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PsySSA Workshop Series 2023: Workshop 5: Narrative Career Counselling

PsySSA Workshop Series 2023: Workshop 5: Narrative Career Counselling

by | Mar 26, 2023 | CPD Opportunities, Events and Announcements, Professional Development, Psychology Events, PsySSA 2023 CPD Workshop Series

About this workshop:

The workshop aims to show participants how contemporary career counselling can be administered to individuals and in groups to help them confront some of the main challenges posed by Work 4.0 in the workplace and people’s personal life stories. Participants will discover how the traditional career counselling approach compares to the narrative process. They will be introduced to and complete a novel, storied career counselling questionnaire (the Career Interest Profile (CIP)) online. The CIP was developed from the (self-)developmental, storied (psychodynamic), differential, and ‘trauma theory’ perspectives to elicit people’s multiple micro-life stories, uncover their central life themes, promote clarification of their career-life identity, and enhance their self-exploration. Moreover, they will learn how to elicit advice from within regarding converting issues and concerns into themes of hope that can advance their life projects and (re-kindle) their sense of hope and meaning.

Learning Outcomes

  1. Understanding the need to implement integrative, QUALITATIVE-quantitative career counselling.
  2. Being able to integrate ‘stories’ and ‘scores’ in career counselling to individuals and in groups.
  3. Being able to help people clarify their career-life identity.
  4. Being able to help people (re-)discover a sense of self-respect, purpose, hope, and meaning.
  5. Being able to help people connect conscious knowledge about themselves with their subconscious insights.

Indexing Keywords

  1. Counselling for career construction for individuals and groups of people.
  2. Integrating ‘stories’ and ‘scores’ in career counselling.
  3. Connecting conscious knowledge with subconscious insights.

PsySSA Workshop Series 2023: Workshop 5: Narrative Career Counselling

Meet our Presenters

Prof. Kobus Maree (DEd; PhD; DPhil) has been the past editor of several scholarly journals, including the South African Journal of Psychology, and a member of several national and international bodies and editorial boards. Kobus has received multiple awards for his work and has authored or co-authored 110+ peer reviewed articles and 55 books or book chapters on career counselling, research, and related topics, supervised 37 doctoral theses and Master’s dissertations, read keynote papers at 30+ international and 25+ national conferences since 2012. He has also presented numerous invited workshops at conferences worldwide on a) integrating qualitative and quantitative approaches in career counselling and b) the art and science of writing scholarly articles. Over the past seven years, he has spent much time abroad (for instance, as a visiting professor at various universities where he presented workshops on contemporary developments in career counselling). He was awarded a fellowship at the IAAP in July 2014. In September 2017, he received PsySSA’s Fellow Award. 

PsySSA Workshop Series 2023: Workshop 5: Narrative Career Counselling

PsySSA Workshop Series 2023: Workshop 4: Racialisation and Decolonial Praxis

by | Mar 26, 2023 | CPD Opportunities, Events and Announcements, Professional Development, Psychology Events, PsySSA 2023 CPD Workshop Series

About this workshop:

The primary consideration in this workshop is thinking through a decolonial praxis and multi-modal response to collective trauma or psychological distress caused by racism. 

South Africa’s history of slavery, colonialism and apartheid has had severe psychosocial consequences alongside economic and political impacts. While we have made legislative progress towards a democracy, we are still faced with socio-political-economic injustices and inequities that affect most of the population in South Africa. Forms of violence – material (poverty), physical, psychological, sexual, and racial – are pervasive. It is within this context that this workshop engages the following issues:

  1. Apartheid, much like experiences in other global genocides (Latin America, Germany, Rwanda), is regarded as a crime against humanity with generational consequences. What has been psychology’s response to this?
  2. How do the concepts of trauma, psychological distress, racialisation and racial healing articulate with a framework for addressing the psychosocial consequences of racism?
  3. Presently, an individual-based therapy model pervades the discipline. Given the scale and nature of challenges, a collective response to a collective psycho-social experience is needed? How can a decolonial psychology respond to this?
  4. In thinking about a decolonial praxis in response to racism and racialisation of black collectives, how do we engage traditional healing, indigenous practices, and other modalities as efficacious and integrated responses to generational trauma and healing?

