Blog

Empowering clients to speak up for their rights is a complicated business – especially when they have arrived in the UK via refugee camps and war zones. Therapists may find themselves working with guilt and fear, and needing to encourage a sense of justice in the consulting room. Jude Boyles is the Manager and a therapist of a Refugee Council therapy service based in South Yorkshire, offering therapy to Syrian refugees resettled via the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Programme (VPRS). In her fifth occasional blog about this work, she recalls clients who have been reticent to challenge and complain

We are trained to pace our interventions and couch questions in tentative reflections. But this indirectness can be baffling – and actively misleading – for refugee clients. Jude Boyles is the Manager and a therapist of a Refugee Council therapy service based in South Yorkshire, offering therapy to Syrian refugees resettled via the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Programme (VPRS). In her fourth occasional blog about this work, she explores the challenge of making the therapeutic dialogue accessible across cultures.

What happens when the therapist becomes an invited guest? Jude Boyles is the Manager and a therapist of a Refugee Council therapy service based in South Yorkshire, offering therapy to Syrian refugees resettled via the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Programme (VPRS). In her second occasional blog about this work, she reflects on the challenges of creating a therapy space within the client’s home

When the women interpreters started sighing deeply during her sessions with Syrian refugees, psychological therapist Jude Boyles found herself unsure how to respond. How might this affect the clients? And what did the sighs signify about the impact of therapy on the interpreters? A Therapy Service Manager at Refugee Council Sheffield, here Boyles considers the prevalence of our cultural assumptions, and the power of therapist curiosity.