Co‐Creating a Fifth Province: A Spiritual, Indigenous and Systemic Space of Practices in an Irish Context

ABSTRACT This paper shows the journey of the author through her engagements with her own Indigenous traditions, literature and systemic practices within Ireland. Initially, this journey was undertaken to deconstruct the hold of an Anglo–American–European orientation within the family therapy field in the early 1980s. Given the country's long 800‐year history of colonisation by the English, the work of the author and her early colleagues was (a) to insert an Irish way of ‘seeing’ and ‘speaking’ in order to (b) deconstruct colonial traces in our culture and to (c) de‐pathologise the offerings of clients who sought therapeutic help or indeed were mandated to attend. Eventually, the metaphor of the fifth province will also be shown to open itself to the author's spiritual practices and to a way of Being in therapeutic conversations.