PsySSA Workshop Series 2023: Workshop 4: Racialisation and Decolonial Praxis

Meet our Presenters

I am an independent consultant and practitioner within the social justice and development arena, a clinical psychologist and African feminist with expertise in the area of trauma, gender and group process. I spent 14 years as an academic before moving into ‘full-time practice’, facilitating group processes on issues of social justice, transformation, diversity, inclusion and healing in community, academic and corporate domains. I have journeyed with NGO leadership both within South Africa and internationally, from community-based organisations to collectives of Human Rights Defenders and climate justice activists, to United Nations agencies. I am deeply invested in exploring and expanding what a decolonised therapy/ collective healing process/ feminist politic and ethic of love and care might look like, particularly for NGOs and in activist and social movement spaces. I am the founder of ‘Deep Wellness’, an initiative and social enterprise invested in unpacking what it means to be truly, fundamentally well as Black womxn and Black people. More and more this has meant engaging racial trauma, interrogating and overcoming those things – outside and inside of ourselves – that diminish us, and as part of a collective healing journey, accessing more deeply, our wells of power and joy.

Over the years, my practice has gravitated towards a focus on individual, collective and organisational change concerning racism, diversity, racial healing, transformation, and social justice. I have been involved in organisation-wide transformation-related interventions in the corporate, public, educational, and not-for-profit sectors. In this context, South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, demands that organisational practitioners find new, non-formulaic, and context-specific solutions for greater social justice.

This has spurned my search for and commitment to relevant and innovative theory-driven praxis for social justice in organisations. In keeping with this, my academic pursuits have been directed at interrogating the psychosocial impact of “race”, gender, class, marginalisation and non-belonging on collectives. At the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, I had the opportunity to integrate practice and theory to address transformation-related issues and developed a three and a five-day accredited short course titled “Race, diversity, social justice and transformation in organisations”.

I am currently pursuing a PhD which explores senior professionals’ experiences of mediating the psychosocial impact of past and on-going racialisation. Recently I revived my organisational psychology practice, Soul@Work, that focuses on racial healing and trauma.

PsySSA CPD Workshop Series 2023

PsySSA CPD Workshop Series 2023

by | Mar 9, 2023 | CPD Opportunities, Professional Development, PsySSA 2023 CPD Workshop Series

Dear Colleague 

We hope you are well.

The PsySSA Office is proud to announce that the Annual PsySSA CPD Workshop Series is back!

This year’s edition features a 10-part focused workshop series covering topics from Climate and Environment Psychology, Forensic Psychology, Neuropsychology, Private Practice, Research Psychology, Sexuality and Gender and so much more. Visit our website for further details.

As a gesture to psychology professionals, due to the current economic climate, delegates can attend the workshops at last year’s rates!

PsySSA members can attend these workshops at the minimal rate of R300.00 per workshop while non-members pay R600.00 per workshop. If you are not yet a member, join PsySSA today to enjoy our member discounts and more. All workshops carry either 2 General or 1 Ethics and 1 General CPD Points. 

We are appreciative of practitioners continued support and look forward to continuing our work together.

In Solidarity, 
The PsySSA Office 

Click here to register!
PsySSA Workshop Series 2023: Workshop 5: Narrative Career Counselling

PsySSA Workshop Series 2023: Workshop 2: Climate change and psychology: Mapping the field and foregrounding justice

by | Mar 9, 2023 | CPD Opportunities, Events and Announcements, Professional Development, PsySSA 2023 CPD Workshop Series

About this workshop:

The world is experiencing unprecedented levels of global heating and adverse weather events, with negative public (mental) health impacts, loss of life, biodiversity loss, migration, and destruction, to name a few. In addition, climate change intersects with longstanding historical social, economic, gendered, and environmental inequalities in the global South and unequal contexts in the global North. The scholarship and practice of ‘climate psychology’ has quickly developed into a vast and complex body of work with many sub-fields. This workshop provides the co-ordinates for psychologists in climate change efforts, including identifying and addressing the direct and indirect impacts of global heating on mental health (climate-specific psychological responses to a changing planet), disaster responses, behaviour change in mitigation and adaption, education, conservation and biodiversity, organisation and community interventions, ethics, and technological and digital innovation. The second part of the workshop demonstrates how justice-related values can be central to how psychologists approach climate change efforts. The workshop provides practical examples of how theoretical, methodological, legal, environmental and human rights frameworks can encourage us to think about interconnectedness, planetary health, the inclusion of marginalised voices, accompaniment, and solidarity with existing climate justice struggles.

