Continuing Professional Development

We provide a variety of professional development opportunities. Some of these are available only to our members whilst others are available to other qualified psychotherapists and counsellors and we are committed to developing training provision aimed at giving an attachment orientation to other professionals.

Open Days

Psychotherapy Training Open Days

The Open Day provides an opportunity to meet staff from the Bowlby Centre to find out more about our approach and the details of our training programme. The event is a facilitated workshop, with an overview of the curriculum, a clinical vignette and a discussion about our approach and the theoretical influences that have informed our work. It is also an opportunity to meet some of those who may be training alongside you, should you decide to join us.

The Open Days will be held in person at the Bowlby Centre, 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN.

Upcoming Dates:

Saturday 11th May 2024

Saturday 1st June 2024

Clinical Forums

SAVE THE DATE: 

April 13 – Anne Aiyegbusi
May 11 – Kate White
June 8 – Tori Settle
July 13 – Barry Christie

* Speakers are subject to change

Conference

Courses

Safeguarding Awareness Training for Counsellors and Therapists
A two-hour online workshop designed and facilitated by Lynn Findlay

Monday 22nd April 2024 OR Monday 13th May 2024
Time: 6.15pm- 8.30pm
With Lynn Findlay
Venue: Zoom Online

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.

Booking Information: 

Date: Monday 22nd April 2024 OR Monday 13th May 2024

Time:6.15pm- 8.30pm

Cost:£40 (£30 for Bowlby Centre members and students)

CPD: 2 hours and 15 Minutes  – (CPD certificate provided)

Specialised Safeguarding Training for Counsellors and Therapists
A two-hour online workshop designed and facilitated by Lynn Findlay

Monday 29th April 2024
Time: 6.15pm- 8.30pm
With Lynn Findlay
Venue: Zoom Online

Specialised safeguarding training for therapists

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.

Booking Information: 

Date: Monday 29th April 2024 OR Monday 20th May 2024

Time:6.15pm- 8.30pm

Cost:£40 (£30 for Bowlby Centre members and students)

CPD: 2 hours and 15 Minutes  – (CPD certificate provided)

Attachment and Complex Trauma March 2024

Course Full

Saturday, 23rd March and Sunday 24th March 2024
Time:10 am to 4pm
Cost:£350
Venue:The Bowlby Centre, 1 Highbury Crescent, London, N5 1RN

About the course
The course will be covering key principles of attachment theory as it originated by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth along with its application in clinical practice. In addition, the course will focus on the Disorganised attachment status and its characteristics as is often shown in clients who suffer complex trauma and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. The emphasis on teaching disorganised attachment and complex trauma has arisen based on the demand from practitioners who often find themselves grappling with challenging situations when working with the more traumatised client groups. The course is aimed at therapists, psychologists, counsellors, social workers, GPs and other practitioners in the caring profession who want to expand their understanding of attachment theory with the emphasises on complex trauma, intergenerational transmission and adverse childhood experiences.

Participants will be meeting in person and the number of places are limited

Seminar Leader
Orit Badouk Epstein is a UKCP registered Attachment-based Psychoanalytic psychotherapist, a training supervisor and a training therapist. She trained at the Bowlby Centre, London where she was the Editor of the journal “Attachment-New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis”. She specialises in attachment theory and trauma and regularly lectures, teaches, writes and presents papers and book chapters on these topics and consults worldwide on attachment theory. She runs a private practice and works relationally with individuals, couples and parents. Orit has a particular interest in working with individuals who have experienced extreme abuse and trauma and have displayed symptoms of dissociation. She is the co-author of the books “Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs” (Badouk Epstein, Wingfield & Schwartz, 2011 Karnac), “Terror within& without” (Yellin, Badouk Epstein, 2013, Karnac), Shame Matters (2021), Routledge and was the co-editor of the ESTD (European Society for Trauma and Dissociation) newsletter for 10 years as well as being a regular contributor of articles and film reviews. In her spare time Orit enjoys the cinema, reading philosophy and writing poetry.

Attachment within a couple relationship -April 2024

A online workshop designed and facilitated by Annie Power

10 hours over 3 Fridays

Dates:

  • Friday 12th April 2024 – 9:00 to 12.20
  • Friday 19th April 2024 – 9:00 to 12.20
  • Friday 26th April 2024 – 9:00 to 13.20

Fee: £300

CPD: 10 hours

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. We will explore working with the ‘couple in mind’, with a shift in the final session to look at working directly with a couple. 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 a chapter of preparation for each module. A copy of Contented Couples: Magic, logic or luck? will be needed for this.

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 in 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 ANNE

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 supervisees. 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.

