West Norwood, SE27 0EQ
England

Email:  dawn.thibert@outlook.com

Dawn is a family therapist, systemic supervisor and doctoral candidate in systemic practice. She has forty years of professional practice in child, adolescent, adult, and forensic mental health, including fifteen years of child protection work as a social worker. She has been applying systemic thinking to her work since 1988 and she has worked in Local Authorities, and she is still working for the National Health Service. She is from a working-class background, which affected her owning my capabilities. 

She had a chapter published in a book in 1998 based on action research she did to improve women’s access to the day centre where she worked. She did not write for publication again until 2021 when she found her poetic voice in the process of applying for her doctorate. She has now written about working with young autistic people and intersectionality with being gay, trans, non-binary, and racialised. She has also co-written about setting up an expressive writing group as a way to decolonise expectations as what constitutes treatment in a child and adolescent service. 

Dawn has been a member of the steering group setting up and running conferences on systemic approaches to autism. She presented at the last conference about autism in forensic services with a colleague and they are writing articles based on this. She is involved in teaching, running workshops, marking, examining and supervising clinical placements for systemic trainees. Her doctoral research is focusing on pivotal moments in family therapy that get picked up by bodily sensations, which are hard to put into words. She is interested in different cultural understandings of this level of communication. She has had forty years of osteopathy treatment, and she is studying how to use this experience in her practice. She is using poetry in writing up her experiences during the research process using an evocative auto-ethnography style. She is becoming more interested in research, particularly the post post qualitative inquiries. She has attended the International and European congress of qualitative inquiry, online and in-person. She will be presenting at the European Congress in 2024. 

She is of English, French, Irish and Norwegian descent – White European, she is disconnected from her ancestry, which makes her lean towards nomadic methodology. She is an anti-racist White, queer, adoptive mother and a keen ballroom and Latin dancer.

Dawn Thibert Resources

• Thibert, Dawn (1998) Working with women.  In Barker, P. & Davidson, B. (eds) Psychiatric Nursing: Ethical Strife.  London, New York, Sydney, Auckland: Arnold
• Thibert, Dawn, (2021) The gift of feedback via video link.  Murmurations; Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice (13 February) www.murmurations.cloud, https://systemicflux.com/2021/02/13/gift-of-feedback-via-video-link/
• Thibert, Dawn (2022). Becoming braver through stanza format exploring intersecting identities beyond autistic. Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice, 4(2), 36-63. https://doi.org/10.28963/4.2.5
• Ragunathan, Thivvia & Thibert, Dawn Louise (2022). The Transformational Power of Expressive Writing. Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice, 5(2), 53-72. https://doi.org/10.28963/5.2.6
• Ahmed, Hibaq & Thibert, Dawn (2023) Reflections on Working with Autism in a Forensic Service. British Psychological Society Special Issue – forthcoming.