Friday 9 September 2022 – 10 March 2023
A Seminar Series with Neil Altman, Anthony Bass, Lori Bohm, Robert Langan, Suzanne Little, James Ogilvie, Janine de Peyer, Terri Rubinstein, Rogelio Sosnik, Morgan Stebbins, Mary Tennes and Sara Weber
Since the time of Freud there has been reluctance in some quarters to pursue the topic of the uncanny. Yet a wealth of practicing therapist authors and literature attests to the degree of interest in the uncanny and unconscious communication among therapists. Indeed, the material we will be presenting throughout this series points to a potential paradigm shift towards non-dualistic theorising about the nature of consciousness itself.
Friday 7 October 2022
A live webinar with Professor Pauline Boss
In this workshop Dr Pauline Boss will share how to work effectively with ambiguous loss, a ubiquitous yet understated phenomena that differs in its effects and expression from unclear loss. An ambiguous loss might arise, for example, from the disappearance of a loved one, declining health or ecoanxiety. It lacks the clarity of a loss through death, divorce or critical illness and its impact on mental health is far less obvious to others.
Friday 21 October 2022
A live webinar with Dr Cherionna Menzam-Sills
The field of pre- and perinatal psychology highlights memories of influential, often traumatic events before and around the time of birth. These early experiences can profoundly affect relational and behavioural tendencies. This seminar focuses on experiences of loss in the pre and perinatal period, the most common being early twin loss. We will also explore the “haunted womb” – one that has felt the impact of miscarriages, abortions, or stillbirths.
Friday 4 November 2022
A live webinar with Doris Brothers, Ilany Kogan and Dr Tamara Feldman
Working psychotherapeutically with the grandiose is not easy. In this conference we’ll look at clinical and fictional examples of grandiosity, what lies beneath this characterological structure, and how someone with these tendencies can be helped. Characteristics that mark grandiosity – in contrast to healthy self-esteem – include arrogance, exaggerated self-importance, oblivion of impact on others… being entitled, reactive and demanding.
Saturday 19 November 2022
A live webinar with Velia Carruthers, Ann Hardy, Dr David Hewison, Melanie Shepherd and Kate Thompson
There is a pervasive lack of awareness of the connection between relationship issues and depression. However, research shows that people in unsatisfactory couple relationships are three times more likely to have a mood disorder than those in partnerships that function well enough. Furthermore, evidence reveals that up to 30% of severe depressive episodes could be prevented if the couple relationship was improved.
Saturday 26 November 2022
A live webinar or In Person event with Tayba Azim, Erene Hadjiioannou, Rose Lewis and Stephen Littlewood with poetry from Louisa Rodriguez
The notion of psychotherapy as a completely private space is negated when working with survivors of sexual or domestic violence who are simultaneously navigating legal systems. When ethical and legal requirements intersect with therapeutic work, they can be experienced as intrusive, anxiety-provoking, and restrictive. All this occurs whilst managing the impact of trauma in a world where violence against disempowered people exists.
Saturday 3 December 2022
A live webinar or in person event with Linda Cundy
Preoccupied people are anxiously attached and feel chronically insecure. Their relationships are often marked by intense emotion, anger and enmeshed dynamics. They can be passionate but also be experienced as needy, demanding, sometimes manipulative, and have been referred to as “borderline borderline”. As clients they can be challenging to work with, and therapy often feels stuck or ends badly. Our attachment patterns lay the foundations of unconscious beliefs about ourselves, and expectations we hold of other people and relationships.
Friday 9 December 2022
A live webinar with Lucy Hill, Dr Marilyn Sanders and Dr Fran Sommer Anderson
Skin-to-skin contact between the newborn and birth mother helps to lay a foundation for secure embodied attachment. Conversely, dysregulation in the wake of early separation in the form of a suboptimal postnatal environment can predispose the adopted baby to the risk of addiction and chronic somatic pain in adulthood. Our presenter, Lucy Hill, was born in the early 1960s in a mother and baby home and was relinquished by her mother at the age of two months.
Saturday 17 December 2022
A live webinar with Avner Bergstein and Judy Eekhoff
Our speakers will delve into unrepresentable, ineffable and often unknowable realms of the human mind. Primarily drawing on the thinking of Bion and Meltzer, our speakers Judy Eekhoff and Avner Bergstein will take us into the privacy of their consulting rooms, and the encounter with emotional experience that cannot be verbally communicated and dynamically interpreted but must first be lived in the here and now of the analytic setting.
Saturday 14 January 2023
A live webinar with Dr Margaret Altemus, Letticia Banton, Danielle Redland and Jane Catherine Severn
The menstrual cycle is an integral part of many women’s daily lived experience for around three decades of their life. Each month female hormonal fluctuations result in a range of physiological, physical, and psychological changes that can impact a woman’s identity in a profound way, at bio-psycho-social and spiritual levels of experience. Yet in 2022, many people don’t openly discuss the menstrual cycle in western mainstream culture, and it carries a lingering shadow of shame.
