Founder Bea Mariam Killguss &

associate Dr. Salma Siddique

Third Space Practice is born out of a desire to provide a space for ethical presence, slow inquiry, and witnessing without rush to resolution. Our shared work draws on decades of experience across psychotherapy, anthropology, education, and post-conflict support, but more importantly, it is shaped by what we have learned from sitting with ourselves and others through uncertainty, contradiction, and systemic fracture.

We work alongside students, psychotherapists, journalists, human rights defenders, educators, medical personnel, NGO staff, and other vulnerable observers: those who witness what the world often prefers not to see. In the slow aftermath of crisis, in the persistence of structural violence, and within the silence that follows loss, our work focuses on how meaning continues to be made, quietly and against all odds.

We call this attuned empathic inquiry: a way of listening that makes room for complexity, contradiction, and emergence. It acknowledges that presence is not passive and that staying with what unsettles us is its own kind of courage.

Associate Dr Salma Siddique

Psychotherapist · Clinical and Research Supervisor · Ethnographic Researcher · Specialist in Trauma and Intercultural Psychotherapy

Salma Siddique, psychotherapist, psychoanalytic practitioner, supervisor, and clinical anthropologist, finds herself returning, again and again, to the curious problem of the Observing I—that position where one who witnesses becomes, almost without noticing, witness to herself witnessing. It occurs to her to wonder what happens when the instrument of observation discovers, perhaps with some unease, that it is also the experiment.

Her encounters with lived experience have led her to a quiet recognition: we do not find our places; we survive them. Yet survival, she has come to understand, is never a solitary affair—it unfolds in those uncertain spaces where self meets other, where the ethnographic gaze encounters its own reflection and finds itself compelled to account for what it sees there, however reluctantly.

Between what we call fact and what we call fiction, between psychosocial, psychoanalytic interpretation and ethnographic encounter, her work moves in fragments that seem to resist the false comfort of resolution. Why, she wonders, do we persist in seeking coherence when fragmentation might offer a more honest accounting? The Observing I, she discovers, becomes implicated in its own observations, quietly transformed by the very act of witnessing what it cannot hope to fully comprehend.

As practitioner-researcher, Salma thinks simultaneously from positions that refuse neat categorisation—roles that reveal themselves not as discrete identities but as overlapping qualities of attention. Through the slow accumulation of insights from psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and the medical humanities, her investigations have begun to circle what she thinks of as a recursive mystery: how does lived experience come to know itself through us?

In those margins between imagination and empirical encounter, she has learned to expect not answers but perhaps better ways of being lost. It seems to her that the question is not whether we might map these territories of human experience, but whether we can bear to remain present while they, in their own time, map us—and what we might discover about ourselves in that necessary unknowing.

Who She Works With

Salma works with individuals and communities living through rupture, transition, or displacement. Her work is especially resonant for:

  • Those grappling with grief, dislocation, or complex trauma

  • Refugees and asylum-seeking communities

  • Clients facing anxiety, cultural conflict, or identity unravelling

  • Practitioners and educators seeking ethically grounded supervision

  • Researchers and clinicians navigating reflective and cross-cultural work

Her style is existential, relational, and non-diagnostic. She offers a space of rigour, reflection, and quiet ethical attention.

Credentials and Affiliations

Salma brings over three decades of experience in psychotherapy and anthropology. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews and has taught in a range of clinical and academic contexts, including at the University of Aberdeen, where she served as Programme Director. She is a supervisor, educator, and long-standing member of multiple international professional bodies.

Qualifications

  • PhD Social and Medical Anthropology, University of St Andrews

  • MSc Psychoanalytical Observation and Reflective Practice (Children and Adolescents)

  • MSc Professional Supervision (Psychotherapy)

  • MSc in Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy

  • Postgraduate Diploma in Counselling and Psychotherapy

  • Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

  • Postgraduate Certificate in Intercultural Therapy

  • Postgraduate Certificate in Vocational Information and Technology

  • MA (Hons) in Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews

  • CEDR Accredited Mediator

Professional Fellowships and Memberships include:

  • Fellow, Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI)

  • Fellow, Higher Education Academy (FHEA)

  • Fellow, Royal Society of Arts (FRSA)

  • United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP)

  • Counselling and Psychotherapy in Scotland (COSCA)

  • American Psychological Association (APA)

  • American Anthropological Association (AAA)

  • Institute of Transactional Analysis (ITA)

  • European Association of Transactional Analysis (EATA)

  • International Transactional Analysis Association (ITAA)

  • European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)

  • Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR)

  • Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA)

📎 Website: www.bricolage.scot
📩 Email: salma@bricolage.scot

Founder Bea Mariam Killguss

Psychoeducator · Lecturer · Research Supervisor

Bea Mariam Killguss works with individuals and communities navigating layered, often unnameable transitions -existential, cultural, and political. Her work is grounded in existential psychotherapy, liberation psychology, post-theological reflection, and decolonial critique. She offers a practice shaped less by intervention than by witnessing, relational depth, and critical thought.

She works especially with those living in fractured or liminal spaces: people carrying complex identities, navigating grief, cultural displacement, neurodivergence, institutional harm, or the disorientation of spiritual deconstruction. Her practice resists diagnostic reduction, instead holding space for people to move toward self-understanding on their own terms.

At the heart of Bea’s work is a belief in radical presence and ethical accompaniment, a willingness to sit with contradiction and not rush toward coherence. Her intellectual roots draw from existentialism, liberationist thought, and post-theological inquiry, but always remain grounded in embodied experience. She is less interested in categorising suffering than in attending to what it reveals about culture, belief, power, and our fragile longings for belonging.

Bea teaches at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling (NSPC) in London, where she lectures across postgraduate modules including:

  • Working with Ethnic, Racial, Religious, and Other Cultural Differences

  • Gender, Sex, and Sexuality

  • Families and Systems Therapy

  • Conflict and Reconciliation

  • Theories of Personal Change

  • Social, Cultural, and Ethical Issues

She also supervises postgraduate and doctoral students, with a focus on autoethnographic and interdisciplinary methodologies that link personal history with collective structures and political consciousness.

Her research explores autoethnography as epistemic resistance - a way to reframe trauma not as individual pathology but as a site of systemic entanglement and potential repair.

Bea’s work is deeply shaped by a lifetime of crossing both geographic and existential boundaries. Born in Pakistan to German humanitarian workers, she was raised between cultures, languages, and belief systems—educated in British and American boarding schools, shaped by evangelical frameworks, and later rethinking those foundations through critical, embodied inquiry. She has lived and worked across nine countries and five continents, and speaks English, German, French, and Urdu. These layered experiences form the core of her relational and political sensibility, bringing an acute awareness of in-betweenness, un-belonging, and the radical potential of reimagining home.

She now lives in South London with her Australian partner, two thoughtful and radically funny daughters, and a Spitz dog with big opinions. She believes in stories, silence, and rest - not as leisure, but as resistance to systems that confuse urgency with care.

Credentials & Professional Memberships

  • MSc, Existential Psychotherapy Studies

  • BTh. honours Theology

  • Lecturer & Research Supervisor, NSPC (London)

  • Member, Accrediting Board of Counsellors and Psychotherapists (ABCAP)

  • Member, European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS)

📎 NSPC Faculty Page
📩 beakillguss@me.com

“The speaking subject is in a perpetual state of exile: longing for a home, searching for an identity, but never fully at rest.”
— Julia Kristeva