Renew’s Graduate Celebration Day 2026 – In conversation with our special guest, Mamood Ahmad.
We’re delighted to be marking the graduation of our Diploma and BA students with a Celebration Day this week, where we’ll be honouring the achievements of our graduates and hearing from exciting speakers.
As part of our celebrations, we’ll be joined by therapist, lecturer and founder of The Anti-Discrimination Focus (#TADF) community, Mamood Ahmad, who will be delivering a guest lecture on “Harm Consciousness as an Antidote to Harm”, also discussing his most recent publication “A New Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy: Embedding Context, Diversity, and Equity into Practice”.
We caught up with Mamood for this week’s Renew Blog – read on to find out more about his journey.
Thanks for joining us, Mamood! Could you share what first drew you to psychotherapy and mental health work?
I became interested in this work as a client. I went to therapy at a crossroads in my life, when I needed to make important decisions and work through feelings associated with childhood, family, and societal harm and neglect, as well as confront my own contribution to harm. I also had to make decisions about boundaries in relationships, as well as what justice means.
Through this process, I worked with a male CBT therapist whose openness, appropriate self-disclosure, and honesty impressed me and demonstrated the value of therapy done well. At the same time, I was looking for a career change from IT, and I became passionate about the healing potential and agency that therapy can offer. The rest, as they say, is history.
You founded The Antidiscrimination Focus. What led you to create TADF, and what need were you hoping it would meet within the therapeutic profession?
I launched The Anti-Discrimination Focus (#TADF) as a community collaboration aimed at improving the initial standards of counselling and psychotherapy education in the UK. Despite long-standing recognition by academics and advocacy-oriented therapists, pressing concerns remained: issues of context, including social contexts, identity, culture, diversity, neurodivergence, embodiment, social justice and equity, had not sufficiently permeated initial training programmes. Furthermore, these elements were also not typically embedded in the foundational pillars of self-development and theory risking fragmentation and gaps in knowledge. The community was created to influence the culture of the profession and to develop a cost-effective solution to the problem. Without this, there is an increased risk of inadvertent harm to all clients and students, as well as increased tutor stress, particularly for those who are more vulnerable, marginalised, underrepresented or underserved.
Note: #TADF are looking for more advocates to join them. If you are interested please email newintro@tadf.co.uk
Where do you think the profession has made meaningful progress, and where do you feel there is still more work to do?
Over the past five years, there has been a growing number of therapists and students who are increasingly contextually aware, including in relation to the systems within the profession itself. More critical debates are now taking place about its future, particularly around access, cost, harm, marginalised communities, and the potential exploitation of therapists, for example through reliance on volunteers or low-cost labour while those in leadership or brokerage roles receive the financial benefits.
There are multiple strands that still need to progress, including fair pay, equitable access, debates about qualification hierarchies, and concerns about decontextualised practice, all of which can act as collective barriers to fairness in therapeutic services. We remain in a fragmented position where “context, difference, and EDI” are often treated as secondary considerations rather than being embedded across the curriculum as core elements of all training.
My aim is therefore to raise awareness through the curriculum and explore how this might catalyse broader progress across these areas. Up until now we haven’t had in my opinion, an accessible low-cost solution to progress this.
You’ll be delivering a session focused on your most recent publication, A New Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy: Embedding Context, Diversity, and Equity into Practice. What inspired you to write this book?
I was at a crossroads with #TADF community, as progress was slow and blocked for a number of years. It failed to generate large-scale interest among training providers. Considering other options, I revisited the idea I had in 2020 of creating a new format for introducing a counselling and psychotherapy book but was reluctant to pursue it due to the significant personal and familial energy it would require. Introductory books on counselling and psychotherapy shape the field’s foundational culture, and writing a new one could catalyse change at individual, training institute, and thus systemic levels. By mirroring the desired curriculum changes outlined in this book, it serves therapists, training providers, and standards bodies. It took two years to write, and so far, I am glad the work is paying off, with over twenty tutor advocates using the approach in training organisations and many more advocating for it, as well as several organisations fully adopting the model, the book, and its pedagogical approach. But there is still a huge amount of work to do.
The book introduces the importance of seeing the “client in context” and taking a whole-person approach. What does that mean in practical terms for therapists and trainees?
Although a person’s experience is centralised, it means taking account of the context within which experiences are formed. The wholeness solution recognises the dynamic interplay between inner, interpersonal, and contextual factors* in shaping experience, as well as how these dynamics are expressed in relationships and reflected in evolving curriculum, training, and practice.
The difference in my approach is that context is not separated out; it is part of the client’s whole experience (e.g., worldviews, home culture, diversity). I explicitly provide practical tools and skills for considering context in practice, rather than treating it as a vague or ambiguous concept. For example, contextual (WICKET) is defined as the intersection of worldviews, identities, lived contexts and cultures (individual, personal, structural, and sociocultural), embodiment (patterns and experiences), and time (e.g., intergenerational), which may be socially normative or different.
Why is accessible counselling, particularly in terms of cost, important?
Who has access to counselling and mental health services is a vital question of equity. There can be many barriers to access, such as cost, language, neurodiversity, childcare, and the availability of therapists who are proficient in working with clients’ whole lived experience. Traditionally, therapy has originated from normative middle-class assumptions rather than fully engaging with the richness of lived experience across different contexts, including the knowledge and ways of knowing that clients bring. Without equitable access, the poorest, most vulnerable, different and most marginalised in society will be overlooked impacting mortality and quality of life.
What do you hope participants will take away from your session with Renew?
I hope participants will develop a deeper awareness of harm and how we might bridge and repair divides, along with its impact on themselves, clients, groups, the planet, and the wider world. I hope that the term Relational Scope (as well as contextual empathy, pre-rupture, pre-empathy) will stick and become part of how we question who is afforded empathy and who may be dehumanised, and that it will be applied to self-development. It invites the question: how far can my empathy extend? And we do not pathologise, especially difference, or inadvertently convert people’s identities or beliefs to societal norms but instead support, affirm, and give agency to clients.
What advice would you give to someone at the beginning of their counselling or psychotherapy career?
Give yourself time to grow and access the opportunities you need. It often takes 3–9 months to start getting clients, and it can be helpful to use this “quiet” period to plan ahead so you do not feel dependent on narrow marketing options or as though you are putting all your eggs in one basket, for example, using social media, networking, or applications to counselling organisations.
Depending on the context and time elapsed, if you find that people are not drawn to your profile, or that clients are not staying for more than a couple of sessions, it may be an indicator to seek feedback. Seeking honest feedback from people who can be direct is often more useful than feedback that is simply supportive of your efforts. I remember doing this myself and I make sure I tell others about this possibility. We should all remain open to learning and maintain a beginner’s mind, regardless of our level of experience.
It is also important to remember that, although the market is changing, for example, with the rise of AI, for example. Although I do not believe a niche is essential, it can be useful for advocacy, meaning making and increasing visibility. For example, if you are working with domestic abuse, you might write articles or deliver training on the topic, become more widely recognised in that area, and gain access to opportunities within specialist domestic abuse counselling organisations.
Want to know more about training with us?
Whether you’re a Renew graduate just starting out in practice or you are many years into the work, Mamood’s words are a reminder to stay curious, question assumptions and keep people at the centre of our practice.
We’re so looking forward to welcoming him to our Celebration Day and to sharing the moment with our brilliant community of trainees, graduates and tutors.
If you’d like to find out more about training with Renew, please get in touch with Georgie Markwell and the training team via georgiemarkwell@renew.org.uk or 01245 264348.
