Calendar – One-Off CPD Events

A series of three CPD Zoom workshops, for therapeutic practitioners from across all modalities, with Michael Soth

Each session includes some theory, a supervision demonstration and discussion

Sunday afternoons Feb 9, Mar 9, April 6, 13:00 - 16:00 UK time

Integrative CPD learning for practising therapists from across all approaches, developing principles of relational groundedness when confronted with severe psychopathology, without succumbing to objectifying and pathologising therapeutic manoeuvers

In this brief series of three online workshops, we will work together towards establishing a frame, an overview and some fundamental principles for engaging with clients whom you find disturbing, and whose way of relating, attachment style, trauma or extreme states make it hard for you to establish a working alliance.

Most likely you are wondering whether there's anything beneficial you have to offer, and whether you, your therapy, or therapy in general are a suitable match for the client. You question your competence and whether what you can and are doing is helpful, or potentially damaging, to the client or to both of you. This is typically the moment when your therapeutically-trained mind will start to make sense of the vicissitudes of the relational field, which you find yourself in, via the medical notions and labels we have acquired from psychiatry.

Beyond the limited usefulness of dubious psychopathological and diagnostic categories, what are your options for relating both on a human and professional level, in a way that does justice to the person in front of you, both their suffering and  their potential, as well as protecting you from overreach, damaging entanglements and ultimately complaints?

In these few short hours, we will not attempt to establish theoretical clarity in what is historically a conceptual minefield across the profession. Rather, we will try to find relational ground in our own embodied sense of disturbance, whether that manifests as, for example, mental confusion, professional inadequacy, traumatising imagery, strong emotion or somatic countertransference. We will experientially encounter - through supervision demonstrations that involve the whole group - a few typical examples of client-therapist situations, volunteered by participants. These will serve as illustrations and reference points for our learning, exploring how the perennial dilemmas and paradoxes of the therapeutic position can be inhabited and navigated, when we get pushed beyond our comfort zone.

However, we will not ignore the thinking and the theories of the therapeutic traditions altogether, but use them as imaginative material for associations that deepen our understanding of our internal process within the therapeutic position. Your commitment to the course will include a few selected readings and other background materials that you need to study in preparation, and which will give us a foundation for some shared language among participants. This should make our work together more precise and efficient, and more helpful in you applying your learning to your everyday practice afterwards.

Format of the workshops

Group composition and configuration

These workshops have been initiated and requested by Michael's colleagues in Oxford, UK, through the professional referral network and community he helped to found in 2015, OTS (Oxford Therapy and Self-Development). Therefore, the group will include a significant number of participants who know each other and have worked with each other before. But all therapists, from across the approaches and modalities, and from all kinds of geographical locations, are invited to join in this rich learning opportunity. Through Michael's previous teaching connections, it is likely that the group will include therapists from Pakistan, Greece and other countries. We can expect that participants will bring quite different levels of previous experience to these workshops as well as familiarity with a wide and diverse range of therapeutic approaches - we will try to do justice to this and attempt to try and turn that problem into a productive feature of our work together.

How to get the best out of working online

Michael has experimented for quite a few years now with the online format of Zoom for shared group experience, in a way that maximises spontaneous and embodied engagement. Although there may be a significant theoretical element through slides and hand-outs, even in the online workshops Michael's emphasis is on experiential work, often in the middle of the group, sometimes in smaller breakout groups, often through role-plays of client-therapist situations. Michael has been running similar CPD workshops since 2012, both in person in different locations as well as online, with different frequencies and formats. Like all other groups that Michael facilitates, this proposed group will be cross-modality, aiming to stretch across humanistic and psychodynamic traditions, and embracing - what he calls a broad-spectrum - integrative perspective. That means he aims to draw fluidly from all the disciplines and approaches of the psychological therapies, and their accumulated gifts, knowledge and wisdoms, and that your particular approach and style will be welcome.

Proposed format of this workshop series

Although Michael's workshops usually include significant degree of unstructured space and emergent process within the group, for the purpose of these workshops and the topic we need to be focused and structured.

Each session will include an initial discussion of theory and basic principles which we will then use as a foundation for observational tasks during the supervision demonstration that is to follow in the second part. Participants are invited to volunteer a particular case during the week preceding the session via email, setting out the issues, headlines and complications of the work. From the variety of client-therapist situations offered, Michael will have selected one that seems most promising both for their clinical richness as well as for the learning opportunities they appear to offer for the group. Michael will aim to facilitate the supervision demonstration in a way that allows for stops and starts, i.e. timeouts during which the group is invited to help reflect on the process of the supervision, before we go back and continue. This should offer significant opportunities for all participants to become involved as well as giving us a chance for paying attention to parallel processes.

The third part of each session will allow for questions and answers, integration and discussion and further shared learning, through reflecting together on the demonstration.

