From Proximity Seeking to Distance Regulation, a Case Presentation On Working Online with a Client Who Comes from a Disorganised Attachment Style

This series of seminars examines the impact of the current Covid-19 crisis on individuals, couples and families through the eyes of practitioners as we navigate this unprecedented and surreal shift in our lives.

Our speakers will explore the emotional meanings of being in lockdown, the reforming of one’s sense of self within states of isolation, or in relationships with sudden intensified intimacy…

As attachment issues become more acutely felt, where life-threatening levels of danger are encountered, where jobs have been lost, livelihoods disrupted, relationships frayed, loved ones lost, these enormous pressures on the psyche are inevitably a new focus of therapy.

How can we ameliorate the impact for our clients and – even perhaps – use this as a therapeutic opportunity? Where do we find our deepest resilience in times of crisis?

Active imagination is one of the pillars of Jungian psychoanalysis. Along with the developmental concept of individuation, the activation of transference in the therapeutic relationship, and the interpretation of dreams, active imagination is a key component that constitutes the essence of Jungian clinical work. Paradoxically, however, active imagination has been neglected as a method by many Jungian psychoanalysts since Jung’s death in 1961.

Classical Jungians have maintained it to an extent, but not until the publication of The Red Book in 2009 has it been seen as central to Jungian work.

Today there is resurgence of interest in this method as a result of recent studies in the importance Jung himself assigned to the method.

This will be a workshop that introduces the method of active imagination as a contemporary form of “inner work” and as a method of clinical relevance for fostering psychological growth and wholeness. Some comparisons will also be drawn between active imagination as a practice and various types of meditation such as found in Zen Buddhism and contemporary mindfulness training.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Active Imagination Seminar Series

Jung’s encounters with the unconscious that he described in The Red Book were especially fruitful for his followers.  He described his dialogues with various unconscious images and these developed into the concept of active imagination as a therapeutic technique. Yet, unfortunately, this process was never fully elaborated for future analytical psychologists. A probable reason is that the conversations Jung had with unconscious images were depicted in The Red Book as monologues.

He used his own words to replace other voices thus, unfortunately, silencing them and denying the reader a sense of that rapport between the imaginer and the imagined. Velimir will suggest that formation of this ‘monological imagination’ hindered the shaping of the dialogical aspect of these experiences that is central to the process of active imagination. We will consider how to work with this gap in theory and practice and to listen to the voices of the imagined others.

CPD – A CPD certificate is not available for this Talk On Demand.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

In the wake of COVID, this conference will address the highly topical issue of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and a therapeutic approach, Trauma Informed Care (TIC), which has been found to be highly effective in addressing the needs of people who have been neglected, abused, or otherwise traumatised in childhood.

Studies, particularly by Dr Vincent Felitti and Dr Robert Anda (1998), have established beyond doubt the link between ACEs or “relational-trauma”, and subsequent ill health.

The conference will explore specific mechanisms whereby psychological stress and trauma in childhood take root in the body right down to a cellular level with a special focus on Racism as an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE). The speakers will then address what can be done to minimise the effects of ACEs through Trauma Informed Care, involving the therapeutic provision of highly attuned caring relationships which can heal many of the dysregulating effects of early trauma, improving resilience and life prospects.

Our presenters, including the voices of three survivors of ACEs, will be sharing how TIC can be applied across different settings in the community such as schools, psychotherapy services, and general practice.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 7 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

In this theoretical and experiential workshop, Doris Brothers and Jon Sletvold will present the body-based perspective they are developing in their forthcoming book A New Vision of Psychoanalytic Theory, Practice and Supervision: Talking Bodies to re-explore some of the most enduring aspects of psychoanalytic theory.

They will attempt to demonstrate how changes in conceptualization of the therapeutic process, and the discourse in which this is described, result in transformations in the therapeutic relationship as well as in the supervisory process.

The challenges faced by people who were ignored, criticised, rejected or utterly neglected within their families of origin and who thus find it difficult to form close and lasting intimate relationships in adulthood. People who avoid close proximity to others, despite their longing for that closeness, often feel more secure and better able to manage deep feelings when they hold others apart, whether sexual partners, therapists, or family members. In this seminar, attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist Linda Cundy talks about how we can understand avoidant attachment as a self-protective system that guards the self from the risk of repeated rejection, humiliation, and shame.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Shame is often felt to be one of the most excruciating emotions, perhaps because it threatens one’s deepest sense of being loveable. For many, a sudden sense of having been inappropriate is embarrassing.

But for someone who has never felt certain of their worth, a minor encounter with personal limitations can feel like a catastrophic reminder of one’s supposed inadequacy: of being insufficient, not quite what’s wanted, unacceptable.

Where that sense of self has origins in early childhood, any ensuing self-repulsion may be hard to transcend. A viable defense against shame is, understandably, to avoid intimacy.

When shame occurs in the therapy session, the intensity of that experience is greatly amplified. Shame, of course, is shameful in itself. To feel exposed, uncovered or found out by the therapist, especially when there is an idealized or parental transference at play, can be deeply humiliating. Furthermore, when a shaming event is experienced in the context of a countertransference enactment – in a momentary lapse of empathy or even an attack on the patient – such moments can rupture the therapy. When they overlap with inequalities of power and privilege, that injury is compounded. How can moments be worked through and turned into an opportunity for self-acceptance? Will our speakers agree that one of the goals of therapy is to become shameless?

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

There is something about everything that makes it not quite satisfactory. Even things we really love are spoilt by not being quite enough or – the opposite – going on too long. People entering psychotherapy want to feel better – more authoritative, less anxious or depressed, more whole – and although it can help, an enormous amount of difficult and painful emotions continue to arise. After years and years of therapy many of us feel as mad as ever. There is no ‘happy ever after’. This all begs the question; what is the place of suffering in human experience and how best can we be with it?

This day picks up this question and answers by saying that discontent and unhappiness are inevitable parts of our human experience but there are ways to avoid adding further unnecessary suffering. By becoming mindfully present, accepting and kind, we may enfold what hurts us in a more spacious and meaningful way. Together we will cultivate our ability to be present with emotions felt in the body and maybe get a glimpse of how emotions dissolve in the open space of awareness.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 2.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

This day will present views on psychotherapeutic experiences which illuminate the bodily basis of intersubjectivity. The speakers will elaborate their understanding of the intersubjective space as a field of ‘mutual unconsciousness’, where the two people in the therapeutic relationships meet and transform.

In particular, they will explore how the inarticulate emotions lodged in bodily experience re-emerge in the shared field of the therapy relationship for both participants.

During the seminar we will examine how such somatic language is felt, registered, and contained by the therapist, and what it reveals. We will see how ways of attending to and being with those sensorial effects in the countertransference can enable deeper access to unformulated knowledge about the patient’s past that would be otherwise impossible to reach. A major theme linking all three presentations is the presence of dissociation in both patient and analyst and how to work with the profound body/mind split that is often linked to early trauma.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

This multi-disciplinary conference will examine the early foundations of chronic pain and how to work with these conditions therapeutically. The impact of the ongoing pandemic on people who experienced early life adversity will be acknowledged. Our speakers include a psychologist/psychoanalyst, musculoskeletal physician and physiotherapist. Offering distinct but related understandings and techniques, drawing on relational, neurobiological and attachment studies, they will outline the aetiology of chronic pain in their adult patients, and how they work with this.