Saturday 21 January 2023
A live webinar or in-person event with Dr Aileen Alleyne, Eugene Ellis, Mark Linington and Susan Schwartz
How we understand psychological development has evolved considerably since Freud theorised that a child with an absent father, raised by a single mother, will face challenges in their personality and identity. Today this theory is considered heterocentric, westernised and outdated, and contested in research. However, the ‘absent father phenomenon’ remains a pertinent area of exploration in therapeutic theory and practice.
Friday 3 February 2023
A live webinar with Donna Jackson Nakazawa and Dr Wanjikũ Njoroge
Anyone caring for girls today knows that our clients, daughters, and the girls next door are more anxious and prone to depression and self-harm than ever before. The question is, why? In this seminar, award-winning science journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa and Professor Wanjiku Njoroge will delve into the problems young girls face and share new evidence that uncovers how and why the mental health crisis facing girls today is a biologically rooted phenomenon that interplays with a society and culture where children seem to grow up earlier and faster.
Saturday 11 February 2023
A live webinar or In Person event with Dr Mazella Fuller, Maimunah Mosli, Susie Orbach, Fajariah Saban and Dr Charlynn Small, Chaired by Karen Carberry
This conference will provide a bridge to help pause, reflect, apply interventions, and discuss ways of being, in order to help circumnavigate and decolonize the system in which the eating disordered client is being treated. The conference will aim to provide both clients and therapists support to better collaborate relationally, and equip the reflexive practitioner with culturally competent skills to enhance clinical practice.
Saturday 25 February 2023
A live webinar or In Person event with Dr Lori Beth Bisbey, Dominic Davies, Anna Randall, Dr Richard Sprott, and Dr Ryan Witherspoon
Many therapists struggle with their responses when working with clients who engage in kink, fetish, and/or BDSM. However, research suggests that a vast number of people, both clients and therapists, engage in, or fantasise about, BDSM and kink practices and pathologising is still dominant with therapists reporting not feeling competent with this work. It has been a number of years since BDSM was declassified from the psychiatric nomenclature, yet knowledge and understanding of how to work with clients with erotic interests, behaviours, and identities is still not commonly found in trainings.
Thursday 2 March 2023 – Thursday 23 March 2023
A series of live webinars with Phil Mollon, Ruthie Smith, Paul Croal, and Nina Parker
Energy psychotherapy works deeply, helping to address a wide range of conditions including PTSD, patterns of transgenerational, attachment, in-utero, preverbal, developmental and complex trauma. The techniques offered on this course are direct and gentle, and the teaching is experiential. In this short course you will learn about and experience energy boundaries and maintenance, clearing emotional and energetic residues of daily client work including releasing the after-effects of challenging session.
Saturday 4 March 2023
A live webinar or In Person event with keynote speaker Dr Nancy McWilliams, with James Barnes, James Davies, and Lucy Johnstone
In the US and UK — and increasingly the rest of the world — our language, thinking, and responses to emotional and psychological distress have become almost completely framed in medical terms in the last few decades. Along with this shift, psychiatric drugs and limited formulaic psychotherapy have become the default modes of care. Born out of the rejection of psychoanalysis and social psychiatric models in the 1980s, the shift was explicitly intended as a biomedical ‘revolution’.
Friday 17 March 2023
A live webinar with Deb Dana and Joseph Falkner
The ability to meet the challenges of everyday life is a marker of well-being and is dependent on the autonomic nervous system. Our nervous systems shape the way we navigate living, loving, and working. Polyvagal Theory, through the organising principles of hierarchy, neuroception, and co-regulation, has revolutionised our understanding of how this system works. We now know that trauma interrupts the development of autonomic regulation and sidetracks building the circuitry of safe connection.
Friday 24 March 2023
A live webinar in-person event with Dr Jonny Martell, Dr Roberta Murphy, Maria Papaspyrou and Dr Tim Read
Psychedelic assisted therapy has emerged as a new treatment with significant potential to cause transformative change. But for that change to materialise we need to work in novel ways that often-run counter to our current psychiatric and psychotherapeutic systems. As this work moves forward from research settings and towards potential wider therapeutic use in the future, we face significant difficulties and ethical conundrums.
Saturday 25 March 2023
A live webinar with Dr Sandra Paulsen
EMDR is a well-established treatment for PTSD and traumatic sequelae, and has been so for over three decades. Being highly effective and time efficient, EMDR also requires modification for success with complex cases. These may include complex PTSD/dissociative disorders, very early trauma held in implicit memory, and alexithymia or somatic dissociation from early trauma and or neglect.
Friday 31 March 2023
A live webinar with Dr Karen Maroda
It has long been recognised that therapists have a history of being caretakers in their families of origin. Yet we have not pursued how that role impacted our own personal growth, values, ideas and limitations. What are the vulnerabilities and strengths that we share as a result of being precociously assigned the responsibility for others’ happiness or even their psychic survival? What role does the resulting guilt, shame and desire to rescue and be rescued play in the creation of both our theories and preferred interventions?