Attachment Theory in Clinical Practice – June  2024

Saturday, 15th and Sunday, 16th June 2024, Saturday, 29th and Sunday, 30th June 2024

10.00am – 4.00pm
Cost – £650
Venue – The Bowlby Centre
1 Highbury Crescent
London N5 1RN

About the course

Seminars will include the following themes

• Introductions – our relationship to attachment theory.
• Attachment theory in context
• Separation, loss and mourning
• Patterns of attachment and their internal representation
• Secure • Avoidant • Preoccupied • Unresolved/disorganised • Not classifiable
• Evaluating adult attachment states of mind
• Internal working models
• Reflective functioning
• Intersubjectivity

Clinical work will consider the role of mourning, narrative, mutuality and recognition, affective attunement and cycles of rupture and repair in the therapeutic process.
The objectives of this course are to introduce Attachment theory and deepen your understanding of it. It’s designed to be of practical value with implications for therapy and human relatedness. The course is aimed for Counsellors, Psychotherapists, Psychologists, Psychiatrists
and Social Workers.

“I was surprised how this course touched on all areas of my life… for me it has been the missing piece of the jigsaw I have been looking for and brings together many things…”

Participants will be meeting in person and the numbers of places is limited.

Seminar Leader:
Orit Badouk Epstein is a UKCP-registered Attachment based Psychoanalytic psychotherapist, a training supervisor and a training therapist. She trained at the Bowlby Centre, London where she was the Editor of the journal “Attachment-New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis”. She specialises in attachment theory and trauma and regularly lectures, teaches, writes and present papers and book chapters on these topics and consults worldwide on attachment theory.
She runs a private practice and works relationally with individuals, couples and parents. Orit has a particular interest in working with individuals who have experienced extreme abuse and trauma and have displayed symptoms of dissociation.
She is the co-author of the books “Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs” (Badouk Epstein, Wingfield & Schwartz, 2011 Karnac), “Terror within & without” (Yellin, Badouk Epstein, 2013, Karnac), Shame Matters (2021), Routledge and was the co-editor of the ESTD (European Society for Trauma and Dissociation) newsletter for 10 years as well as being a regular contributor of articles and film reviews. In her spare time Orit enjoys the cinema, reading philosophy and writing poetry.

Mental Health Familiarisation for all 2024
A one-day online workshop designed and facilitated by Gwen Adshead

Saturday 29th June 2024
Time: 10:00am – 4:00pm
With Gwen Adshead
Venue: Zoom Online

The aims and intention of this workshop are:

  • To provide knowledge and understanding which meets the UKCP criteria for the mental health familiarisation requirement;
  • To provide an opportunity for the audience to hear from an expert in lived experience
  • To provide an opportunity for a discussion, question and answer, session for all delegates

Is it for me?  This course is designed for anyone with an interest in mental health, including qualified and trainee psychotherapists and counsellors and academics with an interest in mental

What will I learn? The day will be broken up into 4 sessions which covers:

Session One knowledge and understanding of mental health in England and Wales

  • How mental illnesses are classified
  • Models of assessment

Session Two knowledge and understanding of the mental health system in England and Wales

  • Working within a social responsibility framework
  • Working within a wider system of care

Session Three Panel discussion Gwen with those who have had experience within the mental health system

  • The experiences of those who have used the mental health system
  • Visons of how to develop the mental health system
  • Common problems experienced by those who use the mental health system
  • Ideas about what therapists need to know about the mental health system

Session Four -Question and answer

  • Whole audience participation in questions, opinions and commentary

About Gwen:

Dr Gwen Adshead is a forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist. She trained at St George’s Hospital and the Institute of psychiatry; and she qualified as a group analyst at the Institute of Group Analysis. She is also trained in mindfulness based CBT and in mentalisation based therapy. Gwen has a long standing interest in attachment theory; and its potential implications for the origins of child maltreatment and interpersonal violence and also for delivering therapeutic interventions. Gwen works as both a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in different kinds of clinical settings; from high secure services to the community. She has a long standing interest in the ethics of mental health services and models of health care delivery. In 2013, she was awarded the President’s medal for her work in mental health ethics. Gwen’s most recent publication is for a general audience, and was written with Eileen Horne. Entitled ‘The Devil You Know’, it is published by Faber.

Booking Information: 

Date: Saturday 29th June 2024

Time: 10:00am – 4:00pm

Cost:Bowlby Centre students: Free
Students from outside the Bowlby Centre: £50
Registered members of The Bowlby Centre: £50
Registered non Bowlby Attendees £100

CPD: 6 Hours  – (CPD certificate provided)