As a psychoanalyst working relationally, Frances Sommer Anderson will talk about the role of early trauma in this process, elaborating the view that interpersonal trauma takes place within the intersubjective field and how this, in turn, can trigger a cascade of bodily dysfunctions in adulthood. She will demonstrate ways of bringing other techniques into the therapy, including Somatic Experiencing™️ in order to make shifts beyond the reach of the analytic frame. Our other two presenters work directly with the body: Georgie Oldfield, a physiotherapist, and musculoskeletal physician Nick Straiton, will corroborate Frances’ approach by demonstrating the emotional component of physical pain and the need to work on unprocessed emotions in a safe space to recover.

The interweaving of a psychoanalytic stance, the contemporary influence of current thinkers in the field of trauma, and the work of body-based practitioners will give attendees a thorough and holistic grounding in the emotional roots of chronic pain, and how to work with what may lie beneath to enable a client to fully recover and flourish.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

In this conference we will explore ways of working psychotherapeutically with those who are drawn into enmeshed adult relationships that inhibit healthy separation and autonomy. Enmeshment as an attachment style may originate with the needs of a narcissistic parent or family culture where personal boundaries are diffused, roles undifferentiated and an over-concern for the other can lead to a failure in autonomous development.

Paradoxically, the collusive, fused family, couple or parent-child dynamic may also enable a level of functioning for those family members, perhaps even preventing psychic collapse.

Last year we asked the thought-provoking question What is Normal? as the topic for our think-tank conference to celebrate our 20th anniversary. Somewhat beyond our expectations, the question generated some brilliant, fresh and new perspectives about the therapy process. And so we have posed another challenging question for our speakers to answer in this event: is psychotherapy a relationship or a cure?

Our aim is to explore the dichotomy between the medical model of assessment, treatment, and cure in contrast to its antithesis – a process of exploration between two people, one which focuses on the needs of one but in which each participant draws on their own subjectivities and histories.

Each speaker addresses the question through their own experiences of being in therapy, of being the therapist and of experiencing and witnessing change.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

As the pandemic has brought us all face to face with death, either in reality or in the imagination, we will be talking about how the mind negotiates this gross affront to our sense of survival. The sudden risk of catching a fatal illness brings out some extraordinary capacities, such as adaptation, connection, altruism, but it also amplifies the deepest fear we may have of ceasing to exist.

This conversation is about what we notice about the human responses to mortal threat, what these tell us about unconscious processes, defense mechanisms and the internal scenarios that we create in order to live with that fate.

Our speakers will discuss how we navigate increased uncertainty, prolonged fear in the face of invisible danger, the bigger sense of mortal threat, and the realisation of how little we are able to control.

Working with these insights, we will also be considering what the fear-based and rapid response to the virus tells us about our capacity to make huge mental adjustments, and ask what stops us from applying that capacity to the threat of climate change.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

In contemplating divorce or ‘uncoupling’, couples are assaulted with change on multiple levels. They may face separation from their children and experience shame at their relationship’s failure. Feelings of betrayal, abandonment or relief are commonly reported but rarely equally shared between spouses.

Whether the separation is wanted or not, both halves of a couple are faced with an overload of uncertainty: where to live; how to live and who they are now.

It is not surprising that couples need therapeutic help when confronted by dashed expectations and fear for the future, or when they blame each other and prolong conflict to avoid the pain of ending their relationship.

These talks offer an in-depth exploration of separation and divorce, and the help that can be offered by psychoanalytically informed couple psychotherapy. Our four speakers will explore different aspects of separation and divorce, illustrating their talks with clinical material and thoughts about effective therapeutic skills.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

This discussion focuses on the question of what constitutes an acceptable picture of change in psychoanalysis. Adam begins the talk by exploring the uses of the word “conversion” in psychoanalytic discourse and the idea of change within the thinking of key theorists.

The paper provides a platform to examine what we understand is being changed. Is a process of conversion from one state of being to another even central to the project of psychoanalysis?

If so, what is being shed or left behind, and what is being discovered or gained? In a historical moment when the idea of conversion is being deeply interrogated, we consider what insights are most useful to help us navigate this territory. As part of this exploration, Adam is interviewed by Anouchka Grose, and discusses his paper with Judy Yellin, providing the space and time for us to examine these questions in depth.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

This series of seminars examines the impact of the current Covid-19 crisis on individuals, couples and families through the eyes of practitioners as we navigate this unprecedented and surreal shift in our lives.

Our speakers will explore the emotional meanings of being in lockdown, the reforming of one’s sense of self within states of isolation, or in relationships with sudden intensified intimacy. As attachment issues become more acutely felt, where life-threatening levels of danger are encountered, where jobs have been lost, livelihoods disrupted, relationships frayed, loved ones lost, these enormous pressures on the psyche are inevitably a new focus of therapy.

How can we ameliorate the impact for our clients and – even perhaps – use this as a therapeutic opportunity? Where do we find our deepest resilience in times of crisis?

Skin-to-skin contact between the new-born and birth mother helps to lay a foundation for secure embodied attachment. Conversely, dysregulation in the wake of early separation in the form of a suboptimal postnatal environment can predispose the adopted baby to the risk of addiction and chronic somatic pain in adulthood.

Our presenter, Lucy Hill, was born in the early 1960s in a mother and baby home and was relinquished by her mother at the age of two months.

On seeking treatment for a 10-year history of chronic back pain, she engaged a psychoanalyst who specializes in treating chronic pain from a relational, trauma-informed perspective.  At the outset, she experienced “craving” for her analyst, similar to yearnings she had for alcohol and sugar.  Exploration of this desire for body contact with her analyst, led her to initiate a successful search for her birth mother.  Their reunion revealed the complexities of the disrupted early attachment, and it stimulated latent grieving for the loss of mother.

Lucy and her analyst will present the adoptee’s perspective as it unfolded in the safe holding space of psychoanalysis.  Commentary by a neonatologist and pediatrician will elaborate the optimal conditions for mother and baby during pregnancy and discuss the impact on the baby after birth and relinquishment.

CPD – Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

In the context of our increasing awareness about power, privilege, race and gender politics in society, and the consulting room, Confer invites you to spend a day learning more about the concept of intersectionality, and how it impacts each of us. This event is an opportunity for psychotherapists of all modalities, genders, and sexualities to reflect on their own intersectional identities and how we might make better use of these similarities and differences within our practices.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

This series of seminars examines the impact of the current Covid-19 crisis on individuals, couples and families through the eyes of practitioners as we navigate this unprecedented and surreal shift in our lives.

Our speakers will explore the emotional meanings of being in lockdown, the reforming of one’s sense of self within states of isolation, or in relationships with sudden intensified intimacy…

As attachment issues become more acutely felt, where life-threatening levels of danger are encountered, where jobs have been lost, livelihoods disrupted, relationships frayed, loved ones lost, these enormous pressures on the psyche are inevitably a new focus of therapy.

How can we ameliorate the impact for our clients and – even perhaps – use this as a therapeutic opportunity? Where do we find our deepest resilience in times of crisis?

This webinar will outline the systemic safety methodology for safe relationship therapy when physical and emotional violence is known to have occurred. It is in response to the increase of violence in the home during the lockdown period, and the challenges of working remotely with these clients. It will assist practitioners to assess when it’s safe enough to work relationally, and when to offer alternatives.

The systemic safety methodology has emotional, physical and relational safety as the highest priority. It works within a working triangle of the connections between the risks of further violent behaviour, helping people to take responsibility, and collaborative practice.

The work is never without risk – we know what we know and we know what we don’t know, but we don’t know what we don’t know. We will consider the management of risk in the context of possible further violence.

