Bowlby Centre Online Conference 2024

Attachment, Climate Crisis and the Natural World

A one-day online conference

Saturday 20th April 2024 | 10.00 – 5.00

What is it about? 

A ground-breaking climate conference that delves into the heart of the climate crisis through the unique perspective of Attachment Theory. Therapeutic practitioners worldwide are witnessing the profound impact of climate change on the mental health of individuals, as anxiety, helplessness, and depression become prevalent concerns. At the same time, the natural world serves as a vital source of comfort and healing for many.

EXPLORING THE HUMAN-ENVIRONMENT BOND: ATTACHMENT’S ROLE IN CLIMATE CRISIS

This conference aims to spotlight the intricate relationship between our environment and our sense of safety and wellbeing. The climate crisis, coupled with relentless consumerist demands, is not only resulting in the loss of habitats and species but is also fostering a profound sense of insecurity that reverberates through individuals, groups, and nations globally.

ATTACHMENT THEORY: ILLUMINATING THE IMPACT OF INSECURITY

Attachment Theory is well-placed to comment on the impact of insecurity. The conference will share insights into the emotional toll of the climate crisis, emphasizing its implications for life and wellbeing. This conference is a unique opportunity to deepen our understanding of the human psyche in the face of environmental challenges.

ACTION FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

By attending this conference, you’ll not only gain a comprehensive understanding of the psychological impact of climate change but also be inspired to contribute to solutions. The aim of this conference is not only to raise awareness about the threats to life and wellbeing but uniting participants in their commitment to finding sustainable solutions.

Is it for me? This conference is open to anybody who is concerned about the impact of people on the planet, and the impact of climate change on people.

How is it delivered? Via Zoom, 10.00 – 5.00: each presentation is 40 minutes plus Q&A, Plenary and breaks.

Key Note Speaker:

Professor Jeremy Holmes

Speakers:

Roger Duncan

Dr Isabel Jimenez Acquarone

Maggie Turp

Karen Carberry

Chair: Linda Cundy

Date: Saturday 20th April 2024

Time: 10.00 – 5.00

Location: Online via Zoom

Bowlby Centre Online Conference 2023

Speakers:

Orit Badouk Epstein – Using Exploration and Creativity to work with Clients with Dissociative Identity

Creativity is the opposite of subordination and defines freedom. Being the survivor of mind control and ritual abuse, it is hard to live in a family that corrodes freedom. It is then that the client’s imaginary abilities confine their freedom for exploration. In this presentation, I will discuss how the therapeutic relationship enables modes of creativity that enable the processes that lead towards earned security and develop intersubjective relatedness.

Trained at the Bowlby Centre, Orit Badouk Epstein is a UKCP registered, Attachment based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, a training supervisor, training therapist, teacher, editor, and a writer. She has published many articles, film reviews, newsletters, and edited several books. Her most recent is Shame Matters: Attachment and Relational Perspectives for Psychotherapists, Routledge (2022). She was until 2021 the editor of the journal Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis. Orit has presented at numerous conferences in the UK and internationally.  She has a private practice in North London. She works relationally with individuals and parents and has a special interest in complex trauma working with individuals who have suffered extreme abuse and who have been diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder.www.oritbadoukepstein.com

Since 2008 she has applied the insights of therapeutic work with eating disorders to obesity, as well as continuing her work on eating disorders.
From 2004 to 2007, she was editor of Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, the research journal for BACP.

She has developed a programme for emotional eaters available to the general public, Understanding your Eating, www.understandingyoureating.co.uk, and has published an account of her ideas for the general reader in Understanding your Eating (Open University, 2011). In addition, Professor Buckroyd offers supervision, workshops and consultancy to a wide range of organisations on psychological approaches to all forms of disordered eating and related issues.

Catherine Holland – Exploration of the relational dialogue between Client and Therapist

What is it like to work with multiple persons in one body? The complexity of working with ‘masking and fronting’ by hidden identities who have protective functions within a system whilst trying to build a good enough therapeutic dialogue can be challenging for a therapist. Catherine will consider her experience of working with covert ‘alters’, especially those who are experiencing hurt and overwhelm, and highlight some of the dilemmas that have unfolded. Examples of how agility, adaptation and creative ways of fostering inter-alter communication have enabled better relational cooperation within a system will be discussed.

