About me

My name is Dương which means ‘ocean’ in Vietnamese so you can call me Dương or Ocean.   I am a Vietnamese-refugee settler living and working on Jagera, Turrbal and Yugambeh country (Brisbane/Logan).  I’m also cis gendered, queer, and living in a heterosexual partnership with two small children. My parents, siblings and I arrived in so-called Australia as ‘boat people’ in 1988. Trained as a social worker and narrative therapist, I spent 10 years working in NGOS in South-East Queensland, mostly in the anti-violence sector. Since 2018, I’ve been in my own alternative (private) practice. I’m also a writer, organiser, dreamer, abolitionist and basketball lover.

My approach

I believe we are never neutral, objective or value-free. My practice attempts to be de-colonising through working towards Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. As such, I recognise the ongoing colonial violence of the State and of medical, psychological, legal, religious and educational institutions. As a supervisor and facilitator, I see my task is to respectfully inquire and intently listen to the specific ways in which folks are experiencing and resisting violence. My approach is collaborative, relational and non-pathologising. My attention is to ethics; context; history; relationships; and personal, collective and cultural practices. 

My practice is informed by people who I have consulted with, survivors, community workers and artists in Magandjin. My practice has also been shaped by narrative therapy, response-based practice, intersectional feminism, prison abolition, Engaged Buddhism, queer theory, disability justice, body liberation and healing justice frameworks. I have a special interest in community accountability, transformative justice, prison abolition and building collective power and strategies to resist structural violence. I want to accompany individuals and groups who are seeking to find accountability and healing for their own participation in harmful systems. I work from the belief that no one is disposable, and that everyone is worthy of dignity.

Formal qualifications

Supervision

I provide clinical supervision and consultation to individuals and teams involved in a range of work that has social justice principles at its core. This includes counsellors, social workers, support workers, activists, and community organisers. 

My standard rate for individual supervision is $180+GST per session. Concessions are offered if you’re self-funding your sessions. Please contact me if you’d like to discuss rates for group or team supervision.

Conversations and questions at the heart of my practice

• How do we prioritise people’s dignity, autonomy and self-determination in contexts that recruit us into paternalism and social control? 
• How do we sustain ourselves when we are working in dehumanising systems? 
• How might we use our power and privilege to resist congoing colonisation and systems of violence. That is, how do we continue decentring State systems such as the mental health system, legal system, police system, Child Protection etc.)? 
• How do we know when we are colluding with practices of domination, criminialisation and genocide?   
• How do we not lose sight of the political nature of personal suffering? How might we steer clear from language that medicalises and sanitizes human suffering and obscures power, violence and history? 
• How do we nurture and amplify the voices of the oppressed in our work?
• Who benefits from our interventions? Who is excluded? 
• Whose knowledge is valued? Whose knowledge is subjugated? 
• What are the social, political and historical legacies and lineages that have informed me, and that I want to be informed by? 
• How do we understand and respond to problems collectively? 
• How do we resist binaries and stay with the tensions and complexities of our world? 
• How might we stay implicated in systems of violence? 
• How might a ‘long view of history’ support our current responses?