One single day Advanced Professional Development workshop

Address questions of socio-economic and sex-related disparities as they arise in relationships between coaches, mental health professionals, consultants and our clients.

Led by Deepak Dhananjaya, psychotherapist and Agile-Leadership-Organisation Coach and founder of AgileSattva Consulting, and Prabhava Institute of Inclusive Mental Health. Deepak is visiting us this summer from Bangalore, India.

The workshop will be held in-person at the Tavistock Institute offices, 63 Gee Street, central London, EC1V 3RS.

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Oppression Inside Out: perspectives on the unconscious dynamics that emerge between us and our clients

This will be an opportunity for participants to explore their work with clients from a socio-political lens. 

As we work with individuals and groups, we try to help them find their way or to emerge out of the psychological pain they are going through. We draw on many valuable theoretical models to help us understand the internal world (psyche).

The workshop will focus on the psychological ideas we hold of the “cure” or of “mental well-being” and its impact on clients. 

We are part of the same social and political systems as our clients, which are constructed based on the patriarchy, a dominant class/caste/race or capitalist frameworks.

So it is important to explore the context of the clients/groups and our own selves and our interplay in the work we do together.

 While we hold the idea of socio-political impact on clients, it is easy to create a split of “Oppressed” and “the Oppressor”, which furthers the fragmentation that is alive in the system and its introjected aspects in the internal world of clients. 

In this workshop we will explore

• ideas of “cure/mental-wellbeing”;
• the intersectional aspects of multiple identities that both client and we hold;
• the introjected-intersectional-oppression at three levels: Intrapsychic, Interpersonal and Societal. 

We will work with ideas derived from radical-relational Transactional Analysis (Karen Minikin, Keith Tudor, Bill Cornell, Claude Steiner), and from sociologists and psycho-analysts like Eric Fromm, Wilhem Reich, Frantz Fanon. 

What to expect

The workshop is an invitation to reflect and dialogue on one’s own experience as a client and a practitioner, so it will be a reflective, experiential, dialogic space. 

Participants will get to explore their multiple identities that are alive internally and in their professional world, and their impact. This experimental workshop provides a contained space for one to do this exploration.

About Deepak Dhananjaya

Deepak Dhananjaya is a psychotherapist and Agile-Leadership-Organisation Coach. He is the co-founder of AgileSattva Consulting, an organisation development and transformation organisation in Bangalore. 

With a private clinical, teaching and supervision practice in psychotherapy, he is also the founder of Prabhava Institute of Inclusive Mental Health that focuses on inclusivity in mental health education and services negotiating the boundaries of privileges and oppression of intersections of society (patriarchy, sexuality, class, caste, religion). 

Deepak is an engineer and has a Masters in Sexuality and Sexual counselling. Engaging with the group relations framework since 2019, Deepak has been part of various group relations conferences and workshops in both member and staff roles. His work is informed by Transactional Analysis, Group Relations, and socio-cultural-political frame of reference which reflects in his writings and practice.