What's it like training at Homa when it’s HARD?

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We ran an Introductory Workshop yesterday evening.

Ten paticipants, all curious about training as psychotherapists, all asking thoughtful, searching questions.

One participant asked this question:

My immediate, internal response was, "When it's hard, it's working."

I laughed at myself, because of course it doesn't have to be hard to work.

Or does it?

Since then, I've been wondering about what makes it feel hard and why I'm so sure that's a good thing.

I think it's because I don't hear hard as a negative. To me...

Hard doesn't mean bad. Hard means growth. Hard means healing.

Hard means discovering something about myself that can be challenging to hear and finding that I can survive knowing it and be more human for it.

I've spent much of my life learning that I can do hard things. More than that, I've learnt that the hardest things have often turned out to be the most liberating.

Image contributed by Audrey Boss

The conversations I wanted to avoid. The truths I resisted. The feedback that hurt and that I haven't wanted to own. The steps I didn't want to take. The grief I thought would swallow me whole. The relationships that asked more of me than I thought I had to give. Staying when I wanted to run away.

Those experiences have usually shaped me in positive ways.

So when that question came, I felt excited.

It felt like permission.

Permission to be completely honest about what we're inviting people into.

Permission to stop talking about modules and assignments and theories and instead talk about what the experience of training at Homa might actually feel like.

Because the truth is, we haven't designed the Homa training to be comfortable. We've designed it to be transformative.

And transformation often feels hard.

It's not that we enjoy making things difficult, but it seems to us that there is no path to becoming a deeply relational therapist and a safe enough pair of hands for our clients that doesn't first ask us to become more deeply relational with ourselves and each other.

What is most divisive?

Another question that was asked was, "What is most divisive?"

"Meeting difference. Especially when that difference is shaped by race and the realities of racism."

Similar dynamics can emerge when we meet difference in other forms.

Conversations about sex, ability, class, sexuality, gender identity, faith, neurodivergence or other differences between people can evoke similar feelings.

Whenever we're invited to recognise both the pain that exists in the world and the ways we have been shaped by the systems that create it, we are likely to encounter discomfort.

At Homa we have seen that it is conversations about race and racism that most consistently evoke the deepest shame, defensiveness and division.

White trainees arrive genuinely wanting to challenge the ways they unconsciously participate in racism and in systems that disadvantage and harm people from the Global Majority. They want to become anti-racist therapists. That intention is real.

But wanting to challenge racism and actually encountering our own whiteness are very different things.

Whiteness has a remarkable ability to remain invisible to the people who inhabit it.

Most white people haven't had to think of ourselves as white. We've simply experienced ourselves as... people. So when our whiteness is named, when we begin to recognise the privileges we didn't ask for but have nonetheless inherited, the ways we have unconsciously participated in systems that centre and protect us, or the harm we can cause through what we haven't yet learned to be aware of, it can feel profoundly uncomfortable.

Not because we are bad people. But because meeting our whiteness asks us to rethink the story we have told ourselves about who we are.

And that work doesn't happen in theory.

It happens in the room, in relationship.

It happens when we meet the impact of something we've said or done.

It happens when we realise that our good intentions don't protect other people from harm.

That's the moment the real work begins.

And then something happens.

Someone says something challenging.

A trainee receives feedback from a fellow trainee or a tutor.

And shame arrives.

Shame is sneaky.

It tells us we are bad instead of helping us see that we have done something that needs attention.

It whispers that we should defend ourselves.

Sometimes shame tells us it's someone else's fault. That it's because of the way the tutors responded, or the demands they make.

Sometimes it tells us that the tutors facilitating the conversation in the wrong way, that they are not kind enough, or calm enough.

Sometimes trainees become very quiet.

Sometimes they disappear into self-hatred.

Occasionally they leave the room.

Sometimes they leave the course.

None of these responses make anyone a bad person. They are deeply human reactions to discomfort, since most of us were never taught how to recognise our shame without either denying it, projecting it onto others, or drowning in it.

We were never shown how to move through it, to make amends where necessary, learn to do better and to look outwards towards others.

Yet this, perhaps more than anything else, is the work of becoming a therapist.

Can I discover something difficult about myself and stay present?

Can I bear the discomfort without making somebody else carry it?

Can I learn and repair rather than defend?

Can I remain connected to myself and to the person in front of me?

That isn't only anti-racist practice.

It's therapeutic practice.

And maybe it's also what it means to be a "good" person.

For trainees from the Global Majority, the challenge is differently HARD.

Although we're working towards a 50/50 Global Majority and white trainee intake by 2027, our Global Majority trainees are still in the minority right now.

This makes the experience of training hard.

It means that they will experience whiteness in the group, as they do in the world.

Microaggressions. Othering. Carelessness. Offensive and thoughtless behaviours and language.

They realise that this place they hoped might feel different still asks them to carry the emotional labour of other people's learning.

That is exhausting.

It's very HARD.

The racism doesn't disappear because we take it seriously at Homa, or because people have good intentions.

Not brushing it under the carpet, not looking away, doesn't make it easier to deal with.

That's what it's like when it's hard.