PsySSA Workshop Series 2023: Workshop 2: Climate change and psychology: Mapping the field and foregrounding justice

Meet our Presenters

Professor Brendon Barnes is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Johannesburg. He writes in psychology, climate change, environmental health, and justice. He has won teaching, academic citizenship, and research awards. Professor Barnes is known to champion the integration of justice into environmental and climate psychology, has edited several collections focusing on climate psychology and justice, and, in 2022, addressed the 15th United Nations Annual Psychology Day on the topic.

Dr Garret Barnwell is a clinical psychologist in Johannesburg, South Africa. In addition to a fulltime psychotherapeutic practice, he provides psychological expertise on a range of issues. Including, in the past, health justice issues in detention and extractive settings for Doctors Without Border, the youth-led #CancelCoal case for the Centre for Environmental Rights and the psychological impacts of opencast coal mining for All Rise Attorneys for Climate and Environmental Justice. He is also a research associate at the University of Johannesburg’s Psychology Department. 

 

PsySSA Workshop Series 2023: Workshop 5: Narrative Career Counselling

PsySSA Workshop Series 2023: Workshop 1: Coming out: Personal reflections and professional guidance for psychology professionals

by | Mar 6, 2023 | CPD Opportunities, Events and Announcements, Professional Development, PsySSA 2023 CPD Workshop Series

About this workshop:

‘Coming out’ is a common turn of phrase used to metaphorically describe lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) people’s disclosure of their sexual orientation or gendered and sexual identity. However, more than just an act of self-disclosure, coming out is a deeply personal process marking an important psychological milestone through which LGBTIQ people grapple with understanding and, hopefully, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation and identity. However, in a society which strongly enforces heteronormative and cisgendered codes of thinking, feeling, and behaving regarding sexual orientation and gender identity, most (if not all) LGBTIQ people contend with the prospect or reality of shame, rejection, and violence as they navigate coming out. It is for this reason that the psychotherapeutic spaces and services offered by psychologists, specifically, as well as mental healthcare and allied professionals, more broadly, provide a vital opportunity for LGBTIQ people to explore and affirm their gendered and sexual sense of self. This workshop aims to provide a capacity-building primer to psychology professionals about LGBTIQ peoples coming out. The workshop will: (1) contextualize the process of coming out within frameworks for understanding LGBTIQ identity development; (2) situate coming out within the South African context and consider how the cleavages of race and the specificities of culture, class, and language shape coming out; (3) examine how women/womxn’s gendered status and subjectivity informs their coming out experience; (4) reflect on trans perspectives of coming out; (5) highlight the Psychological Society of South Africa’s Practice Guidelines for Psychology Professionals Working with Sexually and Gender-Diverse People, as a resource to guide best therapeutic practice; and (6) offer practical tips to psychology professionals when supporting LGBTIQ people through their coming out. In doing so, the workshop will weave together personal reflections and professional guidance with the aim of enriching and deepening the knowledge and skills that psychology professionals bring to their therapeutic work with LGBTIQ people through their coming out. The workshop will be of interest to psychology professionals engaged in therapeutic practice as well as healthcare professionals, researchers, and allies interested in better understanding the coming out process for LGBTIQ people.

PsySSA Workshop Series 2023: Workshop 1: Coming out: Personal reflections and professional guidance for psychology professionals

Meet our Presenters

Jarred Martin, PhD, is an early-career researcher, senior lecturer, and registered Clinical Psychologist based in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pretoria (UP), South Africa. At UP, he teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, manages the postgraduate degree programme in Clinical Psychology, and supervises postgraduate student research in critical studies of gender/s and sex/uality/ies. His research and writing concentrates on critical studies of bodies, gender/s, and sex/uality/ies, with a growing focus on sex-positive studies of erotic subjectivity, sexual practice, and queer intimacy in communities of kink. In addition to this, he sits on the Executive Committee for the Sexuality and Gender Division of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA).

