Reading & working group
Therapy & Law
An interdisciplinary reading & working group for people interested in paradigm shifts, institutional change, and the places where therapeutic and legal worlds meet.
About the group
Where care and law meet
Therapy and law repeatedly encounter the same human experiences — harm, safety, family, capacity, responsibility, repair, accountability, justice — while naming and responding to them in very different ways.
This group is an invitation to sit with that tension. We read across disciplines — drawing on critical legal studies, therapeutic jurisprudence, abolition theory, trauma-informed practice, decolonial thought, disability justice, and transformative justice — and we bring our own professional and personal experiences into the room.
This is not a training or a certification. It is a space for slow, rigorous thinking with others who are willing to let the reading complicate what they already think they know.
Questions we might take up
What we're curious about
What does it mean to "heal" within systems that produce harm? Can therapeutic frameworks be complicit in the very structures they claim to address?
How do legal categories — victim, offender, capacity, consent — shape what is thinkable in therapeutic contexts?
What would a genuinely trauma-informed legal system look like, and what are the limits of that framing?
What might abolitionist, decolonial, disability-justice, and transformative-justice traditions contribute to both therapeutic and legal practice?
What happens when therapeutic concepts enter legal systems — and legal categories enter therapeutic practice — particularly in family law, child protection, mental health law, and disability?
How do institutions determine whose knowledge counts as evidence — and whose experiences remain illegible?
What happens when systems designed to protect or help people become sources of harm themselves?
What would genuine paradigm change look like across the helping and legal professions?
These questions are intentionally unfinished. Part of the work of the group will be deciding together which questions most compel our sustained attention.
Who is this for?
You might belong here if…
This group is for people who hold — or are training toward — roles in therapy, counselling, social work, law, advocacy, community organizing, or adjacent fields, and who find themselves unsatisfied with the frameworks their disciplines offer. You do not need to be an academic or have expertise in both fields. Curiosity, a willingness to read carefully and stay with difficult questions, and respect for different forms of knowledge matter more than professional status.
We are especially interested in bringing together people who rarely have opportunities to think with one another: counsellors and therapists, lawyers and law students, researchers, advocates, community practitioners, people working within institutions, and people working to change them. For example:
- Therapists and counsellors working with clients who navigate legal systems
- Lawyers and advocates who want to think more carefully about trauma, care, and relational practice
- Social workers, doulas, and community practitioners at the intersection of care and institutional power
- Graduate students and researchers working across these fields
- Anyone who has found themselves asking: is there another way?
In formation
Express your interest →
The first iteration of Therapy & Law is currently being organized. If this conversation interests you — whether you would like to join the reading group, suggest a text or question, contribute your professional or lived perspective, or imagine a future collaboration — we would love to hear from you.
My intention is for this to be a small, ongoing group: intimate enough for real conversation, durable enough to build something together over time. Meetings will likely be in-person in Victoria, BC, with the possibility for some folx to join virtually.
The initial format, readings, meeting rhythm, and areas of focus will be shaped in conversation with those who gather. If you express interest, we will be in touch to share more and to learn what you're hoping for. We hope you join us!
Express your interest
I'd love to hear from you
Fill in the form below and we'll be in touch. There's no obligation — just a conversation about whether this might be a good fit.