Moving Out of the Chair: Freeing up Creative Potential in the Therapeutic Relationship
Saturday 7 December 2019 - London
With Roz Carroll, Yeva Feldman & Sissy Lykou
How often do you feel ‘stuck’ in the chair when working with a client? Would you like to bring in other elements that support a transition into using the space? Many practitioners lack a sense of permission or training to know how to track micro-movements and to use kinaesthetic empathy to enable the client to take these further. We will draw on recognised approaches in psychotherapy which focus on embodiment and share ways of exploring the co-created relationship outside the confines of the chair.
READ MORE...In this one day workshop, we will invite curiosity about the experience of moving out of the chair and integrating relational movement awareness. We will explore what holds us back and how to keep the potential for movement alive in every moment of the interaction. We will be considering this from a variety of process perspectives including embodied, somatic and kinetic countertransference. Whilst some of these terms overlap, we will differentiate, track and unpack them individually.
This project is not about having an agenda to ‘get the client out of the chair’ but rather an enquiry into how we, as therapists limit the creative potential of movement in the therapeutic process. We will offer ways through which we can safely experiment with a variety of creative options including working with sensation, images and feelings, introducing art materials or props, designing a Gestalt ‘experiment’, relational improvisation and exploring rhythm and space.
FULL PROGRAMME
09.30
Registration and coffee
10.00
Introduction
The day is structured to offer three workshops, which will run concurrently and be repeated three times so that all participants can attend each workshop
10.10 Three simultaneous workshops:
Roz Carroll – Room 1
Workshop 1: A state of readiness to move?
We live and work in a sedentary culture, spending much or most of our day sitting down. Psychotherapy has prized the capacity to “sit with” difficult feelings, relational dilemmas, and unresolvable pain. The important word is with. The potential and timing of inviting the client to move out of the chair depends in part on our own readiness for movement and whether it is ‘on-line’. A change of position may elaborate, expand, highlight or shift hidden elements and perspectives implicitly stirring in the therapeutic work. How do we stay fluid in our presence and clinical thinking so that when a moment of possibility arises we can flow with it?
Yeva Feldman – Room 2
Workshop 2: The Cycle of Experience
How can we track our clients’ felt experiences and identify where they may be getting stuck? By understanding and moving through the cycle of experience (a Gestalt metaphor), we can identify and support our clients’ emerging needs. This cycle illustrates the evolution of experience from sensation to completion, signposting obstacles to the process. Addressing these impediments or ‘interruptions’ can release energy, promote choice, agency, creativity and greater satisfaction. Once we discover how our clients embody their ‘stuckness’, we have a better understanding of how to experiment to find ways of loosening up and becoming unstuck.
Sissy Lykou – Room 3
Workshop 3: Different Dimensions of the Countertransference
In contemporary therapeutic culture, the therapist is no longer an authority who observes, interprets and makes an intervention, but rather an embodied and active figure who understands that she (and her client) are intimately connected mind-bodies. How can we therapists explore movement in the therapeutic relationship as an inspiration for awareness of our expressive relatedness? Motion can be seen as both an initiation and response to what is brought into the space by the client, as experienced via the therapist’s subjectivity. For this reason, we will define and practice the differences between embodied, somatic and kinetic countertransference/s.
11.10
3 simultaneous workshops repeated
12.05
Coffee
12.35
3 simultaneous workshops repeated
13.30
Lunch
14.30
Roz Carroll, Yeva Feldman & Sissy Lykou
What holds you back?
We will enquire and engage with the therapeutic concerns and complexities which hold you back. This will include your embodied history and your training-and-theory shaped subjectivity, with its gifts, blind-spots and habitual tendencies.
A movement warm up will lead into a structure for brain(body)storming which will open up new avenues and nourish your capacity for improvisation.
15:45
Tea
16.15
Fishbowls and Live Supervision in three groups
Working in three groups each facilitated by one of the speakers, we will experiment with putting this in to practice in mini-sessions and live supervision.
16.45
Discussion
17.00
End