The work is based on Arlene’s collaboration with Jan Cooper a social worker and systemic therapist and the “Reading Safer Families”, an effective independent family violence intervention service. An integration of trauma, attachment, narrative, and feminist theories with systemic theory and practice, it develops safety plans to help people stop the violence, and then explore the potential for repair, safe contact and safe separation as needed. Most of the family members Arlene and colleagues work with are living with the intergenerational legacies of violence and chronic fear and danger.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

At this event, our presenters will take us into the realms of new thinking about some of the more elusive dimensions of the psychoanalytic encounter, from the waking dream to embodied sensations. Drawing in part on the original theories of Wilfred Bion, James Grotstein, and Madeleine and Willy Baranger’s seminal contributions to contemporary psychoanalysis, our speakers will push our understanding of why these theories are so important in the psychoanalytic process.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

As therapists move their practices online, what are we discovering about the significance of embodied presence in the shadow of its absence?

Surprisingly, therapists have reported that certain kinds of connection are actually intensified online. For example, close-up facial expressions provide an immediate intimacy between the two. Transference and countertransference enactments can still find expression, and narratives can easily unfold with less inhibition.

However, much is also now absent from the session: the full-body language of therapeutic couples as they respond to each other, the subtle shift of a foot, a stomach rumble or a tightening of the muscles; the ambience, smells, light and textures of the therapy room itself; the sanctuary of that room and the ritual of the journey. Deep within the body we know that intimacy is related to proximity, to bodies synchronising and regulating each other, to the non-verbal, non-conscious minutiae of communication and what this recalls of earliest interactions. By considering the constituents of embodied intersubjectivity, our speakers explore the extent to which working online has highlighted the need for bodily-based attunement, three-dimensional presence and, conversely, the extent to which the therapeutic couple can find new forms of intimacy.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Although many psychoanalysts observe that trauma has somatosensory components such as freezing, numbing parts of the body or fragmentation between affect and cognition, it is less recognised that the mind/body can become integrated when these dissociated organisations of self/other experience are brought to awareness and relinquished.

In this way, psychological health progresses toward what Winnicott called “indwelling” – an experience of being present and in contact with oneself within one’s whole body.

In today’s increasingly complex and polarised social world, many psychotherapists are being called, pulled or pushed into addressing issues of social justice. This is evident in our work with clients, in our relationships with colleagues, and in our own lives.

For those without a background in activism or anti-oppression work, it can be challenging to know where to begin, how to recognize our privilege, unpack our own history of oppression, and to navigate cultural misattunements with clients with honesty and grace.

Both speakers will demonstrate the power dynamics that pervade all of our interpersonal relationships from an embodied perspective, with the aim of offering insights and confidence in embracing these domains.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

When we see clients individually, in couples or families, we will inevitably work with issues that come from their family of origin or the family they are making. Each client will bring their story of love and loss, joy and pain. They come suffering in the present, but their pain is often woven with threads from the past – maybe many generations stacked behind them.

In this workshop we will examine aspects of how we can work with clients who carry multi-generation trauma, how to work with parents to protect this being passed down to their children.

This series of seminars examines the impact of the current Covid-19 crisis on individuals, couples and families through the eyes of practitioners as we navigate this unprecedented and surreal shift in our lives.

Our speakers will explore the emotional meanings of being in lockdown, the reforming of one’s sense of self within states of isolation, or in relationships with sudden intensified intimacy. As attachment issues become more acutely felt, where life-threatening levels of danger are encountered, where jobs have been lost, livelihoods disrupted, relationships frayed, loved ones lost, these enormous pressures on the psyche are inevitably a new focus of therapy.

How can we ameliorate the impact for our clients and – even perhaps – use this as a therapeutic opportunity? Where do we find our deepest resilience in times of crisis?

Sigmund Freud devoted much of his professional life to the treatment and cure of many severely traumatised patients. But it may well be that Freud actually endured far more trauma in his own private life than most of his analysands.

Quite apart from his complex childhood, filled with broken attachments and multiple bereavements, he subsequently had to navigate many decades of assaults, ranging from anti-Semitic abuse, to the near-death of his sons during the Great War, to the loss of one of his daughters from Spanish Flu, followed not long thereafter by sixteen years of painful, primitive surgeries for his metastasising oral cancer and, ultimately, by the Nazi occupation of Vienna.

Prof Brett Kahr, drawing upon his many years of archival research and his forthcoming book, Freud’s Pandemics: Surviving global war, Spanish flu, and the Nazis, will help us to understand how and why Freud succeeded in surviving these multiple pandemics when so many others would have succumbed to psychosis or death.

Dr Doris Brothers will consider how aspects of Freudian theory itself might reveal the likelihood that Freud sustained life-changing traumas.

Our two presenters will be joined by Dr Valerie Sinason and Prof Neil Vickers to further elaborate on some of the issues raised.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

In his bestselling book Scattered Minds, Gabor Maté rejects the narrow genetic perspective. Instead, he proposes a biopsychosocial view. This has profound implications for the treatment of AD(H)D and related developmental disorders in both children and adults.

During this seminar, Gabor Maté will elaborate how the circuitry and physiology of the brain are affected by the environment, not only during critical periods of early childhood development but throughout the human lifetime.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 2.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Active Imagination Seminar Series

Life is a series of road bumps, detours, and breakdowns. Most of the time, our consciousness can manage these crises with its default mode of operation. However, if our ego consciousness is overwhelmed by the trauma, then the deeper layers of our psyche are activated to master the situation. At such a juncture, our collective consciousness and the cumulative archetypal wisdom of our ancestors triggers the imagination to create a new image or a symbol to help us to navigate such overwhelming situations.

However, when there is a collective imbalance, such as the one we are currently experiencing in the world, shamanic souls create a symbol to heal the cultural fault lines of the times. We will overview three such creations: Jung’s Red Book, Kandinsky’s Reciprocal Accord and Goethe’s Faust, concluding with a mandala exercise by the participants to demonstrate this creative act of imagination.

CPD – A CPD certificate is not available for this Talk On Demand.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

In the UK, 2.3 million people are living with or married to somebody from a different ethnic group, and one in ten relationships is intercultural. The figures for London are even higher and it is predicted that by 2030, 50 percent of people living in the capital will be foreign-born.

It is important to emphasise the strengths and resiliencies in intercultural couple relationships and not to assume that difficulties in an intercultural couple relationship are rooted in cultural differences.

However, intercultural couples may be faced with unique challenges and there is a growing need for psychotherapists working in multicultural contexts to acknowledge and work with these. Psychotherapy with couples needing help can sometimes reach an impasse when the two people in the relationship feel like intimate strangers. Possibly the very qualities that drew them together are the ones that can lead to chasms of misunderstanding between them.

Drawing on research findings, clinical vignettes and experiential exercises, this webinar will focus on the themes and processes in intercultural couples and the dilemmas these may pose for couples and the clinicians working with them. The webinar will equip therapists with effective interventions, will include consideration of self-reflexivity and therapist’s positioning when working with intercultural couples.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 2.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

In his fourth and most personal book Learning from Life Patrick Casement gives us a fascinating insight into fundamental questions concerning the acquisition of analytic wisdom and how personal experiences shape the analyst’s approach to clinical work.

In this 3-part recording from a one-day seminar delivered in London he talks to us about how the psychoanalytic self comes into being, and how our own emotional truths consciously or unconsciously shape our practice and theory. These presentations will have a fresh and emergent quality and viewers can expect to hear inspiring, personal insights that illuminate the practice of psychoanalysis.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Citing his recent volume Right Brain Psychotherapy (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), Allan Schore will discuss the critical clinical role of transient synchronized mutual regressions. He defines these as the process of returning to an earlier stage of development as a conduit to developmental growth.