Our job is not to pretend that it isn't hard.

Our job is to keep making the training room somewhere that those experiences can be recognised, understood and held.

Being part of a training group is HARD

It's hard training at Homa because we are in a group.

Groups are funny things.

A training group is never just a training group.

Soon enough someone reminds us of a parent whose love felt conditional.

Someone else reminds us of the teacher who bullied us or never really saw us.

Another person reminds us of the sibling we could never compete with.

Before we know it, we're falling into the reactions and coping strategies that have helped us survive for a lifetime.

The reactions and strategies aren't wrong. In fact, they were often brilliantly adaptive.

The problem is they keep us in the same old place, wanting agency and feeling powerless. The coping strategies offer us sticking plasters rather than healing and growth.

Homa asks trainees, gently but persistently, to notice when they're stuck in the old reactive patterns, or reaching for the sticking plaster.

That isn't always easy. It can feel very hard.

Being in relationship with power is hard.

In groups, power begins to organise itself in familiar ways.

It's hard when tutors exercise authority, because so many of us have experienced authority as something controlling, humiliating or unsafe. Responsible power can still feel frightening.

Equally, it's hard when tutors don't step into their authority. Without it, people don't feel held.

Containment matters. Being held matters.

Like good parents, good therapists and good teachers, we are constantly trying to find that place between exercising too much power and too little. As tutors we are continually grappling with the truth of power over and power with.

And yes, sometimes we get it wrong.

We become frustrated. We misjudge. We misunderstand. We make mistakes.

We expect tutors at Homa to be accountable, not perfect.

When we cause harm, we want to hear about it. We want to understand the impact we have had. We want to repair wherever repair is possible.

Repair is one of the most important therapeutic skills there is. We would be hypocrites as tutors if we expected trainees to learn it while refusing to practise it ourselves.

And sometimes we stand by our decisions and the power we exercise, even when it's not popular, even when it feels hard to take.

Sometimes training is hard simply because life is hard.

We explore Childhood Sexual Abuse. Suicide. Addiction. Death. Grief. Trauma.

These aren't academic topics.

People's bodies remember.

People's histories are in the room.

Sometimes all we can do is be together so that someone does not to have to carry those memories alone.

Trainees arrive at Homa wanting to learn how to be therapists.

They expect theory and skills practice and case discussions, and they get all of that.

But they also discover that much of the learning happens outside the moments that look like teaching or practice.

Theory, skills practice, diads, triads, they all matter, but so does every conversation, every group process, every moment of discomfort, every invitation to reflect and every relationship they find themselves in.

The course doesn't simply teach psychotherapy. It asks people to live it.

Carl Rogers spoke about Unconditional Positive Regard.

It's a beautiful notion. It is also an extraordinarily demanding practice.

How can I offer a client unconditional positive regard if I cannot extend it towards myself?

How can I deeply accept my clients if I spend my life rejecting parts of who I am?

How can I accompany someone into their suffering if I spend my own life avoiding mine?

These capacities don't develop because we become technically competent. They develop because, over time, we become more able to know ourselves and who we are.

More able to stay.

More able to love without conditions.

More able to be alongside one another in the ordinary soup of everyday relationships.

Training at Homa is HARD, yes, and it can also be enriching and even fun

We think carefully about creating experiences rather than simply delivering lectures. We take great care to create resources that are engaging and accessible.

We teach through music, movement, film and art.

Sometimes outdoors.

Sometimes with lots of laughter.

PowerPoint and books have their place, of course, they help us learn. But people are changed through experience and connection.

At Homa care about creating beautiful spaces to learn in, with fresh flowers and well cared for plants.

There's a kitchen filled with good teas and coffee, fresh fruit, chocolate biscuits and oatcakes for tea breaks and ice lollies in the freezer when it's hot.

These are not incidental. They are another way of saying to our tutors and trainees:

"You matter; your comfort matters; we thought about you before you arrived."

Therapist self-care isn't just a module at Homa. It's part of the culture.

We make time and space for comfort, for rest and for play.

As tutors we teach together because it's much more satisfying and fun and we are more accountable together than alone.

We support one another. Challenge one another. Laugh together.

Many of us have known each other for decades.

We're a family.

So yes, training at Homa can be HARD

Not because we believe suffering is somehow virtuous, but because growth and healing ask something of us; to loosen our grip on certainty.

To become curious about ourselves.

To stay in relationship when every instinct tells us to run.

To discover that we are more resilient, more loving and more capable of repair than we imagined.

We ask our trainees to have skin in the game from the very beginning.

We ask them to question what they know.

To listen when they disagree.

Nobody is cancelled. Everyone is expected to remain accountable.

And along the way, we all begin to change, trainees and tutors.

Homa trainees grow into the psychotherapists they dream of being, not just because we've taught them the theories and skills, but because they've become more capable of meeting themselves and each other.

In the end, that is what psychotherapy asks of all of us.

So if you're wondering what it's like when it's HARD, all of this is my (rather long!) honest answer.

If that sounds like the kind of hard you're ready for, we'd love you to join us.

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Come on the next Introductory Workshop - see dates HERE