This weekend CPD group, organised by experienced TA therapist Judy Shaw in Devon around Exeter, will run over 4 weekends during 2016, with 2 weekends led by Nick Totton and 2 by Michael Soth. There will be two venues: the East Down Centre in Dunsford and Judy's place in Offwell near Honiton. There will be 2 separate intro days in Bristol, at Fulcrum House.

Dates for 2016

2015

• October 3/4: Nick - East Down weekend
• December 5: Michael - Bristol 1-day intro

2016

• February 14: Michael - Bristol 1-day intro
• May 7/8: Nick - Offwell
• June 25/26: Michael - Offwell
• September 3/4: Nick - Offwell
• December 10/11: Michael - East Down

Towards an integrative embodied-relational therapy

For about 100 years after Freud first developed the ‘talking cure’, modern psychology, counselling and psychotherapy has remained focused on verbal communication and the cognitive, reflective mind (insight, understanding, rational choices, mental meaning-making). The talking therapies – for all their profound models and gifts accumulated over the decades – are limited in their perspective and effect, for example, in terms of relation to raw distress and deep feelings, developmental and engrained character patterns, psychosomatic issues and trauma as well as creative personal development.

Beyond the talking therapies

For the last 20 years, however, we are beginning to understand that therapy is not mainly a left- brain activity: right-brain-to-right-brain attunement (A. Schore), ‘implicit relational knowing’, the ‘feeling of what happens’ (D. Stern), mirror neurons and non-verbal communication, and the non-dualistic re-visioning of the body-mind relationship (e.g. A. Damasio, D. Siegel) have put embodiment at the heart of the therapeutic endeavour. As implied in the title of Nick’s new book “Embodied Relating” (October 2015), embodiment is the ground of psychotherapy. The challenge now is how to (re-)integrate embodiment into the ‘talking therapies’, to the benefit of both traditions.

Embodiment - the ground of psychotherapy

Attending to embodiment in the consulting room – the client’s and the therapist’s, and the embodied field created between them – has far-reaching implications for everything we experience, think, feel and do in everyday practice, allowing us to re-conceptualise transference and countertransference as embodied experiences. The whole spectrum of the bodymind (sensation-emotion-imagination-cognition-intuition) becomes available as communication channels, allowing creative and spontaneous ways of working that are experience-near, deeply felt and therefore more engaging and potentially transformative. However, with the body now ‘in fashion’, the undifferentiated inclusion of new ‘body techniques’ can also create new and deeper problems for therapists. Rather than grafting embodiment onto established practice as one more eclectic tool, Nick and Michael have been working towards a non-dualistic embodied way of being and relating in the therapeutic relationship for many years.

Experiential process-oriented learning

These workshops are an opportunity to work with two of the most experienced trainers at the forefront of bringing embodiment into psychotherapy in the UK. The learning process in the groups will be based on the same embodied-relational principles, working experientially with emerging process individually and collectively, modelling the therapeutic approach itself.
This training is being initiated with a view to forming an ongoing group (beyond 2016), thus providing an ideal container for your continuing professional development, rooted in your own embodied process. The residential weekend format allows for a safer, more cohesive group experience than ordinary CPD workshops and is designed to facilitate deeper personal- professional learning.

References

Soth, M. (2010) The Return of the Repressed Body – Not a Smooth Affair. UKCP Journal 'The Psychotherapist', Autumn 2010
Totton, N. (2014) Embodied Relating. International Body Psychotherapy Journal, 13(2)
Totton, N. (Karnac, October 2015) Embodied Relating: The Ground of Psychotherapy

For full booking information, including venues and costs, download the leaflet (including booking form)

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This group is for experienced therapists only (practising for 10 years or more), and has had a consistent core group of participants for the last few years (since 2012), meeting 6 days per year, usually for a whole weekend (10.00 - 17.00 both Saturday & Sunday). There is a 'pool' of currently 12 participants, and 4 more places are available from October 2019.