In heightened affective moments in the therapy session, when the patient is experiencing a right brain emotional state, the psychobiologically attuned therapist implicitly synchronizes with that regression.

In this way, a right-lateralized interbrain synchronization allows for the communication and regulation of both conscious and unconscious affects at a profound level.

In working with re-enactments of early relational trauma and dissociated affect, such neuroplastic changes are vital for adaptive progressions of the client’s right brain emotion processing — for their relational and stress regulating systems. As the co-constructed therapeutic relationship develops, so this capacity in the therapist can become finely tuned.

Although the process of regression may reflect a clinical deterioration, it may also represent a creative return to relational origins that can lead to reorganization, better integration, healthy individuation, and the adaptive capacities of play and intimacy.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Working psychotherapeutically with the grandiose is not easy. In this conference we’ll look at clinical and fictional examples of grandiosity, what lies beneath this characterological structure, and how someone with these tendencies can be helped.

Characteristics that mark grandiosity – in contrast to healthy self-esteem – include arrogance, exaggerated self-importance, oblivion of impact on others… being entitled, reactive and demanding.

Grandiose people may often devalue others to support their self-esteem, demand gratification, be unrealistic about ways in which the world will serve them, and aggressive when challenged.

As it is difficult for a grandiose narcissistic to realistically perceive their limitations, or their need for help, they will typically only enter therapy after they encounter a serious breakdown in their relationship with the world of other people. Once in therapy, however, they may quickly restore the defensive strategies of grandiosity as a means of self-protection and be particularly challenging to stay connected to.

From Kohut and Kernberg, to Gabbard and Symington, there is a rich psychoanalytical literature on aetiology and treatment of grandiosity. Our speakers will pick up this discussion, considering what underlies this tendency, how it functions to both protect and limit the self, its roots in childhood and how it can be most effectively worked with to bring that person towards acceptance of their limitations and human vulnerability.

CPD – Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

“I’ll never attain any degree of freedom till I’ve learnt to disagree with people—to stand alone—to face up to human loneliness.”
Marion Milner (1927)

Why is it that some people never experience the emotion of loneliness, while others feel excruciating anxiety in solitude? This talk attempts to understand aspects of an individual’s psyche that predisposes them towards either tendency.

In this conversation, we will examine the connection between spirituality, mysticism, contemplation and psychotherapy. Exploring the qualities that inspire growth, healing and transformation in the therapeutic journey, the speakers will consider the many qualities that contribute to these less tangible processes: presence, attention, mindfulness, calm abiding, analytic reverie and compassion. We will ask how these contribute to insight and wisdom, and how they can be developed and enhanced through certain forms of psychotherapeutic attention.

We will also explore the contribution of Wilfred Bion to our understanding of the mystical dimensions of psychoanalysis. Bion brought a radical new vision to psychoanalysis, opening our eyes to “things invisible to mortal sight” as Milton put it, a realm of infinite possibility that is utterly transcendent yet also immanent in every analytic encounter. He taught us to listen in the darkness of unknowing with a third ear of intuition to that which is beyond memory, desire and understanding. In so doing, Bion follows in the footsteps of key apophatic mystics such as St John of the Cross, who suggested that ultimate reality, absolute truth cannot be comprehended by intellect, formulations, images or through sensory perception; it cannot be known, only realised.

This workshop aims to enable psychotherapists from any modality to be with unknowing, the fear of uncertainty, to bear with the discomfort and to trust that realisation can emerge in the analytic encounter through these immeasurable processes.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Active Imagination Seminar Series

To Jung, our imagination is the door to divinity: it serves as a symbolic intermediary allowing for the imaging of the imageless divine; images allow mystics to stand in relationship with the transcendent. This seminar will relate Jung’s idea to the numinous images of this “Imaginative Presence” which over-flowed medieval mystic women’s consciousness and was transmuted and grounded in the body.

In their visualization, they envisioned Jesus as an “incarnational form” of divinity (Self) that was feminine in nature, a “continuum with” rather than as an “opposition to” their ordinary feminine experience of embodiment. We will connect these processes and see how they may relate to psychotherapy.

CPD – A CPD certificate is not available for this Talk On Demand.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

This conference focused on the extraordinary neuropeptide oxytocin, and how it enables love, safe attachment and affiliative social bonds to flourish throughout life. Oxytocin supports perceived safety, reproduction and even survival, acting as an anti-inflammatory agent that also protects us from certain diseases. It is a natural medicine and a source of pleasure, connection and passion.

Research has shown that oxytocin is crucial for secure bond formation, and this must include a bond between therapist and client.

Saturday 6 November 2021 has been declared a Global Day of Action for Climate Justice in which communities all around the world will come together to build power for systems change; at COP26 the theme for this date is ‘Nature: Ensuring the importance of nature and sustainable land use are part of global action on climate change and a clean, green recovery.’ Planting Hope is Confer’s contribution to this day of action, and we are inviting psychotherapists and others to join us in thinking about food, soil, land equity, and the balance of our relationship with the earth in the wider context of the environmental crisis.

The concept of horticulture as therapy has a long history, rooted in the belief that connection with the plant world restores equilibrium and re-engagement with life. It does so through the generative and creative acts of growing from seed, nurturing and bringing to harvest; by reconnecting us with our natural contexts of earth, weather and seasons. In this time of need for urgent climate and environmental action, connection to the needs of our planetary home, our relationship with the soil, plants and land, could never be more relevant. Furthermore, the mental health that such engagement evokes places it at the heart of psychotherapy.

Gardening develops both a sense of agency and transformation and can develop community and mutuality. It reconnects us with life beyond human technology and reminds us of our interdependence with other life forms on the earth.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

The Therapeutic Use of the Body’s Social Engagement System to Promote Feelings of Safety, Connectedness, Intimacy and Recovery

In this workshop Porges and Carter will demonstrate the clinical applications of their research into Polyvagal Theory and oxytocin and social behavior. Their scientifically validated advancements in neuroscience offer a new way of considering brain-body medicine.

Safety is critical in enabling humans to optimize their potential. The neurophysiological processes associated with feeling safe are a prerequisite not only for optimal mental health and social behavior but are also relevant in the clinical setting. Physiological states that support feeling safe enhance therapeutic opportunities to access both the higher brain structures that enable humans to be creative and generative and the lower brain structures involved in regulating health, growth, and restoration.

The Polyvagal Theory explains how interactions within the therapeutic setting may turn off defenses and promote opportunities to feel safe. The theory provides an innovative model to understand the importance of the client’s physiological state in mediating the effectiveness of clinical treatments. Consistent with a Polyvagal perspective, oxytocin and vasopressin dynamically moderate the autonomic nervous system influencing vagal pathways and anti-inflammatory circuits that help explain the adaptive consequences of love, trust, and social behavior for emotional and physical health. Thus, interventions that target the client’s capacity to feel safe and use the social engagement system to regulate physiological state can be effective enhancements of treatments of mental health disorders that are dependent on defense systems. The workshop will integrate the Polyvagal Theory with current research on the mammalian neuropeptides of oxytocin and vasopressin, which facilitate social behaviors and trust.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Preoccupied people are anxiously attached and feel chronically insecure. Their relationships are often marked by intense emotion, anger and enmeshed dynamics. They can be passionate but also be experienced as needy, demanding, sometimes manipulative, and have been referred to as “borderline borderline”.

As clients they can be challenging to work with, and therapy often feels stuck or ends badly. Our attachment patterns lay the foundations of unconscious beliefs about ourselves, and expectations we hold of other people and relationships.