Respect and confidentiality

We want to be mindful of the delicacy of the proposed format, in terms of the volunteer's direct exposure to the group, and the client's indirect exposure as well. It is important that we all observe confidentiality, and commit to a shared undertaking that nothing from the workshop will be indiscreetly shared with others, other than your very own personal-professional responses to the material.

Fees - UK

Early Bird before 1 Dec 2024: £140

OTS Members: £90

Recipients of mailchimp newsletter: £140

£175 full price

Fees - Europe

Early Bird before 1 Dec 2024: €160

Recipients of mailchimp newsletter: €150

€200 full price

Fees - Greece/Pakistan

Early Bird before 1 Dec 2024: €100

Recipients of mailchimp newsletter: €100

€150 full price

Fees - US

Early Bird before 1 Dec 2024: $180

Recipients of mailchimp newsletter: $180

$250 full price

The bodymind connection in working with psychosomatic and physical symptoms

A weekend workshop in Athens with Michael Soth

Even though counsellors and psychotherapists are traditionally expected to focus on emotional, mental and verbal communications, many clients invariably do bring their physical and psychosomatic symptoms into the session.

Through including body-oriented ways of working into the talking therapies, we can learn to work with many of these symptoms more directly, more deeply and more effectively (and recognise other situations where the hope of curing illness through psychology is an unreasonable idealisation).

This CPD workshop is designed to expand your understanding of the bodymind connection as well as offering a wide range of creative and body-oriented techniques to include in your practice.

With some illnesses - like hypertension, chest and heart problems, digestive illnesses, symptoms of the immune system - it is scientifically established that emotional stress contributes to their origin. With many other psychosomatic problems, like all kinds of pain, tinnitus, insomnia, chronic fatigue and many other unexplained symptoms, it is known that the intensity of the suffering can be ameliorated through psychological therapy that addresses the regulation and expression of emotion and de-stresses the mind.

Stress is the catchall phrase that supposedly explains the influence of our psychological body-emotion-mind state on illness. However, what is less well understood, is how our bodymind does not just respond to stresses in our current situation and lifestyle, but carries accumulated stress from the past, reaching all the way back to childhood. A holistic and bio-social-psychological understanding of stress needs to include lifelong patterns of the bodymind including developmental injury and trauma (what Wilhelm Reich originally called character structures).

Sometimes clients bring psychosomatic illness as a presenting issue to the therapy, sometimes these symptoms actually evolve in direct response to the unfolding therapeutic process, and the therapist gets implicated in them, e.g. “After last session I had a headache for three days!”

Direct links to body sensations and symptoms as well as body image come up as part of our work in sessions every day, in so many ways: tangible pains, tensions, trembling and shaking, breathing difficulties (hyperventilation, asthma), the physical side of unbearable feelings like panic, rage, dread or terror. There are obvious somatic aspects to presenting issues such as eating disorders or addictions. And then there are the psychological implications of actual, sometimes terminal, illnesses and psychosomatic symptoms and dis-ease.

How do we work with these issues and symptoms in psychotherapy? What ways are available to us for including the client’s ‘felt sense’, their embodied self states, their body awareness and sensations, their physiological experience in the interaction ?

This workshop will give you a framework for thinking about the role of the body as it is relevant in your own style of therapeutic work, based upon the different ways in which clients as well as therapists relate to ‘the symptom’. Throughout the workshop, we will use roleplay of actual issues and dilemmas brought up by your clients. We will also identify and practice ways in which you can explore the emotional function and 'meaning' of your client's physical symptom or illness.

Drawing on a wide range of humanistic and psychoanalytic approaches (including Body Psychotherapy, Process-oriented Psychology, various schools of psychoanalysis and Jungian perspectives) as well as the holistic paradigm underpinning most complementary therapies, we will weave together an interdisciplinary bodymind approach which is applicable within the therapeutic relationship as we know it in counselling and psychotherapy.

Michael has been working with the psychological and bodymind connection of illness and psychosomatic symptoms for many years. In the 1990s he initiated a project called 'Soul in Illness', offering an integrative psychotherapeutic perspective, drawing on the wisdom which the different therapeutic approaches have accumulated regarding illness, both in terms of theoretical understanding and practical ways of working. He has run CPD workshops for therapists on ‘Working with Illness’ many times, and has developed a relational and embodied way of engaging with the client’s bodymind. In 2005 he presented for the first time his model of ‘8 ways of relating to the symptom’, which addresses the client’s own relationship to their symptom, as well as giving an overview of the different stances taken by the therapist in the various therapeutic approaches that correspond to each of the ways of relating to the symptom. These eight ways of relating to the symptom, including the corresponding theoretical understandings as well as methods and techniques for intervention, will form the underlying framework for this workshop.