Tamar Hopkins is a PACFA Reg.Certified Practising Gestalt Psychotherapist with a private clinical practice in Carlton. She welcomes clients from all ethnic, cultural and racial backgrounds, gender identities, neurodiversities, abilities and sexualities.

Tamar is a warm, respectful, and ethical practitioner who works inclusively with her clients to build self-compassion, awareness and deepen acceptance. Tamar seeks to create a non-judgemental, supportive environment that allows people to safely explore themselves and the relational patterns and field conditions that impact their lives. Tamar welcomes enquires from all people wishing to explore how external and structural conditions and internal patterns impact their relationship to themselves and others.

Gestalt psychotherapy is a client-centred, non-hierarchical, non-diagnostic therapy where clinicians work with their clients to build self acceptance and self awareness. The Gestalt therapist does not sit in judgement over their client, but co-creates a therapeutic relationship to support clients to deepen awareness through dialogue, phenomenological attunement, presence and confirmation.

As well as working with a broad range of clients, Tamar works specifically to support lawyers who are engaged in demanding, values-driven, justice work. Many people drawn to law and humanitarian work are deeply committed to their clients and to working against injustice and yet are exposed to sustained high workloads, complex trauma, and to working within systems that may rarely provide justice and may themselves be harmful. These systems can trigger unexamined relational patterns within lawyers (such as: it is my fault that this injustice exist, it is my fault that I am so exhausted, I have to be perfect) and result in the internalisation of harm that they and their clients are exposed to.

Through individual psychotherapy and group reflective practice Tamar supports lawyers and others to develop greater self and system awareness, solidarity and resilience within harmful systems, helping to reduce the risks of burnout, depression, and secondary trauma. Tamar’s approach is informed both by her legal background and her clinical Gestalt psychotherapy training, and is attuned to the realities of legal practice.

Tamar practised law in the ACT from 2000-2003 and Victoria since 2004 working primarily as a community lawyer. In 2010 she was awarded LIV Community Lawyer of the Year and in 2023, the Legal Research Awards Prize for Best PhD.  Tamar has personal experience of the critical voice’s power in singling us out - ‘this is your fault, you are not good enough, you are a failure.’ By blaming ourselves and other individuals, we become isolated from the support and solidarity we need to do systemic work, meet our own needs and our relationships. Through working together and having the support to work through our own relational struggles, and identify our own needs and boundaries, we can bring health and sustainability to our work, lives and relationships within the context of our unique self, intergenerational history and structural contexts.

Tamar is interested in the intersection of race, gender, power, status, colonisation, privilege, ablism, family histories and trauma and how these structural conditions interact with our self-stories and agency.

Tamar offers individual psychotherapy as well as group reflective practice to increase awareness, support and solidarity in challenging social and political working environments.

She currently runs reflective practice for Asylum Seeker Lawyers, Humanitarian and Health workers at the ASRC.

Qualifications: BSc/LLB (ANU), PhD (Law) (UNSW), Advanced Clinical Training in Relational Gestalt Psychotherapy (GTA - Melbourne).

Tamar’s clinical practice is supported by her clinical supervisor Nicole van Os, her group supervision team and her mentor Dr Radhika Santhanam-Martin.