Editorial Lizette Nolte “What I most regret ed were my silences ... and there are so many silences to


be broken” Audre Lorde


I fi rst encountered systemic thinking


when, recently qualifi ed, I accepted a job as a clinical psychologist in a team that was strongly systemically orientated and ran a vibrant systemic journal club. T is was the early 1990s in South Africa and a time of incredible political transformation, including a reckoning with the history and ongoing impact of Apartheid. I remember feeling surprised and grateful for the ways in which family and systemic thinking, with its focus on relationships and context, managed to include the political. T is became a resource for me in navigating the complex political contexts of my own life and work. Arriving in the UK in the mid-90s,


many exciting new opportunities opened up for exploring systemic thinking. During this time, I was particularly ‘grabbed’ by the assertion by the Just T erapy group (Waldegrave et al., 2003) that hearing stories of oppression, inequality and exclusion within the private confi nes of the therapy room and not publicly speaking out about these oppressions was unethical, a perspective that has stayed with me ever since. Time passed and the political and


professional remained interlinked in my thinking, research and practice. However, I noticed recently how, over time, I had located my professional- political identity elsewhere, feeling more comfortable identifying at diff erent times as a narrative therapist, community psychologist or qualitative researcher, and more recently and more surprisingly, as clinical psychologist (see for example, Psychologists for Social Change), an identity I had in the past experienced as particularly apolitical. T e realisation


Context 164, August 2019


that I no longer sought guidance about how to integrate the professional and the political within the systemic fi eld evoked a sense of sadness and loss in me, took me back to my earlier relationship with systemic thinking and led to this special issue of Context. When initially thinking about whose


articles I would like to have read in such an issue, I turned to three therapists who have particularly informed my own thinking in relation to the political – they are Jim Wilson, David Denborough and Vikki Reynolds. Jim and Vikki kindly agreed to contribute articles to this issue, and David put me in touch with and supported the contribution from Hamilton Kennedy, and so I have chosen these three articles as introductory articles for three main areas in the issue: fi rstly, articles that highlight some of the many political contexts (both macro and micro) we fi nd ourselves in; secondly, counter-practices that challenge the impacts of these contexts; and fi nally, how we as therapists can sustain ourselves during challenging times.


How is the professional political? “We are caught in an inescapable


network of mutuality ... Whatever aff ects one directly aff ects all indirectly” Martin Luther King Jr.


In the fi rst collection of articles, we are


invited to consider how the professional is political in some very diff erent contexts, and are off ered helpful theoretical frameworks to use when considering how the political and professional intersect. T e political is considered both from a very personal and local position and from a more broad, macro-political position.


What we can do – counter-


practices for systemic therapists “It’s not like I don’t see the world. I am


not in denial. No. I really see it. T en I work really hard to make it be something else” Eve Ensler (2013, p. 184).


The articles in the second section


reconnect us with our determination, solidarity, advocacy; with our creativity and playfulness; and with fresh viewpoints and perspectives. These articles open up possibility and invite action.


Sustaining ourselves “It is in the shelter of each other that


the people live” Pádraig Ó Tuama (2016)


In the third section of the issue,


Vikki Reynolds and others suggest that “collective care” can sustain us through times where the political challenges us and our clients, and can enable us to practice in the “Zone of Fabulousness” (Reynolds, this issue).


The ‘big P’ political To end the issue, Gwyn Daniel


considers one ‘big P’ political context, here Palestine, through a systemic lens.


Art and photography enhance the


issue. The evocative front cover by internationally renowned Welsh artist, David Garner (http://www. davidgarnerartist.com, see full explanation below), generously made available for this issue, sets the scene, and Victoria Cantons (https://www. victoriacantons.com) and others add


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Editorial


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