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Since 2007, the Centre for Refugee Rights (Australia) has provided workshops on community development and refugee rights to refugees from Myanmar (Burma). Described herein is one, five-day counselling training programme, which was one component of the workshops, developed for participants from community based refugee organisations who were living in New Delhi and in Aizawl, Mizoram. The author presents an approach to teaching counselling, both within a workshop format, and a refugee context. The components of the counselling workshop are outlined, followed by the author's reflections on providing a counselling training in this context.

It is our aim to present gestalt therapy, formulated by Frederick S. Perls, to social workers in the hope that they might give some consideration to the issues gestalt therapy raises and utilize some of the techniques in their practice of casework and group work.

The authors argue that the phrase "feminist family therapy" suggests a compatibility between two bodies of knowledge and practice-feminism and family therapy -which they believe has not been adequately articulated. Accordingly, the field lacks a clear theoretical framework which could yield a consistent practice methodology reflective of both feminist and systemic/cybernetic understandings. While it is not yet clear that such a theoretical integration is possible-or even necessarily desirable-the authors explore the possibility that Bateson's concept of "double description" may provide the basis of such a model.