The group consists mainly of integrative psychotherapists with a relational orientation, many of whom had a humanistic training initially, many years ago. Over the years the culture of the group has evolved, from an emphasis on CPD and supervision to include increasingly personal and group process. The format over a typical weekend varies creatively between working in the whole group, sessions in the middle of the group, small group work, with Michael facilitating in collaboration with the emergent processes in the group. Occasionally, Michael will give some theoretical input relevant to the process, or summarise the emerging themes.

Dates in 2020:
28 & 29 March
4 & 5 July
10 & 11 October

Dates in 2021:
20 & 21 March
19 & 20 June
2 & 3 October

Dates in 2022:
5 & 6 February

As an experienced practitioner, you are likely to recognise that …

• a good working alliance is a paradoxical process: it needs to be robust enough, so it can break down; it needs to break down in order for it to strengthen and deepen (in order to have a strong therapeutic position we need to be able to also lose it);
• breakdowns of the working alliance with certain clients draw out of you a disproportionate amount of engagement as well as requiring additional attention in supervision - this constitutes a fertile edge for continuing professional development;
• your conflicts and dilemmas with these clients are not just a function of your lack of skill or your supposed incompetence - your difficulties are in some deep way a necessary part of the process (in other words: there is a relational purpose inherent in the impasses and enactments that become constellated and co-created in the therapeutic relationship);
• your client’s relational pattern has an uncanny knack for ferreting out shadow aspects of your therapeutic position (as well as that of the therapeutic tradition(s) you belong to);
• your own woundedness, as a person and as a therapist, will be touched and activated as the relationship deepens, and thus becomes an essential ‘eye of the needle’ through which the process needs to pass;
• much of our traditional theories and techniques does not adequately prepare us for the depth and intensity of these struggles and difficulties.

How to access the transformative potential of impasses & enactments?

This weekend is based on the proposition that there is no way out of enactments, but only a way into and through them. Our starting point will be that the very trappedness, stuckness and conflictedness we get to feel in the therapeutic position contains the seeds of transformation, both for the client and for the therapeutic relationship as a system.

To increase our chances of dealing with impasses, breakdowns and enactments successfully, we want to make sure we have a maximum of resources at our disposal, and that we draw on all of the following:

Integration of widest possible range of approaches (broad-spectrum integration):

The different approaches have profoundly different ways of perceiving, conceptualising and working with similar kinds of dynamic. Each therapeutic tradition has certain sensibilities and developed particular expertise, and we do not want to deprive ourselves of ideas, concepts, tools and techniques available within our field which we are unfamiliar with.

Holistic bodymind awareness and embodied engagement:

The bulk of all difficulties in the working alliance emerges and is perpetuated on levels of nonverbal communication. By bringing a differentiated awareness to those bodymind processes which modern neuroscience describes as essential, but subliminal, a whole new realm of perception, understanding and intervention becomes available to us.

Relational sensitivity to unconscious dynamics on multiple levels:

Michael has developed a unique extended model of ‘parallel process’ that can help us attend to and apprehend the dynamics of relational patterns across the various dimensions of the therapeutic relationship (what he calls the ‘Fractal Self’). Exploration and application of this model and its relevance to your practice constitutes one ingredient in the work of the group.

Integration of all relational modalities (including ‘medical model’):

Based upon and extending Petruska Clarkson’s model of relational modalities, we can go beyond attempts at integration via diverse theories and techniques, and arrive at a multiplicity of relational modalities which are all valid aspects of the whole that is the system of the therapeutic relationship. Michael has developed Clarkson’s model further, by integrating the ‘medical model’ as one valid modality, and conceiving of them in dynamic tension in the here and now of the therapeutic relationship.

Diamond model of relational modalities:

Based on the recognition that the therapist’s conflicts (in the countertransference) parallel the conflicts in the client’s inner world (character conflicts) and in the transferential field, we can conceive of the working alliance in constant oscillation between the poles of rupture and repair, enactment and containment/transformation of enactment. Surrendering to the ‘intersubjective mess’ that is the therapeutic relationship involves entering the enactment without taking refuge in theory or technique or categorically taking sides in the various polarities that arise (e.g. one-person versus two-person psychology assumptions).

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