#14 Myira Khan - Founder of (MCAPN) Round up of 2020, therapy, fish bowls, funerals, microaggressions, unconscious bias and islamophobia.

Bereavement Room

Today's guest is Myira a BACP Accredited Counsellor, Therapeutic Coach and qualified Supervisor, working in private practice, under her organisations ‘Myira Khan Counselling’ and ‘Grow To Glow’.

Myira is also the Founder of the Muslim Counsellor and Psychotherapist Network (MCAPN). MCAPN connects Muslim counsellors, therapists and psychologists.

In this episode of Why We Do What We Do we open our discussion on how 2020 has treated us, Myira and I also discuss microaggression, unconscious bias and islamophobia, that sometimes our view of the world will be shaped by our lived experience of it.

An inspiration to many as a Muslim and East African-Asian counsellor, supervisor and coach Myira represents diversity within the profession and promotes counselling to minority and marginalised communities, to break the stigma of mental health and therapy. For her work Myira was awarded the Mental Health Hero Award in 2015.

We look at fish bowl practice in training, personally I think fish bowls are not very effective, i believe most people give biased feedback based on their relationship or view of the people in the fish bowl itself.

So therefore we have to ask ourselves is fish bowl a effective aspect of training and maybe we need to bring that into group process to discuss how we give feedback and that sometimes it will derive from our opinions, likeness and assumptions of a person and not the work in the fish bowl itself.

I am going to project if you like my "own stuff' here unashamedly, i do feel there are far too many white middle class females training and that's likely to be because they have more money in the bank than they know what to do with and to be frank I think they probably do go into the world after qualifying still naive to a degree. Perhaps that's the whole point until more diverse client experience has been gained. Clock up those BACP hours wisely now!

I ask Myira to share some wisdom that might help women, particularly Muslim women when it comes to finding your tribe.

We close the episode with Myira's reflection on the loss of her father and the legacy and guidance he left behind that has lead her to where she is today.

We covered so much ground in this episode but still ran out of time! I'll have to invite her back on a future season.

As always thank you so much for listening.

Your host,

Callsuma Ali