Facilitated Communities of Learning Events: (CPD)
The development of individual or collective writing fragments:
1. Communities of Learning:
Learning occurs not in isolation but in the spaces between us—where vulnerability meets wisdom, where questions find not answers but better questions. We do not see our places; we survive them, together, through the difficult work of mutual recognition. The path from learning to understanding becomes authentic only when we risk genuine expression, when we speak not from certainty but from the edges of what we almost know. These facilitated communities offer not solutions but temporary shelters: ethical spaces where professional development becomes less about acquisition and more about dispossession of certainties. Contact us with your specific training, supervision or learning needs, and we will work alongside you or your organisation to craft bespoke events that honour both the impossibility and necessity of genuine learning—events that remain unfinished, inconclusive, yet somehow sustaining in their incompleteness.
2. Exploring Identity Through Writing:
In this group, participants will explore the intricate layers of identity, including race, culture, and personal history. Guided by reflective writing prompts, we’ll uncover and articulate the unspoken narratives that shape our lives. This process fosters understanding and empathy, which are crucial for personal growth and professional inclusivity. Each session encourages the development of both individual and collective writing fragments, building a mosaic of shared experiences. "Writing is like finding yourself," Virginia Woolf once mused, and here, we embrace that journey earnestly. Drawing from previous sessions on race and mental health, we transform writing into a sanctuary for dialogue and self-discovery.
3. Healing Justice Through Words:
Tailored for those navigating the turbulent waters of mental health and depression, this group employs writing as a therapeutic tool. Participants explore their emotional landscapes through structured sessions, transforming pain into prose and uncertainty into clarity. The process enables the creation and sharing of personal and group writing fragments, facilitating a mutual healing journey. Woolf’s belief that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" underscores our emphasis on creating a safe, supportive space for each writer. Past themes have included mental health and performance poetry, bridging inner turmoil with creative expression.
4. Professional Development and Creative Articulation:
Focused on individuals in academia or any professional realm, this group hones the craft of proposal writing and professional narratives. Participants refine their skills in creating compelling, coherent, and persuasive texts vital for career advancement and scholarly success. The group fosters a collaborative spirit while enhancing personal expertise by developing individual and collective writing fragments. Virginia Woolf said, "Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written largely in his works." This group channels that sentiment, utilising reflexive writing techniques to enhance the clarity and impact of professional documents. Previous sessions covered PhD proposal writing and race, bridging the gap between personal experience and professional articulation. Each group draws on the dynamic interplay of introspection and expression, reflecting Didion's reflective yet piercing narrative style. Whether your goal is personal elucidation or professional refinement, these tailored sessions promise a profound journey into the heart of your own story, culminating in a poignant collection of writing fragments that tell a cohesive, collective narrative.
Please complete the contact form on this website for further information on joining (a (w) riting group.
"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human condition.
A Writer's Diary
Virginia Woolf
Facilitated Communities of Learning Events: (CPD)
TA101: Strangers to Ourselves: Introducing TA101
“From a certain point onward, there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”
— Franz Kafka,
The Zürau Aphorisms, Aphorism 5
Strangers to Ourselves: Introducing TA101
A two-day course in Transactional Analysis for those who have never quite felt at home in their own scripts.
In the context of TA101, this quote underscores the transformative process of recognising and understanding the deep-seated scripts and roles we've unconsciously adopted. It invites participants to reach that pivotal point of no return, where genuine self-exploration begins, and the journey toward authentic selfhood is embraced. So we do not find our places; we survive them. And in that survival, we are haunted by voices we didn’t choose, by roles we never agreed to, by the silent contracts we made in childhood to stay safe, loved, or invisible. TA101 is a beginning, but not to certainty. It is a structured encounter with the foundations of Transactional Analysis—and an unstructured, sometimes disquieting return to the self shaped by absence, adaptation, and unspoken inheritance.
Over two days, we explore ego states, transactions, life positions, and psychological games—not to tidy the self, but to ask: Whose life is this? What am I still apologising for? Who do I become to be accepted? In TA, we understand scripts as unconscious life plans formed early and enacted often—strategies for survival that persist long after the situations that required them have passed.
But scripts are not only personal. They are cultural, historical, and collective in nature. Beneath the surface of individual choices lie the myths we inherit, the archetypes we repeat. What Jung called the collective unconscious, TA recognises as cultural scripting: shared expectations about how we should live, who we should be, and what must be sacrificed along the way. These scripts are not simply remembered—they haunt. Haunting, here, is not about ghosts, but about unfinished meanings. The parts of ourselves and our histories that remain unresolved, unnamed, and ungrieved. Songs like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or 4 Non Blondes’ What’s Up? do not just reflect confusion; they articulate the haunting of unanswered questions. Their refrains echo the unspoken: What was lost in becoming legible? What did I say to be seen?
TA101 does not offer closure. It provides a pause. A space to reflect not as self-improvement, but as self-reclaiming. It is an invitation to meet the stranger who has been living your life when you weren’t paying attention—and to listen, without needing to resolve. This is not training as usual. No performance. No prerequisites. Just facilitated, spacious curiosity. A beginning that values not-knowing as a kind of wisdom.
TA101 is available in-person, online, or in blended formats. It is delivered across individual, group, and organisational contexts—including education, health and social care, NGOs, and international teams. Because wherever people live, love, or labour, stories are being lived out—and some of them are waiting to be rewritten.
