Presentation 1: ACT for Activism - Anti-oppressive practice and being a political psychologist
Many of us know that our clients’ distress doesn’t exist in a vacuum, yet translating that awareness into our everyday clinical work can feel messy, uncertain, and at times scary or risky. In this presentation, I share my (ongoing) journey to becoming a Political Psychologist, a Feminist Psychologist, and working towards anti-oppressive practice. I will share what I have learned about showing up with authenticity, integrity, and courage in both the therapeutic space and also in my other values-aligned work.
I start from a position that may feel uncomfortable: that psychology and psychologists cannot be neutral, and will explore how psychology has emerged from and reinforces longstanding oppressive systems, such as racism, coloniality, patriarchy, and ableism (to name but a few). Drawing on principles from Liberation Psychology, Feminist Psychology, the Power-Threat-Meaning Framework, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, I will present practical strategies which psychologists can use to better align their work with their values. I will speak candidly about the discomfort, fear, and push-back I and others have experienced from integrating activism and social justice into our work as psychologists, and argue that anti-oppressive, human-rights focused practice is now embedded in our role and ethics with the Psychology Board of Australia’s Core Competencies and Code of Conduct.
Participants will leave with:
- Expanded formulation ideas which include systems, power, and intersectionality
- Practical strategies for integrating anti-oppressive and human rights–informed practice into everyday clinical work
- Greater confidence navigating “political” conversations with clients and colleagues in ethical and therapeutically grounded ways
- ACT-informed tools to align their professional identity with their values and support client empowerment
Presented by: Sahra O'Doherty
Presentation 2: Returning to what was taken - Creativity and decolonising our practice
Creative and expressive practices have historically been central to healing across cultures, embedded in ceremony, community, and the transmission of knowledge across generations. Their marginalisation within psychological frameworks reflects the enduring impacts of colonialism and the medical model on what the profession has accepted as legitimate ways of knowing and working. This has significant implications for both client care and clinician wellbeing.
Despite a substantial and growing evidence base demonstrating the neurobiological, psychological, and relational benefits of creative engagement (Fancourt and Finn, WHO, 2019; Fancourt, 2026), creativity remains largely absent from how the profession understands and supports therapist wellbeing. It is the missing pillar: present in the broader evidence base yet persistently excluded from our clinical training and frameworks for practice. This presentation builds on the presenter's previous AAPi webinar and asks a deeper question: not only why creativity has been neglected, but what its absence tells us about the assumptions shaping psychological practice, and what restoring it might require.
A central thread is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social and Emotional Wellbeing framework (Gee, Dudgeon, Schultz, Hart and Kelly, 2014). The SEWB model, centring connection to country, culture, community, kinship, and spiritual practice as foundational rather than supplementary to health and wellbeing, represents a sophisticated holistic framework that predates and surpasses what Western psychology has only recently begun to approximate.
Several of those domains of connection are, by their nature, creative and communal. Engaging with creative practice opens practitioners to multiple ways of knowing and making meaning, foundational to genuine cultural responsiveness and decolonising work. The deficit has been in Western psychology's historical refusal to genuinely engage with Indigenous knowledge and wisdom.
This presentation engages with what it means for the profession to follow the lead of First Nations communities and scholars in understanding what whole-person care requires. This work is also situated alongside Rupa Marya's Deep Medicine framework (Inflamed, Marya and Patel, 2021), Audre Lorde's (1977, 1984) description of creative expression as necessary for survival, and Ross Gay's (2022) exploration of “inciting joy” (relational and inseparable from sorrow) as a practice of solidarity. Taken together, these frameworks make a coherent case for understanding creativity as necessary and meaningful for our work and for decolonising our practice.
Participants will leave with a theoretical framework for understanding creative practice within a decolonising approach to psychology, increased awareness of how colonialism has shaped and constrained clinical practice and professional self-care, familiarity with the SEWB framework and its implications, and practical tools for integrating creative approaches into their work and life. The session includes an experiential component allowing participants to engage directly with a shared creative practice.
Note on positionality: This presentation engages with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander frameworks and with the knowledge of marginalised communities with an explicit commitment to attribution and to following the lead of First Nations psychologists and scholars.
Presented by: Emily Wilkinson
Presentation 3: Decolonising complexity: A systems‑based framework for holistic formulation and treatment
This workshop presents a method of working with complexity that addresses blind spots, siloed treatment and encourages holistic understanding, transdiagnositc formulation, treatment approaches, questioning skills, relationship and conceptualisation. Drawing on anti-oppressive concepts, liberation psychology, systems thinking, human rights practices and client-lead treatment values, this model draws on existing theories, treatment approaches and models to encourage the therapist to think broadly about factors that may impact on client ill health, challenges to recovery, and ways of healing.
This talk will describe a method which maps out schools of thought including diagnostic biomedical models, relational therapeutics, body/mind practices, systems thinking, Indigenous healing systems including SEWB, place-based healing, community connection, the therapist own identity and relationship to self, lived experience and context, the health care system in which we operate, and the scientific study of consciousness, quantum physics, metaphysics, spirituality which can then guide questioning, formulation and treatment approaches. This method is designed for use with all clients, but may be most beneficial for use in complex case scenarios, where there may be therapeutic stuckness or clinician confusion.
Participants will:
- View a case example of how this method might be used in therapy and supervision and case review
- Have example questions to use
- View an example of a treatment method
Presented by: Dr Averil Cook
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