12A The Mall
London W5 2PJ
UK
Extending your practice from individuals to couples
Two one-day CPD workshops for counsellors and psychotherapists
Couple work does present additional challenges beyond individual therapy, but this course will condense the essentials in accessible form, focusing especially on the advantages which an embodied and integrative perspective can bring to couple work.
An embodied perspective can significantly enhance couple work, in all aspects of the process: in terms of the therapist’s perceptive skills, our understanding of the dynamic as well as powerful opportunities for intervention.
The habitual patterns which couples struggle with are mainly triggered, communicated and perpetuated on non-verbal and pre-reflexive levels. For most couples, mutual projective identifications occur subliminally and are difficult to notice and bring into awareness through traditional couple work relying on the ‘talking therapies’ and interpretations.
An integrative approach allows the therapist a creative range of interventions – using techniques from Gestalt, constellations, process-oriented psychology to help the couple discover experientially both the root of their patterns as well as new ways of relating.
The format of the two workshops is designed to allow you to gain some experience in between, for us to reflect and work on during the second workshop.
Some of the topics we may address:
• the promise of falling in love: the other will provide protection against woundedness
• the systemic fit: who the partners represent in each other’s family system
• embodied awareness of each partner’s internal object relations
• complex vicious cycles of child – idealised parent – bad parent - child
• mutual projective identifications (how the partners ‘dream each other up’)
• one of the purposes / side-effects of the relationship is to destroy each other’s defences
• each partner becomes the other’s guide towards individuation
• “Can Love Last?” (after the book by Stephen Mitchell) – the vulnerability of attachment