Jen Swan

Jen Swan (they/them) is a Registered Mental Health Social Worker and accredited Medicare provider with more than three decades of experience across community mental health, counselling, youth work, bereavement support, and social justice advocacy. Based in Bendigo on unceded Dja Dja Warrung Country, Jen has been in independent practice since 2012, offering individual counselling to adults navigating a wide range of life experiences and challenges.

Jen's practice is grounded in Narrative Therapy and Parts Work (Internal Family Systems), approaches that explore how the stories we hold about ourselves and the world shape our lives — and how those stories can be retold. Jen works within a social work framework using counselling approaches that are trauma-informed, lived-experience centred, and locate problems through an anti-oppressive lens. Jen recognises that we are all influenced by multiple ideas and practices, and that these have real effects in our lives — and hopes that conversations in session can create a safer place to stand, catch your breath, and re-negotiate your relationship with those pressures.

Jen particularly enjoys working with folks who want to step away from the pressures of 'normativity' to embrace their own unique and diverse ways of loving and thinking, and works in ways that open space to explore relationships with gender, sexuality, and identity.

In 2026, Jen became a certified Advanced Plural Competent Therapist with the Plural Association, reflecting their commitment to working skillfully and respectfully with people with plural and dissociative experiences. Jen is also a member of AusPATH, the Australian Professional Association for Trans Health.

Jen brings specialist knowledge across a diverse range of contexts, including:

• Individual counselling and group work
• Trauma, violence, and abuse
• Gender, sexuality, and queer experience
• Grief and bereavement
• Homelessness and housing instability
• First Nations community-informed practice
• Plurality and dissociation
• Mental health and wellbeing
• Reintegration support for people exiting the justice system

Jen's career spans more than thirty years of frontline social work and community practice. Early roles included youth work in homelessness services, support for young mothers, and advocacy for women exiting prison. Jen has worked alongside Indigenous communities — including a placement at a remote Northern Territory outstation — and within First Nations-led organisations, bringing deep respect for cultural humility and anti-racist practice to all their work.

From 2010 to 2012, Jen worked as a Bereavement Counsellor with SIDS & Kids Victoria in the Grampians region, supporting families affected by the death of a child, and designing programmes for bereaved siblings. Prior to that, Jen held a leadership role managing the Personal Helpers and Mentors (PHaMs) program at Anglicare SA, overseeing a team and coordinating therapeutic group work grounded in narrative and Indigenous perspectives.

Jen has also supervised Bachelor and Master of Social Work students on placement through Flinders University and NEAMI National, and has contributed as a guest lecturer and conference presenter, including a keynote address at the Marked for Life Reintegration Puzzle Conference and presentations at the International Narrative Therapy Conference and Dulwich Centre Summer Schools.

Jen is a published contributor to the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work:

• "Quiet or Shy when we prefer to be, but always resisting Silencing" (2018) — A co-researched collective narrative practice project gathering multi-storied descriptions and understandings of the preferences, experiences, histories, and effects of quietness and shyness in people's lives.
• "Creating preferred family trees: Adjusting the recipe of collective narrative practices" (2016) — Solo-authored paper exploring adaptations to collective narrative methods.
• "The Squid Group: Narrative practice peer worker support, supervision, superpowers, politics and more!"(2017) — Describing the work of a narratively informed peer mental health support group in Adelaide, including its history, key principles, and distinctive practices.
• "Elizabeth Tree of Life Women's Group Collective Document" (2010) — A group document arising from Jen's collective narrative work with women at Anglicare SA.

• Advanced Plural Competent Therapist — Plural Association (2026)
• Master of Narrative Therapy and Community Work — University of Melbourne / Dulwich Centre (2015)
• Master of Social Work — Flinders University (2010)
• International Training and Supervision Program: Collective Narrative Practices — Dulwich Centre (2009)
• Bachelor of Visual Art — University of South Australia (2002)

• Registered Mental Health Social Worker
• Registered Medicare Provider
• Member, Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW)
• Member, AusPATH
• Advanced Plural Competent Therapist, Plural Association

Jen's family migrated from Scotland and Wales, and Jen was born on Wangal and Wategoro Country (Sydney). They are now practising on unceded Dja Dja Warrung (Djaara) Country in Bendigo, and hope that their work can contribute, in some small way, to acknowledging the history and ongoing contributions of the Elders, Community Members, and Ancestors of this place.