These belief systems are played out in the therapeutic relationship, affecting transference and countertransference, attitudes to boundaries, and how the therapy is used.

This day will focus on individual therapy with adults, outlining how preoccupied attachment develops and what it looks like in the consulting room. It will highlight difficulties common difficulties that arise in therapy with this client group and propose a specific focus and clear aims for therapeutic work with preoccupied clients. The impact of trauma on those with a Preoccupied core pattern of attachment will also be outlined.

CPD – Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

This project began with a discussion between people working at Confer on whether love of the client is essential for the therapeutic process to work. Some thought it would be strange if a slowly emerging, intimate experience of deeply knowing another, and being known, did not result in love of some kind. Others wondered how a therapeutic stance of being loving might inhibit the client’s need to use the therapist as a hateful object.

We considered the many forms and representations of love that might arise in the relational field, from maternal tenderness to erotic desire.

We talked about the wider philosophical, theological question of whether love heals, and whether loving can ever be a deliberate project. We thought about love as a product of the therapeutic frame – which makes it safe to give and receive these deep emotions without fear of consequences.

Clearly these questions raise many pathways of enquiry about what constitutes a deep enough emotional engagement for therapy to be therapeutic. In creating the resulting programme, we asked four author-practitioners to speak about love in therapy. The subsequent conversation is not about erotic transference/countertransference – although it does include that – but about the patient as beloved simply by virtue of being human and seen.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Many families have needed to shed a past identity in order to build new lives.  Especially those who have been subjected to social shame or exclusion. Often, unacceptable aspects of that family history are expunged from the family narrative; histories that are considered too painful to recount – either to protect the teller or listener – are deliberately or unconsciously hidden.

Photographs are removed from albums. Names are deleted from family trees. War records destroyed.

Yet, our panel will propose, such buried truths can never undo what has happened to the former generations of a family, and traumatic histories can never be truly erased. Instead, secrets and lies form an insidious backdrop to family life, which seeps into the collective unconscious of that group. Often these elements become experienced as a free-floating sense of shame or anxiety in future generations that cannot be pinned to any specific event because the truth is unknown.

This conference will consider how a family – either consciously or unconsciously – avoids such knowing, and what happens to the family system when a troubling secret is brought to light. What happens when a child stumbles upon their adoption records? When a DNA result reveals misattributed paternity? Or when a diary reveals a family member committed a violent crime? How can psychotherapy help to bring such secrets to light so they can be integrated into the client’s understanding of who they are, and whose histories they unconsciously carry? And what relief may that bring?

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

In our post-industrial world it is not mysterious that depression and anxiety are so prevalent and that the demand for psychotherapy is increasing. As therapists in this context, how do we understand this collective malaise?

And how do we create new forms of practice that facilitate healing – through ancestry – back to a deeper-known sense of self?

And can we rediscover our profound need for interdependence with each other, with all living systems and the land?

Like many of our events, this discussion is an exploration of views between speakers and participants that is designed to open up new thinking through the process of enquiry.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

The notion of psychotherapy as a completely private space is negated when working with survivors of sexual or domestic violence who are simultaneously navigating legal systems. When ethical and legal requirements intersect with therapeutic work, they can be experienced as intrusive, anxiety-provoking, and restrictive. All this occurs whilst managing the impact of trauma in a world where violence against disempowered people exists. How do we stay connected to such clients when there are multiple factors that may force disconnection and re-traumatisation?

The reality of providing psychotherapy when it intersects with the law will be explored from the perspectives of two psychotherapists, an Independent Domestic Violence Advocate (IDVA) , and a criminal Barrister.

Following the International Day to Eliminate Violence Against Women we will aim to encourage discussion where there is often silence and empowerment where there is oppression.

CPD – Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Mindfulness is simply the deliberate practice of paying attention to what one is feeling and thinking from moment to moment. Usually, the process involves observing the incoming and outgoing breath, noticing and releasing the thoughts and emotions that inevitably arise. As patterns of intrusive thoughts become clearer to identify, they reveal underlying anxieties and make these more manageable.

By repeatedly returning attention to the patterns of breath and the sensations surrounding these, the mindful practitioner is also reconnected to the body. This, in itself, has a calming and affect-regulating effect.

Reflecting the growing body of scientific knowledge about its effect on the nervous system, mindfulness has understandably become one of the most researched areas in psychotherapy. In fact, it is recommended in the NICE guidelines as a treatment for depression. In this webinar we have invited three therapists from different modalities to talk about their long-term use of his practice in their work. The presentations will reflect its effectiveness as a container, as means of transforming feelings and increasing agency.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

In this embodied and experiential webinar, Julianne Appel-Opper will offer new perspectives to explore and work with somatisation and embodied communications. Julianne has developed a way of working – “relational living body psychotherapy” – that is theoretically rooted in integrative gestalt psychotherapy and intersubjective psychoanalytic thinking. This approach also draws on the research fields of attachment, developmental psychology, neuroscience and somatisation.

The focus of the webinar will be to explore how therapists might be able to hear and understand stories without words.

For example, what is communicated as a still shoulder, a look away or painful tension in the back? You will consider how silence, rhythms and melodies of movements might tell a story. You will learn to work with fear of exposure and shame which often make somatised stories elusive and finally the nuanced experience of the embodied presence between therapist and client will be explored.

This workshop will be experiential with short exercises, sensitising participants into a greater awareness of their own and client’s embodiment and somatisation tendencies with a particular focus on attachment trauma. You will explore implicit body-to-body-communications and movements to open up embodied stories for further exploration and integration.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

In this conversation we bring together a panel of distinguished academics, writers, and psychotherapists to explore together the many ways that the death of a loved one can be accommodated in order to free the bereaved to continue to live their lives.

Some of the discussion will centre on how therapists can resource themselves to enter empathically into the grief-landscape that their clients are occupying, maintaining the deep connection demanded of the therapy without losing their own deep connection to life.

We will also hear from two authors who have struggled with exceptional losses and found modes of recovery from overwhelming grief in acts of creativity. The event attempts to unravel some aspects of the unanswerable question: what can we do about unbearable loss?

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

With more than 120 years of analytic experience, models of the mind have evolved in conjunction with various other disciplines.  We are moving towards a new synthesis of knowledge and experience, in which the porosity of subjective and objective states is transcending original binary views. As this opens into a discovery of non-local, distributed aspects of mind and psyche, exciting new therapeutic challenges and possibilities emerge.

In this three-part seminar, we will explore the origins and evolution of the concept of the field, starting with 19th Century discoveries in physics.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Human existence is maintained by a web of connections, attachments and resources. These are inevitably transient yet held together by a person’s sense of ‘going on being’ with a possible future. People leave or die, relationships end, and a life passes through developmental stages that must involve some shedding of former self-states.

If an ending occurs, it would seem to make sense to live into the future, after grieving, especially if holding-on causes suffering. Doing so implies a capacity to exist in the future in one’s mind, through acts of imagination, creativity, courage and developing new ways of being — of exercising agency, purpose and optimism. And yet, doing so is rarely straightforward.

Letting go of another person also involves foregoing aspects of oneself that could only exist in that relationship; it demands a capacity to tolerate a temporary fracturing of self and reality.

If an ending occurs, it would seem to make sense to live into the future, after grieving, especially if holding-on causes suffering. Doing so implies a capacity to exist in the future in one’s mind, through acts of imagination, creativity, courage and developing new ways of being — of exercising agency, purpose and optimism. And yet, doing so is rarely straightforward. Letting go of another person also involves foregoing aspects of oneself that could only exist in that relationship; it demands a capacity to tolerate a temporary fracturing of self and reality.

