Meet Patrycja Toczek, a qualified social worker, accredited mental health social worker, and qualified family therapist with nearly two decades of experience across public and private mental health care settings. Her professional journey has encompassed psychiatric inpatient care, community mental health services, dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) groups, and therapeutic support for people affected by family violence and sexual assault.
“I have been working in mental health in both private and public settings for nearly 20 years, starting from a busy psychiatric inpatient unit in a very low socio-economic suburb of Melbourne, through many years working in a busy community team, running DBT groups in a private hospital, and spending the last few years therapeutically assisting victims of family violence and sexual assault,” Patrycja explains.
She started her counselling practice, Toczek Counselling, in 2020, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic. Her work takes a systemic approach to assist individuals, couples, and families with mental health and trauma-related conditions, relationship and interpersonal problems, to achieve individual goals and reduce barriers.
Patrycja’s work in interconnected areas of social work, including mental health, family services, family violence, housing, community-based organisations, not-for-profit services, and ethnospecific services, has shaped her perspective to a large extent.
“ Working across these areas has provided me with clinically sound experience and diversity of knowledge on how to navigate complexity,” she says.
Patrycja has also authored a book named Crypto Queen: You Are a Mark, which talks about the contemporary topic of online scamming, highlighting the dangers hiding in the online world as observed through the victims’ experience. She hopes this will help readers understand vulnerability through telling a story, reducing shame and recognising danger hiding in the online realm.
“My hope for this book is that it will help reduce the burden of shame and trauma attached to scamming, creating different points of understanding of the topic, raising awareness about the phenomenon and the impact it has on the victims,”- she explains.
Core Principles of Toczek Counselling
Patrycja’s work is grounded in trauma-informed care, recognizing that healing involves more than diagnostic criteria, as it needs a deeper understanding of what happened and the lived experience clients bring into the therapy room. Her work bridges the gap between clinical expertise and human connection by recognizing the need for safety and therapeutic collaboration in building trust necessary to establish a therapeutic alliance. This creates a necessary foundation for building a trusting relationship, enabling progress towards achieving individual goals and overcoming barriers.
Additionally, her experience as a multilingual practitioner provides her with a deeper level of understanding of individual experiences.
“Speaking and learning multiple languages has taught me that communication is about far more than words. Language carries culture, identity, family history, emotions, and an intrinsic sense of belonging,”- she says. “I understand that moving between cultures can bring both opportunities and challenges. It can involve adapting to different expectations, finding a sense of identity and belonging, and sometimes feeling that aspects of oneself are not fully understood by others.”
This multilingual experience has strengthened her ability to work with difference while remaining open and curious about new challenges. This has also helped her to develop a more dialectical perspective in which differences can be understood more holistically.
A Practice Embedded in Social Work
Patrycja’s practise is deeply rooted in social work values with an approach that can be best described as strength-based, client-centered and focused on individual empowerment.
Her approach is fundamentally more collaborative rather than prescriptive, recognising individuals’ existing strengths and that clients make their own informed choices, balancing individual decisions with dignity of risk.
“I strongly believe that clients and their families are experts in their own lives and decisions they make. My role is to facilitate informed conversation about choices they have, providing evidence–based tools and theory–based explanations to their experiences,”– she explains.
A strengths-based approach allows Patrycja to look beyond problems and difficulties to recognise the resilience, skills, and experiences individuals have developed while navigating adversity. By helping clients identify and draw on these existing strengths, she aims to support their confidence and capacity to address challenges in ways that align with their circumstances and aspirations.
Being client-centred also means that therapy is highly individualised rather than a “one-size-fits-all experience”. She always listens carefully to what matters to each person, respects their pace and priorities, and adapts her approach to their life circumstances, culture, relationships and goals.
Understanding Social Systems
Patrycja’s clinical training as a social worker and family therapist views individuals as strongly embedded in their social and relational context. A client’s difficulties rarely exist in isolation but are influenced by relationships, broader social structures, and socio-economic context.
Patrycja believes effective therapy requires mental healthcare professionals to understand the person in their environment, considering the quality of their relationships and social systems surrounding them.
She also explains that an individual’s experiences are often influenced by these broader influences; therefore, solutions and answers to some of those questions lie in understanding things like family dynamics, community and cultural influences, broader social expectations, psychosocial factors such as housing, financial situation, legal problems, etc.
As a social worker, Patrycja often thinks about what is happening in the client’s environment and how the environment is impacting the client’s quality of life, and how it might contribute to maintaining or alleviating an individual’s difficulties.
Making Mental Healthcare More Accessible
Over the years, Patrycja has witnessed the various barriers that can prevent people from accessing appropriate mental health support. These include the affordability of services, delays in early intervention, the stigma associated with mental health conditions, and systemic obstacles that make navigating the support system difficult.
In Australia, cost, waiting times, and stigma are the most significant barriers. She believes that having more supports available, easily accessible for diverse populations, recognising and applying early interventions, and making the system easier to navigate through the use of online platforms, apps, and group programs are just some of the ideas for improving accessibility to mental health programs. Reduction of stigma is an important part of it, especially in culturally and linguistically diverse communities that require a more individualised and targeted approach, addressing nuances of context and providing sensible and culturally appropriate interpretations.
Seeking Support is a Sign of Strength
Patrycja believes that admitting to having a bad day or mental health struggles does not mean someone is weak or there is something wrong with them. It means they have been through a difficult time and carried a burden that is too heavy to carry alone.
She suggests that working with mental health professionals can help people make sense of their experiences, understand their challenges, and find ways to ease that burden. With the right support, individuals can begin to move forward with greater clarity and continue working towards the goals that matter to them.
“You don’t have to have everything figured out before you seek support, and you do not need to wait till things become unbearable. Seeking professional support can be as simple as starting a meaningful, non-judgmental conversation over a cup of tea. Give it a go!”– she concludes.
“As humans, we all have our struggles in life; that is what makes us human.”
