Perceiving and understanding enactment in the therapeutic relationship

Perceiving and understanding enactment in the therapeutic relationship

Over recent years the most exciting developments in our field have come to us via neuroscience, psychotherapy integration (i.e. cross-fertilisation between approaches) and the inclusion of the body.

We now understand that whatever psychological wounds the client is bringing to us and into the consulting room, we will in some ways become involved and implicated with them, in ways that go far beyond verbal interaction. The term ‘enactment’ is being used to describe the ways in which the therapist is - inevitably and necessarily - drawn into the client’s wound, leading to impasses and breakdowns in the working alliance.

There is great therapeutic potential in these cycles of rupture and repair that occur in the client-therapist relationship, but much of it happens subliminally. So if it takes place unconsciously, outside of awareness, how can we perceive and understand enactment and respond creatively from within it?

This CPD workshop is dedicated to deepening our engagement with difficult enactment dynamics in the therapeutic relationship, and to finding ways of accessing the therapeutic potential locked within them.

What you can expect to learn on the day …

  • perceive the ways in which the client’s wound enters the consulting room
  • register significant and charged moments in the relationship
  • understand these moments in the context of the three kinds of contact
  • collect in these moments bodymind information which would otherwise remain subliminal
  • link these moments to the client’s habitual relational patterns
  • process the charge and pressure impacting on the therapist
  • consider interventions for relieving or intensifying the transference-countertransference enactment pressure
By |2014-07-16T15:35:57+00:00September 28th, 2013|Comments Off on Perceiving and understanding enactment in the therapeutic relationship