In-Congress Workshop 5 - Representation in CBT: A Framework for Clinical and Systemic Practice

Representation within CBT is often reduced to a statistical exercise, focused on numerical diversity within teams or services. While commonly measured in this way, such approaches fail to capture how representation is experienced, enacted, and sustained within clinical and organisational systems.

In contexts where formal diversity or inclusion initiatives may be limited or contested, the Representation Model offers a framework for understanding how structural dynamics—such as leadership pathways, supervision practices, recruitment processes, and allocation of clinical labour—continue to shape engagement, psychological safety, and outcomes within CBT systems.

This workshop introduces the Representation Model and demonstrates its application across CBT practice, education, supervision, recruitment, and leadership. The model maps common failure points in representation, including absence, tokenism, and performative inclusion, and examines their impact on trust, engagement, power, and safety. Participants will explore how representation may stagnate at entry levels (“sticky floors”), remain absent from senior leadership (“glass ceilings”), or become symbolic rather than structural. The workshop will also address how misapplied notions of representation can result in the unequal distribution of clinical and emotional labour, such as routing clients from particular identity groups to a single clinician without adequate consideration of client choice, therapist consent, or professional impact.

Drawing on clinical, organisational, and educational examples, the workshop will examine how limited or performative representation contributes to disengagement, burnout, and experiences of marginalisation, including racial trauma. An intersectional lens will demonstrate how the model can be applied across protected characteristics without reducing representation to identity matching. Through applied mapping and structured reflection, participants will examine representation within their own contexts and identify what authentic representation looks like in day-to-day CBT practice, including recruitment decisions, leadership pathways, supervision cultures, curriculum design, and policy implementation.