Behind the Work: Sandi James on What Survival Teaches Us About Connection

Professional expertise can create distance from the experiences it seeks to explain. Sandi James’s life has given her no such distance.

Before becoming a clinical psychologist, she lived through childhood violence, heroin addiction, homelessness, poverty, methadone treatment, and the long work of continuing to function while much of her life remained unstable. She earned degrees, taught, moved across Australia, and later spent nearly a decade teaching medical students in Borneo.

Then, in 2020, a ten-day conference in Dublin became ten months of displacement when borders closed, and she could return to neither Australia nor Malaysia. The experience altered her relationship with uncertainty and sharpened her understanding of what it means to lose one’s footing.

Sandi’s perspective resists the temptation to turn survival into a simple story of personal triumph. She believes deeply in human potential, but she is equally clear that opportunity is shaped by money, privilege, stigma, discrimination, and access to care. Resilience matters. So do the conditions in which people are expected to be resilient.

Her work therefore places connection and community alongside clinical knowledge. Support, in her view, is not instruction delivered from above. At its best, it allows a person to feel held without being told who to become. In this edition of Behind the Work, Sandi reflects on addiction, uncertainty, inequality, identity, and why people need compassion and connection more than another directive.

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What originally brought you to the work you do today, and why does it continue to matter to you?

I came to this work almost by accident. I was working as a behavior support teacher, specializing in working with students with emotional and behavioral disorders, when I was offered a scholarship to train as a psychologist. But the deeper truth is that my path started long before that, in a childhood marked by violence and instability, which led me into heroin addiction in my late teens – an addiction I lived with for more than fifteen years.

During that time, I found ways to keep moving forward: a visual arts degree, then a teaching degree, then years of casual teaching, much of it while I was still using or on methadone. Eventually I moved halfway across the country to a remote town in Australia to leave behind the city where I’d been using for so long, and that’s where things began to shift.

From there I found my way into psychology, spent nearly a decade in Borneo teaching medical students at a university, and now work as a psychologist in private practice and PhD researcher specializing in eating disorders and substance use. This work matters to me because I’ve lived on the other side of it. I know what it is to be the person struggling, not just the person trying to help.

I know what it is to be the person struggling, not just the person trying to help.

Sandi James

Was there a particular experience, transition, challenge, or turning point that shaped the direction of your work or perspective?

The turning point that reshaped both my work and my perspective was the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, I traveled to Dublin for a ten-day conference, and while I was there, the world closed, and Australia closed its borders, even to citizens. I couldn’t get back into Australia, and I couldn’t get back into Malaysia, where I was working at the time. I ended up stranded for ten months, couch surfing, essentially trying to stay afloat. That experience was deeply traumatic, and it changed me – it changed what I value, how I understand people, and how I do this work. I came out the other side with a different relationship to uncertainty, to instability, and to what it actually means to support someone who has lost their footing.

What have your experiences taught you about staying true to yourself amid pressure, expectation, or success?

My experiences have taught me that no matter what’s happening around me, staying true to myself and my values has to come first. During the pandemic, I lost that for a while – I genuinely believed my life as I’d known it was over, and in many ways, it was. That period became a crucial pivot point for me. What I discovered is that staying connected to my values keeps me on the path I want to be on, even though I don’t get to choose where that path leads. I’ve learned that I can survive and thrive under almost any circumstance, as long as I stay connected to people and stay true to who I want to be – the person I want people to remember. Pressure has the power to change us, and if we let the pressures of society dictate who we become, we end up indistinguishable from everyone else, and the world becomes a far less interesting place. Staying true to our individuality and our uniqueness isn’t just personal preference – it’s what matters.

What do you believe people most need to remember during periods of uncertainty or change?

What people most need to remember during periods of uncertainty or change is that they will be okay. Support is available if we look for it, and staying connected to our people – our tribe, our community – is the single most important thing that keeps us afloat and moving toward what we want. We are not alone in this. Whatever I’m experiencing, I can almost guarantee someone else is experiencing something similar, and when I reach out, more often than not, I find people who can meet me with compassion and empathy rather than directives and unrequested advice. That, to me, is the key – support that holds you without telling you what you need to do.

Support that holds you without telling you what you need to do.

Sandi James

What has your work taught you about healing, human nature, and potential?

My work has taught me that human potential is essentially unlimited. There are barriers – privilege, access, inequality – that can prevent people from reaching or exceeding that potential, but at the core, I believe anyone is capable of something incredible given the right resources and support. The same is true of healing and human nature more broadly. So much of what stops people from being true to themselves comes down to inequality – the fact that so much of the world’s wealth sits with so few people, and that in this day and age, money is so often the gatekeeper of what we’re able to achieve. There are ways around that – resourcefulness, connection, community – but privilege still shapes what’s possible for people, and that’s something I find genuinely difficult to sit with. Even so, I believe human nature is stronger than the systems we live inside. When we build community, when we find strength in connection, we become something close to unbeatable. For me, that’s the real key to human thriving: not individual willpower, but community and connection.

When we build community, when we find strength in connection, we become something close to unbeatable.

Sandi James

What have you learned about the barriers that stop people from expressing themselves honestly and authentically?

Stigma and discrimination. It is hard to be honest and authentic in a world that judges harshly, where discrimination can prevent access to services and resources. Where the rich and powerful dictate who and what people can be. Labels also create barriers to authenticity and freedom; psychiatric labels in particular can lead to significant discrimination and stigma. When we feel safe enough to unmask, to not have to hide our true selves, then we find space for freedom of expression and authenticity.

What do you hope people feel, remember, or take away after experiencing your work?

This one feels simple to me. What I hope people feel and remember – whether from experiencing my work or simply from coming into contact with me – is that they matter. Regardless of what they’ve done in the past, what they’re struggling with, I want people to know that they matter, that they’re important, and that they deserve to have calm and feel safe in their life.

What I hope people feel and remember is that they matter.

Sandi James

What conversation do you believe we need to be having more openly right now?

The conversation I believe we need to be having more openly right now is about inequality – and the stigma, discrimination, and racism that come with it. We need to be talking about cultural understanding, about shared space and genuine connection across difference. We need to talk far more honestly about how wealth is concentrated in the hands of so few, while so many people live in severe poverty without access to healthcare, education, or even enough food. The world we live in is unfair and unequal, and we need to name that plainly. Things need to change – and that includes how we’re treating the planet we all depend on.