Living and practicing therapy and supervision from Northumberland, with participants across the UK is a place of privilege but also isolation. I work from a village in a stunning, sprawling landscape amid close-knit villages, and historic market towns. But operating outside of a major metropolitan hub comes with a specific clinical challenges: diversity is too often treated as a “city issue” or a neat, optional tick-box exercise and training locally is all too often white, cis het and frightenly middle class. When your local landscape is predominantly white or geographically isolated, it is easy for traditional training and practice models to fall back on a dangerous illusion of neutrality.

That is why I was so incredibly pleased and excited to enroll in the Headstrong Anti-Oppressive Supervision course as a second supervision training this spring after my initial training with the Northern Guild of Psychotherapy. To spend time with the ideas and theories of decolonalising therapy which mean to so much to me, but which at times can feel like the experiences of a medieval anchorite, recieving messages from the big city, hundreds of miles away.

As counsellors, we like to believe our therapy and supervision rooms are inherently safe spaces. But if we are not actively dismantling colonial, Eurocentric, and normative attitudes, we are likely reproducing the very oppressions our clients face outside our doors. This is especially true when we look at the vital intersections of neurodiversity, race, class and queerness within rural communities.

The Invisible Harms of “Neutral” Supervision

When clinical supervision ignores systemic power dynamics and diversity, it ceases to be a space of growth. Instead, it becomes an echo chamber for dominant cultural norms.

When we ignore these realities, the harms are concrete:

• Pathologizing Neurodivergence: Traditional counselling frameworks are overwhelmingly built around neurotypical standards of communication, regulation, and emotional expression. Without an anti-oppressive lens, a supervisor might view an autistic client’s lack of eye contact or a client’s executive dysfunction as “resistance” or “poor boundaries”, rather than valid ways of being.
• The Erasure of Rural Queerness: Being LGBTQIA+ in a rural area carries unique layers of hyper-visibility and deep isolation. When supervision lacks cultural humility, a queer client’s anxiety might be treated as an internal, individual pathology rather than a perfectly rational response to living in a community with fewer visible safe spaces or support networks.
• Silencing the Practitioner: If a supervisee cannot bring their own marginalized identities—whether they are neurodivergent, queer, working-class, or a person of colour—into the supervision room, the relationship breaks down. Supervision becomes a performative exercise in compliance rather than a place of vulnerable clinical reflection.

When diversity is ignored, the supervisor’s worldview defaults to the standard. We inadvertently pass down colonial attitudes that demand the client adapt to the therapy, rather than making the therapy serve the client.

Dismantling the Colonial Mindset

To challenge colonial attitudes in therapy means rejecting the idea that the therapist (or supervisor) is the ultimate, objective authority on human experience. It means moving away from a model that seeks to “fix” or “assimilate” individuals into a rigid, colonial standard of functioning.

Instead, anti-oppressive supervision asks us to look at the whole ecosystem. It forces us to ask: Is this client struggling because of an internal deficit, or are they exhausted by a world built for neurotypical, cis-heteronormative, and colonial ideals?

Embracing the Discomfort of Unlearning

Diving into this course with Headstrong has been an opportunity to look closely at the cracks in standard practice, and to refine and robust my practice. It is about learning how to build a supervisory space that is radical, explicitly inclusive, and deeply accountable.

For my practice in Northumberland, this means ensuring that our rurality never becomes an excuse for insularity. It means holding space where neurodiversity is celebrated as natural human variation, where queer joy and grief are deeply understood, and where every practitioner feels empowered to bring their whole self to the work.

True therapeutic growth requires us to embrace the discomfort of unlearning, to see this as a robust place of challenge, not a criticism of previous learning. Rather than being a silent rock, unmoved, I wish to be a river flowing through an everchanging landscape, reflecting the patterns of the world around me, moving and open to change.