Trauma Industrial Complex: Pre-Order Launch for Darren McGarvey’s forthcoming book

An online event with Darren McGarvey and Suzanne Zeedyk
Wednesday 14th May 2025

Join us for a compelling evening with award-winning author and social commentator Darren McGarvey as we celebrate the upcoming launch of his latest book, Trauma Industrial Complex. In conversation with psychologist and researcher Dr. Suzanne Zeedyk, Darren will explore the growing influence and consequences of trauma discourse in contemporary society.

From social media content to public policy debates, trauma has become a dominant cultural narrative. But how has this narrative evolved, and what are the consequences of its commodification? Darren and Suzanne will unpack these questions, offering critical insights into the ways trauma is framed and consumed in contemporary society.

At The Bowlby Centre, we are committed to deepening the understanding of human relationships and the lasting impact of early experiences. By bringing together insights from attachment theory and contemporary debates on trauma, we hope to foster a conversation that is both thoughtful and informed.

Event Schedule UK TIME:

• 7:00 PM: Introduction of Darren McGarvey by Suzanne Zeedyk
• 7:10 PM – 8:00 PM: In-depth conversation on Trauma Industrial Complex
• 8:00 PM – 8:25 PM: Audience Q&A

How is it delivered?:

This event will be delivered live online via Zoom.

ABOUT DARREN

Darren McGarvey grew up in Pollok, Glasgow. He is a writer, hip-hop artist, broadcaster and campaigner. His bestselling and acclaimed first book Poverty Safari was awarded the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2018. Darren is skilled at offering incisive, authentic and often controversial insights about the ways we live in modern society. There is much anticipation for his third book, due out later in 2025.

ABOUT SUZANNE

Dr. Suzanne Zeedyk is an academic, researcher, and renowned speaker dedicated to helping individuals and organizations understand the fundamental role of connection in fostering human thriving. Nearly 20 years of experience in the School of Psychology at the University of Dundee has been followed by a decade of working with the public. Throughout her career, Suzanne has focused on helping others to see the profound and the ordinary in the science of relationships and attachment.

Date: 14th May 2025

Time:7:00 PM – 8:30 PM UK TIME

Cost: Free to attend, with a suggested £15 donation to support The Bowlby Centre.

Clients who protect themselves by minimising their experience

Avoidant attachment – how we work with clients with this strategy
A three-hour online workshop designed and facilitated by Anne Power
Thursday 29th May 2025

This session aims to deepen our understanding of avoidant attachment strategies and how they impact all relationships including the therapeutic one. The goal is to increase our effectiveness in working with clients who have this attachment pattern.

This will help therapists:

i. Establish safety with clients who are skilled at hiding their need for it.
ii. Be alert to the inner story of avoidance and deepen their curiosity.
iii. Be alert to how they themselves are likely to respond to the client’s strategies.
iv. Be equipped to offer empathy to clients who may initially feel allergic to this.
v. Develop skill in finding the optimal blend of validation and challenge for each client.

Topics will include:

Assessing new clients; regulating and containing feelings; managing the frame; formulating different sorts of interventions; recognising and tolerating our countertransference; responding to ruptures.

In addition, we will consider:

• How some people with narcissistic traits might have an avoidant attachment style
• How some neuro-diverse people may be seen as ‘very avoidant’ – what is the crossover here?

How is it delivered?:

These will be live interactive training sessions on Zoom. The first hour, Annie will present in-depth information on this subject, this will be recorded. For the remaining two hours the group will enter small break out groups for focused exploration and share questions and discussion in the larger group. This element will not be recorded.

ABOUT ANNIE

Anne Power has qualifications from The Bowlby Centre, Westminster Pastoral Foundation, Tavistock Relationships and Relate. Her clinical work has been in voluntary settings, in the NHS and in private practice in London where she now works online with couples and providing one-off supervision consultations. She has taught on a number of therapy trainings in London. Contented Couples: Magic, logic or luck? was published in 2022 and reflects on interviews with eighteen long-term couples.

Date: 29th May 2025

Time: 6:00pm – 9:00pm UK TIME

Cost: £90 non-Bowlby Centre members  |    £70 Bowlby Centre members

CPD:  3 hours (CPD certificate provided)

Safeguarding Awareness Training for Counsellors and Therapists

A two-hour workshop designed and facilitated by Lynn Findlay
Tuesday 10th June 2025

What is it about? The workshop will increase your knowledge and confidence about making safeguarding decisions about children and adults in the therapeutic context. We focus on joined up thinking across families and networks.

Is it for me? It is for therapists working with both adults and young people. Many adult clients have contact with children in some capacity, and all children are cared for by adults.  You can be in private practice or employed by an organisation.

What will I learn? The session covers:

• The legislative and statutory framework which promotes and safeguards a child’s welfare, including understanding terminology and comparisons with safeguarding adults (joined up thinking).
• An overview of the types of harm and abuse in child and adult safeguarding
• The role of the therapist within this framework, exploring issues of confidentiality and contracting in the counselling context.
• Making sense of your concerns and threshold dilemmas
• Guidance on recording and reporting concerns
• Signposting – what next.

How is it delivered? This is delivered via Zoom, with information sharing, whole group discussion, and opportunities for questions and personal reflection.

About Lynn:

Lynn is a qualified counsellor and psychotherapist, working with both adults and young people. She is a registered social worker with over 25yrs experience working in safeguarding, with many years’ experience designing and delivering training sessions in social care and therapy.

Date: Tuesday 10th June 2025

Time: 6.15pm – 8.30pm

Cost: £40 non-Bowlby Centre members

£30 Bowlby Centre members

CPD: 2 hours and 15 mins

(CPD certificate provided)

Specialised Safeguarding Training for Counsellors and Therapists

A two-hour workshop designed and facilitated by Lynn Findlay
Tuesday 17th June 2025

Working with non-recent abuse and the LADO process AND Domestic abuse, including the DASH risk assessment and the MARAC process

This workshop is designed for counsellors and therapists, who have either completed the Safeguarding Awareness session, or who have a sound knowledge of child and adult safeguarding and are looking to expand their knowledge on working with disclosures of non-recent abuse and working with domestic abuse in therapy. The workshop offers knowledge of tools and procedures which can be used in therapy and opportunities for further discussion around thresholds and safeguarding dilemmas.

This is a two hour session and we spend around one hour on each topic.

Working with non-recent abuse covers:

• What is non-recent abuse?
• Managing a disclosure in therapy – duty of care, confidentiality, and self-care
• Making a referral to the police and/or social care
• Allegations against persons working with children/vulnerable adults: Role of the LADO
• Continuing with therapy alongside an investigation –role of CPS and pre-trial therapy

Working with domestic abuse covers:

• What is domestic abuse?
• How domestic abuse is located within child and adult safeguarding
• Contracting with a client experiencing domestic abuse
• Working with a disclosure of domestic abuse
• The DASH risk assessment tool and how this can be used in therapy
• Understanding the MARAC process

There will be a blend of information sharing and small group work to discuss thresholds and dilemmas.

About Lynn:

Lynn is a qualified counsellor and psychotherapist, working with both adults and young people. She is a registered social worker with over 25yrs experience working in safeguarding, with many years’ experience designing and delivering training sessions in social care and therapy.

Date: Tuesday 17th June 2025

Time: 6.15pm – 8.30pm

Cost: £40 non-Bowlby Centre members

£30 Bowlby Centre members

CPD: 2 hours and 15 mins

(CPD certificate provided)

Attachment within a couple relationship

A online workshop designed and facilitated by Annie Power
11 hours over 3 Friday’s

Outline:

This course is offered both for couple therapists and for practitioners who work with individual clients but would like a fuller understanding of how attachment strategies play out in a relationship. The modules will map attachment dynamics in different areas of a couple’s life. In the final session we will briefly explore working directly with a couple  as well as working with the ‘couple in mind’. This might be particularly useful for individual therapists who are considering a move into couple work.

The approach I take is based on my own training at The Bowlby Centre, my systemic training with Relate and in recent years, my training and experience as an EFT (emotionally focused couple therapy) therapist. I will suggest points for reflection between meetings as well as asking you to read a chapter in preparation for each module. A copy of Contented Couples: Magic, logic or luck? will be needed for this reading.

Session 1

How attachment impacts our selection of a mate

Secure attachment is a blessing across the life cycle and its impact on our choice of a partner is particularly telling. People with this attachment history are equipped to choose well. They have a view of self as loveable and of the other as capable of loving. Their comfort with themselves allows them to think about their own feelings and to be curious about their own experience and that of a potential partner. With less need to project parts of their self they are better placed to read and accurately assess another person. We will consider how insecure attachment could sabotage mate selection in any of the courtship pathways – romance, arranged marriage or self-arranged relationships.

How attachment impacts building and sustaining a relationship

Secure attachment enables both care-seeking and caregiving to be more effective. We will consider the importance of understanding our needs and being able to voice these in ways which our partner can digest. We will map how different forms of insecure attachment interfere with the reciprocal, mutual support which most people long for in a partnership. People often say that the difficulty in their relationship is all down to ‘communication’ and we’ll explore what may underly this idea and how clients might be helped to unpack and go deeper in understanding their experience.

Session 2

How attachment impacts fights: Triggering, escalating and repairing them

Rows are a part of most relationships, the problem is not so much the fight itself as the lack of repair. A couple who avoids all friction could be at risk of keeping their relationship in the shallow end. Many couples become drawn into an ongoing tug of war between their complementary attachment strategies: the more one tries to calm the situation by saying little and keeping at a distance, the more the other insists on talking and feels things would be OK if only they could get their partner to understand. When this pattern becomes embedded, the tension will be constantly humming and a relatively small jolt can catapult the couple into open conflict.

How attachment impacts sex in a long term bond

How can long term partnerships continue to enjoy sexual pleasure over the decades? Why does it often happen that all seems fine in a couple except for sex? Is sex a lightning rod to what is really going on, or an adjunct which is less important for some couples? We will consider how competing attachment strategies can interfere with their sex life, as with any aspect of a couple’s daily life. When clients become more regulated and less reactive in their attachment behaviour then sex may be easier to negotiate – as would other areas such as money.

Session 3

How we work with attachment in a couple

In this module we will switch to a more focused approach to working, either with the ‘couple in mind’ as we sit with an individual in the room, or actually working with a couple. The approach I offer is broadly based on EFT and I build this onto an attachment-based psychoanalytic base. We will consider how to help a couple who arrive with the common presentation of rowing about all kinds of unimportant things, despondent because they seem to have become enemies and longing to recapture a sense of being a team. We will also review the understanding from earlier meetings.

ABOUT ANNIE

Anne Power has qualifications from The Bowlby Centre, Westminster Pastoral Foundation, Tavistock Relationships and Relate. Her clinical work has been in voluntary settings, in the NHS and in private practice in London where she now works online with couples and providing one-off supervision consultations. She has taught on a number of therapy trainings in London.  Contented Couples: Magic, logic or luck? was published in 2022 and reflects on interviews with eighteen long-term couples.

Anne’s first book, Forced Endings in Psychotherapy, investigated the process of closing a practice for retirement or other reasons. Her published papers explore attachment meaning in the consulting room and in the supervision relationship.

Dates:

• Friday 26^th September 2025 – 9:00 to 12.20
• Friday 3^rd October 2025 – 9:00 to 12.20
• Friday 10^th October 2025 – 9:00 to 13.20

CPD: 11 hours
Limited to 15 participants