TA101: A recognised certificate course.
A beginning that doesn’t pretend to be an end, only the start of listening more closely to the stranger, and the haunting, within.
Writing #OurSelves: A Collective for Diverse Realities within Communities of Praxis: The Black Edition
“As subjects, people have the right to define their own reality, establish their own identities, name their history.”
— bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989)
How do we write from spaces never designed for our truths? We survive them—and in surviving, might yet transform them. Cultural praxis—the lived embodiment of theoretical understanding through cultural action and reflection—shapes our diverse realities of identity, but what happens when these realities collide with institutional expectations? When whiteness moves through professional spaces like invisible weather, what storms gather in its wake? When silence masquerades as professionalism, whose voices remain unheard? As Lorde (1984) reminds us, "I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood" (p. 40).
For whom do we first write, if not ourselves? What act of reclamation occurs when we refuse to perform our wounds for academic consumption? How might publication adhere to relational ethics that challenge the violence of silence? Baldwin (1962) knew that "not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced" (p. 8)—but what changes when the facing becomes writing? What emerges when subterranean voices rise, when we position ourselves as vulnerable observers implicated in the very narratives we construct? Is the act of writing both witness and testimony, and how might it resist the extractive gaze that would turn our experiences into data?
Over eight sessions, we'll employ a saccading approach—sharing diary extracts, notes, photographs—learning from one another to write for performance, for therapeutic process. What family myths must we remember, and what myths must we unmake? How do we negotiate contracts that honour rather than constrain? Through Substack, we'll create a collaborative archive of what Butler (1993) might call "the ploughing under"—the breaking open of ground that "makes space for what was never meant to grow in such soil" (p. 228). When publication transforms experience into evidence, how do we retain ownership of our narratives? This space offers not just community but the radical possibility of writing ourselves into existence on our terms. As Woolf (1929) observed, "For most of history, Anonymous was a woman" (p. 51)—and how many other identities remain unnamed, unexamined in our practices? How might we curate our experiences for a publication that refuses to be packaged for consumption, that insists on the integrity of the voice behind every word?
References:
Baldwin, J. (1962). As much truth as one can bear. The New York Times Book Review, p. 8.
Butler, O. (1993). Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows.
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press.
Woolf, V. (1929). A room of one's own. Hogarth Press.
CTA Writing Groups
Writing & Clinical Supervision Sessions: TA Practice & Thinking
June 2025 – April 2026 | Online
“We do not find our places in therapeutic practice; we survive them.”
In these six bi-monthly gatherings, we take seriously the idea that supervision is not about correction but about staying with the trouble, where theory meets the untheorisable and writing becomes a form of listening. This is a space for TA practitioners who feel the ache of what doesn’t fit, who are drawn less to mastery than to meaning. Each session holds open a possibility—unfinished, sometimes unbearable—that supervision can be a kind of companionship in survival. The emphasis is less on knowing and more on noticing; less on solution, more on the sediment of experience. If you are preparing for CTA exams, reimagining your practice, or simply looking for a way of thinking that doesn’t tidy things too quickly, you might belong here. We are not here to refine your certainty. We are here to wonder how we go on.
- 6 bi-monthly sessions (3 hours each)
- Last Thursday of the month, 09:00–12:00 GMT
- Philosophical supervision that sustains curiosity over correction
- A community that commits to leaving no one behind, through cascading learning support available with an enabling environment
For:
– CTA candidates preparing for written examinations
– Qualified TAs seeking rich peer supervision
– Practitioners exploring theory–practice integration
– Anyone interested in the literary dimension of therapeutic work
Limited to 12 participants. A small circle where thought is allowed to falter—before it finds form.
Further Information on these learning opportunities, dates, delivery options & registration [complete contact form and/or email]
✉️ Enquiries: salma@bricolage.scot
Writings (selected publications)
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." - Proust
Moutsou, C., & Siddique, S. (2024). Lying and truth-telling on the couch: The sense of touch in the consulting room. In C. Moutsou (Ed.), Dialogues between Psychoanalysis and Architecture: The relational space of the consulting room through the senses (Chapter 3). Routledge Publications.
Siddique, S. (2024). Observing and Consulting in the Digital Aquarium. In C. Moutsou (Ed.), Dialogues between Psychoanalysis and Architecture: The relational space of the consulting room through the senses (Chapter 10). Routledge Publications.
Siddique, S (2024) A Psychoanalytic Anthropological Exploration of Tracing the Singularity of Things and (Re)membering Fieldwork Nuances - (preparing for publication).
Siddique, S.,& V.R.Dominguez (2021). Anthropology in the Consulting Room: An Interview with Salma Siddique by Virginia R. Dominguez. American Anthropologist, 123 (1), 179-183, 2021.
Siddique, S., (2017). Ellipses: Cultural reflexivity in transactional analysis supervision. Transactional
Analysis Journal, 47 (2), pp.152-166.
Siddique, S., (2015). Bhaji on the Beach: Teaching Relational Ethics in India. Man in India: an international journal of anthropology.
Siddique, S.,(2012). Storymaking: In-between anthropological enquiry and Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy. European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, 14 (3), 249-259.
Siddique, S., (2011). Being in-between: The relevance of ethnography and auto-ethnography for psychotherapy research. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 11 (4), 310-316.
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