This discussion invites us to think about a range of therapeutic concerns, including the internalization of loved-ones; whether loss can be experienced as an opening, and how we navigate an unknowable future. Our three panellists will offer their views on what makes letting go so problematic, yet so essential for full engagement with life.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

In this webinar, our speakers will explore this process of mutuality as a developmental process of moving through and being moved by another’s experience of the self and the world.

While psychoanalytic thinking has moved far beyond the neutral analyst and now fully encompasses the mutual influence between patient and therapist, the nature of those two-person influences has only begun to be articulated.

The term ‘moving through’ comes from current thinking about embodied communication. It is grounded in action and also encompasses the process of being emotionally moved by the other in relational encounters. In this regard, the embodied moving through process in psychotherapy drives the long developmental trajectory involved in coming to know our own and others’ minds.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Today’s panel will consider the implications of holding the psychotherapy session in cyberspace – something that most psychotherapists have, however reluctantly, adjusted to during the pandemic. Many have expressed regret at the loss of embodied contact, the familiar physical rhythm of the sessions and the lack of access to non-verbal cues.

Yet, while this shift from the embodied to digital encounter appears to involve significant losses, practitioners have also discovered unexpected forms of connection through the quasi-cinematic intimacy with the other.

These, and other interesting phenomena arising from changes to the frame of therapy, the felt-experience of the relationship and its therapeutic potential will form the core of this discussion.

It’s important to note that we are preparing this October event in June 2020. We can’t predict where our therapy practices will be located when it happens. Nonetheless, much will have been learnt about the significance of the location of psychotherapy, and its frame – and explore what might happen (or perhaps what has already happened) when therapist and client are able to meet once again in person.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

The aim of psychotherapy is freedom: to liberate sufferers from repetitive self-defeating patterns of thought and relationship. Its clients feel stuck, unable to move forward, trammelled by depression, anxiety, physical and/or mental pain and cut-offness.

In this webinar we shall consider psychotherapeutic freedom from three different, but related, viewpoints. Based on his recent book, The Brain has a Mind of its Own: Attachment, Neurobiology, and the New Science of Psychotherapy, Jeremy Holmes will present a contemporary neuroscience perspective.

Drawing on Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle, he will show how the co-created psychotherapy projects of transference analysis, dream work and free association disrupt habitual patterns of sensation and thought. This in turn helps re-instate the agency, capacity to change one’s models of the word, and mentalise which are compromised in psychological illness.

Barnaby Barratt is today’s foremost psychoanalytic scholar of free association. He will expound the views encapsulated in his recent Radical Psychoanalysis trilogy, showing how free association, Freud’s greatest discovery, fosters a sense of aliveness that goes beyond and even subverts conventional interpretation and representation.

Saadia Muzaffar is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist with a particular interest in the role of spirituality in therapeutic practice. She will explore the boundary between the security and constraints which spiritual beliefs and practice represent. Spiritual freedom underscores the transformative impact of self-directed spiritual exploration on the troubled mind.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

We often think of highly sensitive people as having less structured boundaries than others: their heightened responses can be confused with poor ego function, with personality or mood disorders. But in this conference we will be looking at new work with Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) as those who have an innate trait of sensory processing sensitivity (SPS).

Highly Sensitive People may be super-perceptive, but they also face the considerable and persistent challenges of processing multiple stimuli in depth. They can be easily overwhelmed, including by the therapy relationship itself. To avoid the risk of misdiagnosis – of a borderline or trauma issue, for example – the therapist’s understanding of the SPS’s inner world, and especially how it resonates with their childhood experiences, is crucial.

When attachments have been good, the highly sensitive person may flourish; when adverse, they are more prone than others to depression, anxiety and shyness in adulthood. Therapeutic work may need to include dealing with overstimulation and setting boundaries; managing stronger emotional reactions, particularly in relation to criticism; low self-esteem; and the need to reframe even a good childhood and work history.

As well as considering the importance of making accurate differential diagnoses our presenters will also consider many aspects of a highly sensitive person’s needs: how to discuss the trait with them or their families; sensitivity and gender; issues in relationships; challenges at work, and differences in sexual style.
Useful link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_processing_sensitivity

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

For twelve years Gabor Maté was the staff physician at a clinic for drug-addicted people in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where he worked with patients challenged by hard-core drug addiction, mental illness and HIV, including at Vancouver Supervised Injection Site.

In his most recent bestselling book, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, he shows that their addictions do not represent a discrete set of medical disorders; rather, they merely reflect the extreme end of a continuum of addiction, mostly hidden, that runs throughout our society. The book draws on cutting-edge science to illuminate where and how addictions originate and what they have in common.

In this recorded webinar for Confer, Gabor discussed how he has come to understand what is often claimed to be the source of addictions. He has discovered that this is not found in genes but in the early childhood environment where the neurobiology of the brain’s reward pathways develop and where the emotional patterns that lead to addiction are wired into the unconscious. Stress, both then and later in life, creates the predisposition for addictions, whether to drugs, alcohol, nicotine, or to behavioural addictions such as shopping or sex.

Helping the addicted individual requires that we appreciate the function of the addiction in someone’s life. More than a disease, he will propose that it is a response to a distressing life history and current life situation. Once we recognise these roots – and the lack the addict strives (in vain) to fill – we can develop a compassionate approach toward them, one that stands the best chance of restoring that person to wholeness and health.

https://drgabormate.com/book/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts/

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 2.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

This series of seminars examines the impact of the current Covid-19 crisis on individuals, couples and families through the eyes of practitioners as we navigate this unprecedented and surreal shift in our lives.

Our speakers will explore the emotional meanings of being in lockdown, the reforming of one’s sense of self within states of isolation, or in relationships with sudden intensified intimacy. As attachment issues become more acutely felt, where life-threatening levels of danger are encountered, where jobs have been lost, livelihoods disrupted, relationships frayed, loved ones lost, these enormous pressures on the psyche are inevitably a new focus of therapy.

How can we ameliorate the impact for our clients and – even perhaps – use this as a therapeutic opportunity? Where do we find our deepest resilience in times of crisis?

Many of us, including our psychotherapy clients, may suffer from unexplained symptoms of debilitation, and of depression, without a clear context. In fact, general practitioners say that about 25 per cent of their consultations are with patients for whom they cannot give a medical diagnosis or treatment and this can be a key issue in psychotherapy.

This talk guides us through the latest findings about the biofeedback loops between inflammation, the immune system and states of mind.

The role of underlying low-grade inflammation is a rapidly growing and fascinating area of research that might have great relevance to psychotherapy practice.

Our two expert presenters describe some of the biofeedback loops between stress, inflammation and the immune system. We discover how inflammation stemming from persistent pathogens may influence the development of mood disorders to a significant extent – actually to a greater extent than inflammation resulting from acute infections. Researchers have found that recurring negative moods are associated with elevated levels of inflammatory biomarkers. These pro-inflammatory chemicals can give rise to physical, cognitive and behavioural changes, typically fatigue and cognitive impairments. They are known to be raised in people who suffer from depression compared to non-depressed ones (Happakoski et al., 2015) and can predict the severity of depressive symptoms.

This seminar will be packed with information about the biology that underpins these insights, as well as practical examples of safe lifestyle interventions that might support psychotherapeutic approaches. Our recommended reading is Edward Bullmore’s book, The Inflamed Mind (Short Books, 2019), which explains how and why mental disorders can have their roots in the immune system and how mind, brain and body work together.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

In a time of multiple crises in many Western democracies, from the Covid-19 pandemic to the uprisings against racism, to the unfolding economic disaster that is a product of austerity, many asked the question: what type of person is governing us? This question relates not simply to specific individuals, their political parties and ideologies but to the mental states of those who are supposed to be offering benign leadership.