Nkanyiso Madlala is a registered Clinical psychologist at the Department of Correctional Services (DCS). Nkanyiso is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of South Africa focusing on the area of sexuality and gender diversity specifically in the carceral population. Nkanyiso is a committee member of the LGBTQI+ Africa Human Rights project, an executive member of the Sexuality and Gender Division of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA), and a member of the Professional Association for Transgender Health South Africa (PATHSA). He was involved in the development of the gender affirming health care guidelines by the South African HIV Clinicians society. A committee member for the core committee currently reviewing and revising the Psychology procedures manual for psychological services in the DCS. In addition, he has worked at spearheading training workshops for DCS professionals (Gauteng region) and correctional staff. The workshops are geared towards sensitizing correctional staff of the LGBTQ+ community in correctional facilities and their needs, and equipping DCS staff with basic tools and skills needed to work with the LGBTQ+ community.

Vickashnee Nair is a registered Counselling Psychologist in private practice based in Bryanston. While working at a children’s home, providing therapeutic services, she is also employed as a consultant psychologist at a medico-legal and evaluation company working in assessments. She was an Executive Member of the Southern African Sexual Health Association (SASHA). Her education includes a Masters in Community Based Counselling Psychology through the University of Witwatersrand. Her passions include LGBTQ+ issues, social justice, advocacy, and community psychology.

Chris McLachlan is the Chairperson of the Sexuality and Gender Division of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA) and the Professional Association of Transgender Health, South Africa (PATHSA). Chris also serves as a World Professional Association in Transgender Health’s board member, represents South Africa on the International Psychology Network and an advisory board member of Wits Reproductive Health Institute trans clinics. Chris has been involved in the sexually and gender diverse field since 1992 and was one of the first registered marriage officers in South Africa under the Civil Union Act. Chris is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of South Africa and a registered Clinical Psychologist working at a Thuthuzela Care Centre (rape crises centre) in KwaZulu-Natal. He also runs a small private practice focusing primarily on members of the LGBTQI+ community. Chris is also a trainer/lecturer in the field of sexuality and gender diversity and has published various articles. They had the privilege to be part of the core group that developed PsySSA’s guidelines on sexual and gender diversity. Chris identifies as genderqueer, trans masculine and lives in a beautiful village with his children in the Midlands, KwaZulu-Natal.

Juan Nel, DLitt et Phil, is a registered Clinical and Research Psychologist, Research Professor of Psychology at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and an NRF-rated researcher with recognised expertise in LGBT+ mental health and well-being, hate crimes and victim empowerment and support, more generally. Juan is a former President of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA) (2014-2015), former member of its Council, and founder and Deputy Chair of the PsySSA Sexuality and Gender Division. He, furthermore, represents PsySSA on (inter)national structures in fields related to his research towards furthering PsySSA’s profile as a Learned Society. In this regard, most noteworthy are his roles as i) leader of the research sub-committee of the South African Hate Crimes Working Group; ii) co-representative on the International Psychology Network for LGBTI Issues (IPsyNet); and iii) leader of the PsySSA African LGBT+ Human Rights project aimed promoting well-being and human rights for LGBT+ persons in Africa, and from which the PsySSA Practice Guidelines for Psychology Professionals Working with Sexually and Gender-Diverse People emanate. He is passionate about equality and human rights, and strengthening healthcare provision through evidence-informed and sustainable community-based services, and the development of a body of knowledge towards policy reform.

Pierre Brouard is currently the Acting Director of the Centre for Sexualities, AIDS and Gender (CSA&G) at the University of Pretoria (UP) and a registered Clinical Psychologist, with a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology, obtained in 1993 from the University of the Witwatersrand. He has worked in HIV since the mid 1980’s (initially as a volunteer) and at the Centre since 2001. His interests and work include sexualities, gender, human rights, stigma, governance, leadership, accountability, transformation, diversity and social justice. At UP he sat on a committee which drafted an Anti-Discrimination Policy, and contributed to and taught on a number of short courses and modules, mostly on sexualities, gender and HIV, including short courses on Gender Equality and Sexual Minority Rights. He was instrumental in developing a workshop on sexual harassment which has been rolled out over the last 5 years at the university and helped to develop a protocol for the university to meet the needs of trans and gender diverse students and staff. In addition to this, he is an Executive Committee Member for the Sexuality and Gender Division of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA).