Working with Intersectionality
Coreen Bernard
Art Psychotherapist, NHS School-Based Services
July 14, 2026
Audio
About this Episode
Art psychotherapist Coreen Bernard works inside NHS school-based services, where the children carry trauma and the adults around them carry it too. This conversation is about the model she is building to hold both.
We get into Holding Space, her reflective practice approach for staff in caring roles, and why the hardest part is not the clinical thinking but getting a budget-squeezed school to say yes. We talk about what changes in the room when a client sees a therapist who looks and sounds like them, and what gets lost when they do not.
Then we go where a lot of training stops short: intersectionality, the fear of asking the wrong question, decolonising practice, and what a non-saviour approach to working across cultures actually looks like.
Coreen Bernard
Art Psychotherapist, NHS School-Based Services
Coreen Bernard is a London-based art psychotherapist working in NHS school-based interventions, with a specialism in children and young people's mental health. She is developing Holding Space, a reflective practice model for staff in caring roles, built from her own work supporting teachers and support staff through vicarious trauma and burnout.
She trained over four years part-time, following a BA in Art and Design with a Master's in art psychotherapy. As a Black British Caribbean practitioner, she works closely with questions of representation, intersectionality and cultural humility, and is heading to Ghana to work alongside a clinical psychology team across rehabilitation, psychiatric and community outreach settings.
What You'll learn
- How to build a reflective practice model for staff carrying vicarious trauma, and how to make the case to a school that says it cannot afford one.
- What actually shifts in the therapeutic alliance when a client sees someone who looks and speaks like them, and where unexamined assumptions quietly break the connection.
- How to work with intersectionality and difference when your own training barely touched it, and how to move past the fear of getting it wrong.
- Practical ways to demystify art psychotherapy for parents, carers and whole-school communities without breaching confidentiality.
- What a grounded, non-saviour approach to cross-cultural and decolonised practice looks like in real settings.