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Providing safe space
As a client-centered organization, it’s important that Victoria Women’s Transition House adapts and shifts our services to meet the needs of our clients. This requires reflecting on the services we offer, and how we offer them, and ensuring that we are continuously looking at promising practices.
The Stopping the Violence Counselling team have been pleased to see positive results from one seemingly simple shift in their practices. Senior Program Manager Karlee explains: “It’s about finding ways to provide services that feel safe and comfortable for clients – and that means there’s not just one way of working.” Offering alternative locations for counselling sessions, including outdoors, has been a success. Karlee shares that it stems from “being aware that we can provide services in different ways so that clients feel at ease. Rather than telling clients that we can only meet for counselling in a traditional office setting, we know that being engaged in nature and with movement can help with healing and it’s a nice way for us to do the work that we do, through walk and talks. We’re embracing a different approach to the same service but taking it out of the context of the four walls.”
Did you know that in counselling there is always a power dynamic? Even when we try and remove barriers – such as client and counsellor sitting at the same height and eliminating the desk in-between – shifting to a walk and talk can really help take away that sense of unequal power. Removing the walls from our services is also one of the ways we are working to decolonize our practices. When buildings look and feel institutional, they can be unapproachable to clients.
In practice this can be meeting at our community office, then heading out for a walk, or it might be meeting at a neutral location such as a park, recreation space, coffee shop or beach. Our counsellors are, of course, always aware of their surroundings and who else might be in them and confidentiality remains paramount.
Movement regulates your nervous system so this sort of walk and talk approach can aid the way the body reacts to the process of counselling. Counsellors know that this adaptation has been successful as they are seeing improved engagement from clients who have previously struggled to connect.
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