way to me. And we sometimes have this moment of almost coming out to each other as being spiritually inclined in those moments. It's which is quite interesting. So those elements are there as well, my work. But I think psychodynamic work lends itself really well to, the kind of the spiritual realm to magic to the unconscious other things that are happening, which is what I really like about, about the psychodynamic approach.

Peter: 15:44

That's really interesting. And I don't know if this is an accurate kind of representation, but when you were talking about becoming less rigid, I was imagining like I've certainly done this when first training kind of clinging to the theory rigidly this is how it's got to be. And then over time going, Oh, actually, gosh, there's all this stuff, that's out there.

Ellis J Johnson: 16:01

It's a lovely feeling to grow in confidence, I can definitely look back and see that I can trust myself more to apply the theory in the right way, but not in a rigid, not in a rigid way. So that's a lovely thing that comes with time, I think, and experience. Yeah,

Peter: 16:18

I love that. So for regular listeners of this podcast, you'll have already heard Ellis talk a little bit about this topic already because we did a interview with some of the authors of the Queering Psychotherapy book that's been out this year. But for people listening for the first time you are one of the authors of that book. Can you tell tell them a little bit about it and what kind of motivated you to write a chapter in that book?

Ellis J Johnson: 16:41

Yeah, so I was invited to write a chapter on working alongside trans non binary questioning folks in therapy, and yeah, I think as I said earlier, it's quite rare, actually, for trans people to be given a seat at the table, for us to be given a voice, and particularly as a brown trans person, a trans man, and being somebody who is nonbinary. working class, from a working class background there are those three things together, being trans, being brown, being working class, and perhaps even also being a man, sometimes in this profession, sometimes, not always and being queer. as well, all those things together it's pretty rare for people like me to have a voice, actually. And you might be forgiven for thinking, oh, trans people are everywhere, we can't, we don't stop hearing about trans people. But if you kind of tune in a little bit, you'll notice that you're not really hearing trans people talk about trans people. You're hearing cis people talk about trans people. With a lot of confidence, but it's very rare you hear trans voices. So I lost

Peter: 17:46

a lot of confidence and very loudly, incredibly loudly

Ellis J Johnson: 17:50

and very forcefully. And perhaps very convincingly sometimes as well So for me, I was like, wow, okay, so there's an opportunity, there's a space here for me to talk about the things that I care about, the things that I experience and also from being able to talk about it as a professional. Not just from a lived experience perspective, because that's also often what we hear from trans people if they're given space to speak, it's about personal experience, it's lived experience, it's about the narrative, the story, when did you know, when did you start taking hormones, when did you have surgery that's what we hear, I think, a lot of the time but it is rare, I think, to hear Professionals who just happen to be transgender, talking about the things that they know about. So I was, I was just really over the moon to be asked. It's just a wonderful project. And Yeah, there was so much to say. Oh my God, there's so much to say, but it was really wonderful experience talking with chance and hearing what chance had to offer as well. And yeah, I just feel really lucky to be a part of it.

Peter: 18:52

Yeah, it's wonderful. It's fantastic. It's a fantastic book. So anyone who's not read it, I would recommend going and getting it and you can hear more from the authors in one of our previous. podcast episode a bit more from you, Ellis as well. So thank you for writing it as well, because it's it's brilliant. And your chapter is fantastic as well I really enjoyed it. Can you tell us a little bit about how you see the wider therapy community? I suppose we might've touched on that a little bit and how connected you feel to other therapists.

Ellis J Johnson: 19:19

Yeah, I think. again, as a listener of the podcast, I hear lots of the therapists saying similar things that is a very isolating can be very isolating profession. And I think I would probably say I haven't felt very connected to the profession or to the community that, you know for a very long time and I think when that has, it's come about recently and that's because I've been connecting with other queer therapists, thanks to the book and also being asked to be a clinical associate at Pink Therapy was a really big honor for me. And so connecting in those ways has been really wonderful. I don't know that I've always felt there's a space for me. with my identities, my background, the way I look, the way I talk, the way I hold myself, and that might be something also for me of training down South. Had I done my training up North, maybe back in Yorkshire it would be one thing I trained in a very white trained in Brighton, very white middle class area. So maybe I set myself up actually feeling a bit separate. But it has been hard to feel connected and to be perhaps even to feel accepted really and wanted. And as I say, yeah, that changes with. finding other therapists who are a little bit like me, and there are lots of them the, that we are out there so it's been a bit, it's been a little bit difficult, I think, but for me also trying to create those spaces for myself and other people, that's how I've gotten around it starting to deliver training on my own for other people that want to have these conversations around oppressions, class, race, ability trans identity in there started to. Create the spaces for people who want to have the conversations that I want to have. And again, surprisingly there's lots of us, actually.

Peter: 21:13

It's, you're right, it's such a common thread, through the guests on the podcast of talking about isolation and not feeling connected, but wanting to be. And I don't know if you'd agree with this, but I feel like I've seen the establishment of lots more communities now and groups of people coming together. I think almost for me, like the next stage is like, can we get all those groups to also connect Yeah, absolutely. Because I think those conversations are really important and I think a lot of people want them to happen and I think people aren't, or therapists aren't always sure how to organize ourselves in groups. Yeah. That's a bit of a generalization, maybe.

