Our Approach

At ThirdSpacePractice, our approach is not defined by a single method or modality, but by a shared commitment to presence, reflection, and ethical engagement. We are less concerned with solving problems than with creating conditions for inquiry, repair, and meaning-making.

Rather than offering answers or expertise, we hold space for people to think, feel, and speak from the complexity of their experience - across roles, identities, systems, and stories. Our work lives in the tension between inner life and structural reality, personal memory and cultural inheritance, theory and practice.

Beneath it all are four guiding commitments that shape how we facilitate, teach, and accompany others.

  • Existential Grounding

    Existential approaches are about authentic, transformative change—something deeply personal rather than formulaic. They offer space to explore complexity, contradiction, and freedom: Who am I? What truly matters to me? What am I willing to choose?

    Rather than seeking quick fixes, existential practice invites reflection, responsibility, and the ability to tolerate ambiguity. It supports you in building a life that aligns with your values—even in the presence of uncertainty, loss, or fragmentation. It asks not for certainty, but for presence.

  • Trauma-Aware Systems Thinking

    We understand trauma not simply as an individual wound, but as something held in bodies, relationships, institutions, and lineages. Our approach is informed by trauma theory—but resists pathologising. We hold trauma as relational and systemic, not just intrapsychic.

    Rather than reactivating or analysing trauma, we explore its impact gently and collaboratively. Sessions prioritise safety, clarity, and pacing—while encouraging insight into how trauma may be shaping current experience, identity, and emotional life.

    This work is about becoming more present to oneself and not more “fixed.”

  • Liberatory Practice

    Liberation psychology challenges traditional Western models by recognising that personal pain often reflects social realities. It centres the lived experiences of those shaped by displacement, marginalisation, and structural violence.

    Drawing on thinkers like Ignacio Martín-Baró and Paulo Freire, this approach invites reflection on how power, privilege, and historical narratives shape the psyche. Through practices such as conscientisation, the recovery of historical memory, and critical witnessing, it supports people in reclaiming their stories with political and personal clarity.

    This is not therapy as adjustment. It is engagement. It is agency.

  • Relational Ethics

    We do not work from a position of detached expertise. We centre the ethics of mutuality, attunement, and accountability. Our relationships with clients, students, and collaborators are shaped by listening—not just to words, but to context, history, and silence.

    Relational ethics means being honest about power and complexity. It means staying present when things get uncomfortable. It means honouring boundaries without abandoning depth. In this way, our work holds both intimacy and rigour.

  • Facilitation as Inquiry

    We use facilitation not to deliver knowledge, but to co-create space for reflection. Inspired by Action Learning Sets and dialogical learning models, our groups are built around structured reflection, collective presence, and appreciative questioning.

    We do not enter as experts—we host spaces for real thought. Learning here is participatory, relational, and often transformative—not because of technique, but because of how people are seen, held, and invited into inquiry.

    We ask: What do you already know? And what becomes possible when others are truly listening?

  • Constancy and the Practice of Staying

    Constancy is not about perfection or professionalism—it is about presence over time. We believe in returning, staying, and accompanying others through dissonance, doubt, regression, or silence.

    In a culture obsessed with resolution and speed, constancy is radical. It offers the kind of relationship in which people don’t have to perform coherence, and where growth is permitted to be non-linear. It is the slow work of ethical support

Trauma decontextualised in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualised in a family looks like family traits. Trauma in a people looks like culture.
— Resmaa Menakem