To suggest that our leaders are flawed from the get-go by their desire for power is too simple. There is surely a form of benign politician who is dedicated to equal citizenship for all, who can combine strength with care – who is an adult. Perhaps a better question is to explore the developmental maturity of certain leaders. Disturbing, yet obvious, as this idea may be, we need to ask whether huge economies are being controlled by people who have never been able to grow up, and who lack an internal representation of care on which they can model their political decisions.

As the history of populism repeats itself, we considered the trajectory between unformed minds and uncompassionate politics. Our panel of speakers looked at the childhoods of certain leaders, tracing deficits in their early care to the kind of psychopathologies apparent in the neglect, abandonment and trauma inflicted or allowed in the countries they are elected to govern. With backgrounds in which a toxic mix of privilege, neglect and sadism may have formed their models of the parent-child, do we see this acted out in government with dire consequences?

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Freud saw dreams as fundamentally an expression of the inner world of the dreamer. Contemporary therapies and dream science have tended to follow him in this (to the extent that dreams are allowed any significance at all). But Westernised cultures are relatively unique in insisting that dreams are intra-subjective. Indigenous cultures, historically and to this day, have seen dreams as reflecting social, trans-generational and transcendent realities.

What does it say about our basic cultural assumptions, that we view dreams in such an individualistic way? How might it affect the way we work with dreams, to view them as multi-dimensional?

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Anyone caring for girls today knows that our clients, daughters, and the girls next door are more anxious and prone to depression and self-harm than ever before. The question is, why? In this seminar, award-winning science journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa and Professor Wanjiku Njoroge will delve into the problems young girls face and share new evidence that uncovers how and why the mental health crisis facing girls today is a biologically rooted phenomenon that interplays with a society and culture where children seem to grow up earlier and faster.

Jackson Nakazawa will speak to how the earlier onset of puberty mixes badly with the unchecked rise of social media and ongoing cultural misogyny, and how this affects girls’ health and well-being. Dr. Njoroge will address how systems of oppression, predominantly racism, affect girls across development. When this toxic biopsychosocial clash occurs during the critical neurodevelopmental window of adolescence for girls, it can alter the female stress-immune response in ways that derail healthy emotional development and harm well-being.

However, our new understanding of the biology of modern girlhood yields good news, too. Though puberty is a particularly critical and vulnerable period, it is also a time during which the female adolescent brain is highly flexible and responsive to certain kinds of support and scaffolding. Based on the latest science, Jackson Nakazawa will share a series of neuroprotective and healing strategies for how clinicians, parents, and communities can help secure a healthy emotional inner life for girls and young women.

CPD – Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

The autonomic nervous system is at the heart of daily living, powerfully shaping our experiences of safety and influencing our capacity for connection. Porges’ Polyvagal Theory provides a guide to the autonomic circuits that underlie behaviours and beliefs. It gives us an understanding of the body-to brain neural highways that give birth to our personal stories of safety and survival.

In this workshop Deb Dana will offer a polyvagal roadmap for psychotherapists, exploring ways to listen with curiosity and compassion to emerging autonomic states and answer the essential question, “What does the nervous system need in this moment to find safety in connection?”

In the course of the seminar, Deb Dana will describe the autonomic hierarchy and a ‘personal profile’ map. We will learn how neuroception shapes behaviour and discuss how to use the co-regulating pathways of the social engagement system to send cues of safety to the client in therapy.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

This conference invites psychotherapists of all backgrounds to consider the intricate and complex challenge of talking about race, both within and beyond the consulting room. It rests on the premise that examining the subjective experience of inequality across painful racial divides in our society is inevitably a confronting and emotionally charged endeavour: frustrating and saddening for black people; shame laden and unnerving for white people.

That this conversation can flow creatively is as important in therapy relationships as anywhere. Our speakers will suggest that although challenging, a deepened conversation about racial hurt can safely emerge. This is one in which the Person of Colour is given the empathic listening needed for fullest possible expression of their lived experience of racism. For the white therapist, a recognition of any fragility, shame and defensiveness in this conversation is a transformative starting point.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Families face intense emotional pain when a child has died or gone missing. For complex reasons, this loss and trauma can remain unresolved and unconscious across one or more generations. This powerful psychological atmosphere can impact any other child in the family but it is especially powerful for the child born after the loss.

In this conference, Kristina Schellinski, a Jungian analyst, will be citing from her book, “Individuation for Adult Replacement Children.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

James Masterson was a leading figure and innovative thinker in the major psychoanalytic turn from the theory of repressed desires to a focus on relationship and the self. Essential to this shift was the naming and defining of personality disorder, an endeavor that both shaped Masterson’s work and, in turn, was shaped by him.

Unwilling to accept his “borderline” patients as “untreatable,” he began an effective synthesis of object relations theory and developmental studies that became the cornerstone of his theory and clinical practice.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Active Imagination Seminar Series

In classical Jungian psychoanalysis, active imagination is one of the key instruments for contacting and working with the unconscious. It has summoned a wave of interest among Jungian practitioners since the publication of The Red Book by C.G. Jung in 2009, demonstrated by the recent publication of four volumes of essays by Jungian scholars in the series titled Jung’s Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul Under Postmodern Conditions.

Today the role of imagination is taking a paramount position as a pillar of Jungian analytic practice, theory-making, and depth psychological response to issues in contemporary culture. We shall consider why it is making such a comeback and what active imagination brings to the therapy process.

CPD – A CPD certificate is not available for this Talk On Demand.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

From colonial occupation to partition, from the Famine to the Troubles, Ireland has experienced much turmoil and loss. Countless people died in the great hunger, and since 1700, 10 million have emigrated for survival. The scattering of Irish people across the world means that many of us (10m in England) are the descendants of those who experienced the anguished loss of family, history and land. The proposition of this conference is that this has led to distinct manifestations of intergenerational trauma running through the diaspora.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

This conference explores the psychotherapeutic challenges of working with shame, one of the most painful yet insidious emotions because of its potential to attack the deepest sense of self. Shaming is often a mechanism of emotional control in dysfunctional families. It works by undermining the individual’s most fundamental sense of worth, leaving them with an intangible sense of being wrong, unworthy – a disgrace in some way – at the core of their being.

Afraid of having this confirmed by others, people with a core sense of shame may fear intimacy and social engagement; their ability to engage with life involves holding themselves apart from others.

Anxiety, loneliness and depression may be its painful side-effects. When feelings of shame are compounded by further humiliations, aggression may be triggered.

Every message of a shame-based family, it is suggested, is the re-enactment of trans and intergenerational wounding. Clients may not be aware that they suffer from shame but if these emotions bring a person or family into therapy it can be worked through. This is challenging therapeutic work: underlying dynamics may play out, taking hold of all involved, including the therapist and perhaps supervisor. Our speakers come from psychodynamic and systemic family work and have vast experience working with shame in all its forms and extremities. We will discuss how to manage these dynamics in the consulting room so clients can grow in self-belief and transcend the family pattern.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

It is perhaps a given that, whatever someone’s starting point for coming into therapy, they have a wish to change – to suffer less – and that one way of thinking about that is as a desire to be securely attached. Of course, most people don’t come into therapy framing their problem as an incapacity for secure attachment, but psychotherapists who think of emotional suffering as rooted in childhood deficits may view the work through the lens of attachment theory.