Ellis J Johnson: 21:49

it's my experience as well I agree with you and I wonder sometimes if it's, if a lot of us are quite introverted somehow, and we're more comfortable listening than talking. So you get lots of us together and maybe everyone's sitting back and listening and it can be it can be a bit tricky kind of thing sometimes. So it's it's quite fascinating to know that. Yeah, there are lots of people who care about the same things in my experience, again, with doing the work around trans inclusion, in therapy, the vast majority of therapists I speak to are really desperate to hear more and to understand more from a really affirming position. Without the hostility or the, the cynic cynicism or the critical ear people are just actually quite welcoming. So if we could, I love your idea of just getting, bringing these groups together somehow. And I think maybe that's, that's got to be the next step for our profession. If we want to have longevity, I think in this work, we want the work to be sustainable. We want to avoid burnout. And we also want to make a difference. To the profession and keep it moving forward. I think. Yeah, there's lots of opportunity for that. You just need someone to do it.

Peter: 23:07

Yeah, absolutely I think that's why people enjoy the Therapists Connect podcast because people are talking about their experiences and we're getting to hear about all these different kinds of groups and communities and work that people are doing that's going on, but isn't always necessary. necessarily visible or it might be visible to certain therapists but not to others. So I think I think it's just really important that we highlight all of the, all this important work that's going on out there at the moment.

Ellis J Johnson: 23:32

Absolutely. Absolutely there's lots of different ways to be a therapist, right? Exactly. Hearing from one another, I think is really powerful and Yeah it's been an experience today looking back and talking about my experience it's really interesting.

Peter: 23:45

That's brilliant. What do you think is the biggest challenge that the counselling and psychotherapy profession faces right now?

Ellis J Johnson: 23:54

I think there are lots of challenges. I think there are lots of challenges because I think Not to sound too grandiose about it, but I think the world is changing really quickly really profoundly everything around us is shifting. So I think one of the challenges that perhaps I can land on today is, how do we keep up with that, how do we, I think particularly. Incorporating a social justice lens, understanding intersectionality, understanding all these other elements of human experience that might not take as much space in therapeutic spaces as they should. Actually, I think that might be the next challenge. And certainly, as I say, the therapist that I speak to, it's like everyone's trying to catch up with you can think particularly around like Black Lives Matter, for example. And I think these kinds of movements, these kinds of social justice movements, civil rights movements are coming thick and fast at the moment. So I think therapists want to understand how to keep up with that, how to work with it and. Perhaps there's something there also about society being very polarized. And I think therapists are wondering which side of the coin or which side of the fence am I going to fall on? And how do I work with that? There's a kind of an expectation that we're supposed to be very polarized in the world right now. We're supposed to have an opinion about things, I wonder how difficult that is for therapists to to hold all that shift and change and not be defensive about being called out for being racist, for an example, or this is what's in the ether at the moment. So I wonder if a challenge is, yeah how do we engage with those conversations when they're incredibly difficult conversations? How do we own our racism when that is incredibly painful? As an example.

Peter: 25:53

And I think part of that is for me those, it can be so fast paced, but it's really important that we actually do have the conversations and don't avoid the conversations because that's the bigger problem. Yeah, when we're completely avoiding it because it's too scary or too, there's too much going on and we're too defensive to engage with that. We don't have those conversations, then the work's not happening.

Ellis J Johnson: 26:15

To not avoid the conversation altogether, right? To say therapy is a completely neutral space. It's an apolitical space so that I don't need to engage with these things. And that I think can trickle down to the idea that being trans is a political identity. Somehow we've been politicized as a talking point I think that can be difficult for therapists to maybe even take seriously, right? We, there's an idea that we're just a fad and we're causing trouble, but how do you, what what is your opinion as a therapist? How are you going to deal with that? How are you going to deal with that in a client? so These are really big questions. I think that society is asking itself and I think therapists are not immune to those questions.

Peter: 26:58

And so I was thinking that when you were talking was the idea of it's about those specific conversations we're having, not just a conversation, debating. People's lived experience or identities or it's actually really about the conversation with yourself about what are you doing to improve your work and how you can support people.,

Ellis J Johnson: 27:17

I think this is the big shift and something that I'm really keen on in my work is acknowledging that these questions are not just about people out there or your clients. They are about you because you are also part of society and. So when I offer my training around trans identities in therapy the first half of the day or the weekend is about you, is about, okay, what is your history with gender?, turning the kind of the camera background and saying how about you? You have a gender as well. You have a a sexual identity. It's not just people who are othered that have identity. You have an identity as well. And that's tough work that is tough. That's really tough work. But if you want to engage in a meaningful way with your clients and work in a safe way, there's I've said it to you on the other podcast, it's a potential for li a liberatory conversations for all of us in this work. And, I think that therapists need to do that work.,

Peter: 28:23

I completely agree. When we did the other podcast, we discussed this point a little bit in terms of, I think something in the book that you were writing out is the opportunity for everybody when you start having these conversations. And we had a bit of a discussion about isn't it just enough actually for it to be for trans people and one of the things that I was thinking about it, which I didn't mention when we had the discussion earlier was when I'm doing training in university for students and stuff, when you open up this conversation it's it opens up a world of opportunity for everybody in the room. Yeah. And people start questioning and reflecting and thinking about different aspects of their identity that they hadn't really connected with before, which I think is, for me, it's a wonderful thing to. See, and once you take away, that can't take away completely, but reduce some of that tension and that toxicity around some of those discussions and actually people talking from their authentic experience. Actually you can, it's amazing what kind of comes out of that, I think.

