OTS: Witney – Learning from Ruptures in the Working Alliance

This training day is oriented towards using the richness and diversity of a cross-modality group of therapists to enhance each other’s practice and learning - we will use the different approaches represented in the group as resources and perspectives on our own work. We will do this by helping each other focus on the relationship with a particular client, in an embodied and experiential way. Paying attention to particular significant and ‘charged’ moments in that relationship, we will try to experience and understand from within the forces operating in the working alliance. We will attend to the therapist’s conflict as an avenue into understanding the client’s inner world, and the conscious and unconscious expectations of the therapist and the therapy.

In order to participate, it is not a requirement that you have attended any of the previous training days, as we will keep the focus very much on particular experiential vignettes.

However, the way participants bring particular issues and vignettes into the group may very well be inspired by previous topics of our trainings together, e.g.:

• How to work when therapy isn’t working - embodied pathways through impasses, enactments and breakdowns in the alliance
• How to extend talking therapy into experience - using two-chair work to embody internal and external relationship dynamics
• What do we mean by ‘relational’? - Combining different notions of the therapeutic relationship, deriving from the traditional branches of therapy (psychodynamic, cognitive behavioural, humanistic, systemic), to understand and engage enactments and their transformative potential

The more a therapist feels drawn towards tackling the client’s habitual and characterological scripts, schemas and patterns which underpin and fuel the problems in their life, the more there is a tendency for the therapist to become embroiled and entangled in the wounding dynamics which are at the root of these habitual patterns. In simple terms: there is a tendency for the client’s internal conflictual pattern to become the therapist’s conflict. This usually implies that the therapist will lose their exclusively benign and neutral position, and feels drawn into, or is perceived as implicated, in the wounding dynamic. This is bound to create problems and conflicts in the working alliance.

Preparation:

The proposal for this CPD day is that you monitor your practice and then collect examples of situations where you experience disturbances in the working alliance; or in psychodynamic language: where you experience conflict in the countertransference, and the possibility of countertransference enactment.

During the day, we will focus on one example, which we will explore through the lens of the different approaches represented in the group, including ‘one-person psychology’ and ‘two-person psychology’ perspectives.

If you live in the area and want to join, contact the director of OTS, Justin Smith via the website.