They will seek to bring these deficits to consciousness in such a way as to both validate the client’s distress and to arrive at some level of psychological integration between past and present.

An understanding of the importance of having secure attachments leads us to a further idea: that it may also be possible to acquire these via the therapeutic relationship itself as a reparative experience. If so, we would want to ask what kind of secure attachment would that be? Could it involve a profound shift in the client’s expectation of the other? Or would it be an alternative gain: the capacity to think, empathically, about one’s emotions and the feelings of others without becoming overwhelmed? Underpinning these possibilities is the question: how does psychotherapy enable people to change? Our panel will explore the psychotherapeutic processes they believe lead to “earning security” from a range of perspectives.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

The field of pre- and perinatal psychology highlights memories of influential, often traumatic events before and around the time of birth. These early experiences can profoundly affect relational and behavioural tendencies. This seminar focuses on experiences of loss in the pre and perinatal period, the most common being early twin loss. We will also explore the “haunted womb” – one that has felt the impact of miscarriages, abortions, or stillbirths.

Maternal loss and stress can affect the flow of love and connection that the baby in utero requires to thrive.

It is suggested that babies developing within this traumatized space may live their lives in the shadow of a mysterious sense of longing and dissatisfaction. How might we shine the light on such shadows and access the original potential that they occlude?

This online seminar offers an overview of common early loss and its effect for the baby in utero, including how such experiences might be sensed and remembered. We will also be offered the opportunity for some experiential exploration of this material, both in ourselves as therapists and clinically with our clients.

CPD – Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

The spread of the SARSCov2 virus presents an unprecedented event that rapidly introduced widespread life threat, economic de-stabilization, and social isolation. The human nervous system is tuned to detect safety and danger, integrating body and brain responses via the autonomic nervous system. Polyvagal Theory provides a perspective to understand the impact of the pandemic on mental and physical health.

This perspective highlights the important role of the state of the autonomic nervous system in exacerbating or dampening threat reactions to the pandemic. In addition, the theory alerts us to the impact of clinical history (e.g., trauma) on autonomic regulation as an important compounding risk factor lowering the threshold to behaviorally and physiologically destabilize in response to the pandemic. The theory provides a strategy to dampen the adverse reactions to threat (e.g., acute stress disorders) through portals of social engagement that evolved to downregulate defenses to promote calmness and connectedness.

Consistent with a Polyvagal perspective, oxytocin and vasopressin dynamically moderate the autonomic nervous system influencing vagal pathways and anti-inflammatory circuits that help explain the adaptive consequences of love, trust, and social behavior for emotional and physical health. Thus, interventions that target the client’s capacity to feel safe and use the social engagement system to regulate physiological state can be effective enhancements of treatments of mental health disorders that are dependent on defense systems. The workshop will integrate the Polyvagal Theory with current research on the mammalian neuropeptides of oxytocin and vasopressin, which facilitate social behaviours and trust. In this workshop Porges and Carter will discuss applications of their research to the current pandemic.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Drawing upon years of experience in the consulting room, humanitarian field work, international projects and academic research, Renos Papadopoulos will present refreshing perspectives in relation to work with those who have faced severe adversity due to various forms of involuntary dislocation.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Active Imagination Seminar Series

Jung’s active imagination is believed to be the heart of his massive contributions to depth psychology and central to his psychotherapeutic enterprise. There are many guides on how to experiment with active imagination – the process of making dreamed images objectively intelligible in a process of healing and transformation.

Lingering in many descriptions of this process, codified after Jung’s death, is a reflexive method that involves “going inward” to correspond with the images behind dream-induced emotions. However, in light of post-humanist insights to critical theory and the subsequent annulment of the coherent soul, where do we draw the line between what is “inward” and “outward”? Who is the dreamer? What roles do the non-human “furniture” around us play in the production of images, and how do we account for their work?

CPD – A CPD certificate is not available for this Talk On Demand.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

This series of seminars examines the impact of the current Covid-19 crisis on individuals, couples and families through the eyes of practitioners as we navigate this unprecedented and surreal shift in our lives.

Our speakers will explore the emotional meanings of being in lockdown, the reforming of one’s sense of self within states of isolation, or in relationships with sudden intensified intimacy. As attachment issues become more acutely felt, where life-threatening levels of danger are encountered, where jobs have been lost, livelihoods disrupted, relationships frayed, loved ones lost, these enormous pressures on the psyche are inevitably a new focus of therapy.

How can we ameliorate the impact for our clients and – even perhaps – use this as a therapeutic opportunity? Where do we find our deepest resilience in times of crisis?

In this workshop Dr Pauline Boss will share how to work effectively with ambiguous loss, a ubiquitous yet understated phenomena that differs in its effects and expression from unclear loss. An ambiguous loss might arise, for example, from the disappearance of a loved one, declining health or ecoanxiety. It lacks the clarity of a loss through death, divorce or critical illness and its impact on mental health is far less obvious to others.

Often it may be unresolvable, internalized, and difficult to communicate, and the individual’s symptoms can be the sole focus of treatment while the context goes unnoticed.

Pauline however, challenges the idea that we need closure from such losses. Rather, she suggests, people can come to live well with the grief if they can find meaning in it, often in creative ways, and new purpose and joy in life. For such a situation of loss, a therapy based on stress and resilience is required, and the capacity in the therapist to hold the ambiguity deep within themselves is essential. The workshop will provide a road map for working with this kind of loss offering guidance on meaning, mastery, identity, ambivalence, attachment, and a new hope.

CPD – Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

What makes depression so complex, and how can therapists best meet its particular demands? Depression is a multifaceted and layered phenomenon – a set of conditions that vary widely in subjective experience and aetiology. It is difficult to work with because the very psychodynamic patterns that underpin it tend to block therapeutic change.

This workshop attempted to grapple with these complexities, and ask why such a common and potentially devastating ‘disorder’ has not been eliminated by natural selection.

One of the most difficult relationship patterns which can be brought to psychotherapy is domestic violence in a couple relationship. To begin with it can be very difficult for someone on the receiving end of abuse to take this step. Victims often resist intervention until they are in desperate emotional or physical danger. Even then, their commitment to the therapy may waver, especially when the abusive partner offers promises of change and attempts to draw them back into the relationship and away from therapy.

The menstrual cycle is an integral part of many women’s daily lived experience for around three decades of their life. Each month female hormonal fluctuations result in a range of physiological, physical, and psychological changes that can impact a woman’s identity in a profound way, at bio-psycho-social and spiritual levels of experience. Yet in 2022, many people don’t openly discuss the menstrual cycle in western mainstream culture, and it carries a lingering shadow of shame.

The menstrual cycle has been overlooked and this is most evident in psychotherapeutic theory, research, and training.

However, with the rise of the ‘period power’ movement, a new feminist discourse around menstruation is opening outside the therapy room. As psychotherapists, how can we more openly, sensitively, and insightfully dialogue about it inside the therapy room with our clients?

In this conference, we will take a multidisciplinary view to better understand the place of the menstrual cycle in women’s lives. We will hear from a range of speakers from across the globe offering biopsychology, psychoanalytical and humanistic therapy perspectives. While the content will primarily be about women’s experience, we recognise not all women have periods and not all people who have periods identify as women. We intend this to be an inclusive event that recognises subjectivity. We welcome women, men, and gender non-conforming therapists to join us to learn more about how the menstrual cycle may impact clients of all genders in a variety of ways.

We will close with a panel discussion taking a pragmatic lens, to ensure you leave with some ideas of how you can incorporate working with the menstrual cycle in your therapeutic practice.

CPD – Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.