Our Story

This collective and our project emerged from a series of workshops that we have been running, entitled When the Institution Harms. We recognised the need for people to gather together, to be in conversation and to be in recognition of one another. Our first in-person workshop was held in April 2026; the second in July 2026.

Again and again, people shared stories of being harmed by the very institutions they had hoped would support, teach, care for, employ, train, supervise, or protect them. Different people. Different settings. Different roles. Similar patterns.

These experiences might have felt personal, where harm was treated as an individual problem rather than a systemic one. But through the workshops, something became clear. People were not simply describing isolated incidents. They were loudly naming the structure. They were naming institutional harm.

The collective emerged from that recognition. It was formed because many people were carrying similar wounds alone, often believing they were the only ones, or that they had somehow failed to explain themselves clearly enough, remain calm enough, evidence enough, or endure enough.

We came together because isolation is one of the ways institutional harm survives. When people are separated from one another, the institution can treat each story as an exception. When people come together, these patterns become visible.

The collective is necessary because institutional harm is not only about one bad moment, one harmful tutor, one poor decision, or one failed process. It is about the repeated ways institutions protect themselves from accountability.

It is necessary because people need somewhere to name what happened without having their reality reduced, doubted, or translated into institutional language.

It is necessary because the counselling and psychotherapy field, like many caring professions, can reproduce harm while speaking the language of care, compassion, ethics, and repair.

It is necessary because people who have been harmed by institutions often need more than an apology. They need language. Witness. Protection. Connection. Accountability. Space to make sense of what happened. Space to stop carrying it alone.

This project is not about individual blame. It is about collective pattern recognition. It asks: what becomes possible when we stop treating institutional harm as a private wound and begin understanding it as a shared political, relational, and embodied reality?

Through our workshops and conversations, we have learned that institutional harm often follows a familiar pattern.

For many, this produces silence. People stop speaking, stop trusting, stop attending, stop applying, stop creating, stop asking for support, or stop believing that repair is possible.

What follows is silence, and withdrawal. A means for survival in an institution that was never meant for us.

This space has been created because many people are searching for somewhere to place what happened to them.

A place where institutional harm can be named without the risk of the experience being minimised. A place where Black feminist, decolonial, queer, disability justice, anti-racist, and survivor-centred knowledge can guide how we understand harm.

A place where people can see that their experiences are not isolated failures, but part of wider patterns that require collective attention. A place where repair is not reduced to apology, reputation management, or returning the institution to comfort.

A place where we can ask harder questions about power, care, accountability, and what it means to build institutions that do not require people to disappear in order to survive them.

Our hope is not only to document harm. Our hope is to build language and an archive for what has too often been made unspeakable.

Our hope is to create a shared space where people can recognise themselves, feel less alone, and begin to understand that what happened to them was not simply personal.

Our hope is to support deeper conversations about institutional accountability, especially within counselling, psychotherapy, training, supervision, education, and professional regulation.

Our hope is to imagine forms of repair that do not ask harmed people to carry the burden of institutional transformation by themselves.