Ellis J Johnson: 29:18

Yeah. I mean it's revolutionary. Yeah it is revolutionary and it's revolutionary because, the other big part of my work that I really care about is thinking about white supremacy culture and coloniality and colonialism and. Attempting asking the question, how can we undo those things and so when people recognize that they. also have a position in white supremacy. They've been positioned as well. They're not just the center, but they've been racialized as white. They've been told that they are straight. If they have certain types of sex or they're, attracted to certain types of people. Once we recognize that all these systems work in tandem. It's not a surprise to me that there's a relief my God, the relief of it to understand that, that we., we don't have to be rigid that we have space to maneuver and how wonderful in terms of connecting with other people to acknowledge that they also don't have to be rigid. So there is a freedom for everybody here and it's huge work, it's, yeah. It's it's taken 400 years to get here

Peter: 30:22

and the dismantling of a system and a culture and, or multiple systems and cultures is amazing, but, and fluid and freeing, but can also be really scary for people as well

Ellis J Johnson: 30:33

yeah, absolutely it's we can talk about very particularly in sort of therapeutic terms, we're giving up familiarity, we're giving up incredibly ingrained senses of self that have been ingrained on purpose for 400 years. This is the kind of person you are, this is how to be a person. This is what a body should look like, this is how a man should act, this is how a woman should act. This is race, the construct of race, very particularly on purpose. It there's a lot that we have to sacrifice, but there's a lot more to gain. But it's really profound work and it's very emotionally charged and it's very it's very confusing for lots of people. So that's the kind of work I like to do.

Peter: 31:18

Amazing. Sounds great. Ellis, I've really enjoyed this discussion it's been really interesting. I suppose my final question is what plans have you got for the future? I know you've got some training coming up, which you might want to tell us a little bit more about.,

Ellis J Johnson: 31:30

yeah yes I've decided to, as we said earlier Create space to have the conversations that I want to have with people and to learn the things that I'm interested in learning. So I've created it's a three part course. I'm. I've titled it Gender Expansive Therapy, and the reason it's expansive is that we are not just talking about gender, but we're also talking about race, class age, ability, we're breaking apart the sort of white supremacist oppressive structures, and engaging in the bigger question of decolonial work. Which is something that I'm really excited by so how do we decolonize therapy? How do we decolonize gender, sexual diversity relationship diversity? I'm really interested in moving these conversations forward from talking about toilets and pronouns, which are absolutely important they have their place, but I want to. Yeah again, it sounds like a big ambition, but I want us to be talking about these things in a much broader, bigger way. Understanding them through a colonial lens and doing something to undo that. So as I say, yeah, the course is in three parts. The first part is working with expansive clients. It's just around gender and trans identities, really. The second part is on decolonizing gender relationship, diversity, sexual diversity. And the third part of entitled expansion in practice. And that will be more experiential for therapists to. Yeah, have some fun with their gender, have some fun and explore and expand and yeah, have some experiences that might be a little bit out of your comfort zone in terms of the questions and the provocations that I'll be asking. So we've had the first session already. We had level one ran a few. Weeks ago, and that was really wonderful. Really challenging is the feedback that I was getting really challenging. But somebody said I can feel my brain expanding. I can feel my brain's expanded through this weekend. So I can understand why you're calling it gender expansive therapy. Which is really wonderful and level 1 is going to run a few more times. The next one's in February 2024 10th and 11th and we'll have another level 1 I think in April and then level 2 and level 3 will be out as well. Plenty of opportunities to come along to level 1 and a big. And ambition for me, as I said earlier, is creating spaces for therapists who are thinking about these topics to come together and meet other people to create community as we go along, keep in touch with one another and support each other and doing this work. So that's a big. a big project for me, trying to decolonize gender in the therapy world. But it seems like people are ready for it. So I'm ready too.

Peter: 34:21

Absolutely. People are asking for it. And that training sounds amazing. And to have that feedback, that's what you want from training is, to expand your mind and it sounds like people are soaking that up, Which is absolutely fantastic. And what we'll do is we'll put links to the website and the training and stuff in the show notes. So people can get access to that and check it out. So Ellis, thank you so much for coming on the therapist connect podcast for a second time. And it's been great getting to know you a little bit better and find out more about you. Thanks so much.

Ellis J Johnson: 34:49

Thank you so much, Peter. It's been really lovely. Thanks so much.

Peter: 34:52

Thank you.