Dr Sarah T Nghidinwa

Teaching Fellow with Psychodynamic Spcialism

Biography

Background

Sarah Taati Nghidinwa’s work sits at the intersection of counselling and psychotherapy, psychosocial studies, and decolonial scholarship. Her research explores grief, identity, and the psychological impacts of racism and political violence, with a focus on how lived experience is shaped by power, history, and social location. Using narrative and decolonial qualitative methodologies, her work contributes to ethically and politically responsive approaches to therapeutic theory, practice, and training.

She is a Teaching Fellow in Counselling and Psychotherapy in the Counselling, Psychotherapy and Applied Social Sciences (CPASS) department at the University of Edinburgh. She contributes to professionally accredited postgraduate programmes through teaching, curriculum development, assessment, and academic supervision at Master’s and doctoral level. Her teaching and supervisory practice are informed by psychodynamic and relational approaches and underpinned by a strong commitment to anti-oppressive and decolonial pedagogy.

Nghidinwa completed her Doctorate in Psychotherapy and Counselling at the University of Edinburgh in 2024. Her doctoral thesis, The Mbwiti on the Grief Mattress: An Autohistoria-Teoría Voicing the Grief of Identities Fragmented by Whiteness, was approved for publication and advances creative, relational, and culturally situated approaches to understanding grief and identity within psychotherapy research. She has also contributed to psychosocial research on bereavement through a narrative inquiry project examining lived experiences of grief and loss.

Alongside her academic role, she maintains an active psychotherapy and clinical supervision practice. Her clinical experience spans counselling, psychotherapy, and clinical psychology contexts, including work with trauma, complex distress, anxiety, and depression across short- and long-term therapeutic settings. Her clinical and academic work are closely connected, particularly in relation to practitioner reflexivity, ethics, and the therapeutic encounter in social contexts shaped by inequality and change.

 

Qualifications

Doctorate in Psychotherapy and Counselling

PG Dip in Counselling (Interpersonal Dialogue)

Msc in Psychology

Bachelor of Arts (Psychology)

Postgraduate teaching

Master of Counselling / PG Dip in Counselling (Interpersonal Dialogue): https://www.ed.ac.uk/health/subject-areas/counselling/postgraduate-taught/placement-based-programmes/master-counselling-id

-  Ethics in Counselling Practice

- The Counselling Relationship: Theory, Practice and Process

- Developing Narratives of Self

- Difference, Diversity and Power

- From Two Person to Three Person to the Group: A Psychodynamic Perspective

- Psychological Vulnerabilities and Distress in Counselling Practice

- Transitions, Endings and Beginnings

 

Dpsychotherapy:  https://study.ed.ac.uk/programmes/postgraduate-taught/942-psychotherapy-and-counselling#details

- Practice Seminar

- Professional Accreditation and Personal Development

Research summary

  • Decolonial and narrative approaches to counselling and psychotherapy

  • Autohistoria-teoría (after Gloria Anzaldúa) and creative qualitative research methods

  • Grief, loss, and bereavement across the life course

  • Identity formation, subjectivity, and meaning-making in therapeutic contexts

  • Psychodynamic and psychosocial approaches to trauma and complex distress

  • Intersections between counselling, psychotherapy, and clinical psychology

Project activity

Cruse Scotland 2024-2025: Journeys of Grief: Understanding how people experience grief and how they navigate their loss.

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