Catherine has worked in health and social care as a practitioner, commissioner, policy maker, trauma interventionist and organisational consultant for over 40 years. Catherine trained at the Bowlby Centre and is a UKCP registered attachment-based psychotherapist, a clinical and training supervisor and an organisational consultant. She currently works in private practice and is a Trustee of The Bowlby Centre and OPUS – An Organisation promoting understanding of Society.

Emma Jack – What are we Doing? The Three Phase Treatment Model – work with a section of a mind control system

Emma will present some of her work with a ‘Mind Control’ system to illustrate the kinds of things a psychotherapist may be doing/thinking about with a DID patient during a three phase treatment (as described by the ISSTD). Thought about the ‘kind of psychotherapist’ you need to be, boundaries, getting out of your chair and working with the body (patient and psychotherapist) will be included.

Emma is a Minster Centre trained relational psychotherapist. She has worked in severe presentations for her whole career. Emma has worked for Bexley Psychotherapy Service in the personality disorder service, The London Ambulance Service and in private practice. Emma was the joint Head of Foundation Year at the Minster Centre and supervisor until 2022. She currently moderates the Supervision Diploma at The Minster Centre.

Emma has worked with DID patients for the last 8 years and has worked for The Clinic for Dissociative Studies since 2018. She is currently the Clinical Director.

Mark Linington – Using an attachment-based model to understand and work with people with dissociative identity disorder

Mark will present some of his long-term psychotherapeutic work with a person with a Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). He will use the model of attachment-based systems developed by Dorothy Heard, Brian Lake and Una McCluskey (including the systems of Careseeking, Caregiving, Self-Defence, Interest-Sharing, Sexuality, Internal Environment and External Environment) to explore a way of representing and approaching the key issues in the person’s internal environment and their relational models. He will show how this has helped with the therapeutic work. 

Mark Linington is an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist with The Bowlby Centre and the Clinic for Dissociative Studies in London UK. From 2013-2018 he was Chair of the Executive Committee at The Bowlby Centre, where he continues to work as as a training therapist, clinical supervisor and teacher.

He worked for 12 years in the NHS as a psychotherapist with children and adults with intellectual disabilities, who experienced complex trauma and abuse, including those with Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.). He also worked as a psychotherapist for several years at a secondary school in London for young people with special needs, including autism, ADHD and dissociative disorders. He has written a number of papers and book chapters about his clinical work and presented papers on attachment theory in clinical practice at a number of conferences.

He is currently Clinical Director and CEO at the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, where he is also a specialist consultant psychotherapist working with people with (D.I.D.) and clinical supervisor. He works in private practice working with children, adults and families, providing supervision to individuals and groups and training to organisations.

Adah Sachs – The Parts, the Whole and the Real Person: an Attachment Perspective

The person with DID experiences themselves as a number of separate people. Not one of these ‘people’ or parts knows the full identity of the whole person because, as the name DID conveys, their identity is dissociated. Does this mean that the separate parts have no collective Self, no shared wishes- or that beyond the individual parts there is no real person at all? Who, then, makes their main choices- or are we making the radical suggestion that a person with DID has no capacity for making a choice?

This presentation looks at the hidden attachment relationship between the parts and the whole, viewing it as the foundation of the ‘real person’ and the basis for therapy.

Adah Sachs PhD is an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a member of the Bowlby Centre. She has worked for decades with adults and adolescents in psychiatric care, was a consultant psychotherapist at the Clinic for Dissociative Studies and an NHS consultant and a London borough psychotherapy lead (now retired). Her main theoretical contribution is outlining sub-categories of disorganized attachment, with links to trauma-based mental disorders.

Adah lectures, assesses and supervises worldwide on attachment and dissociation. She is the author of over 200 training days, conference papers, book chapters and journal articles, including three co-edited books. She is a fellow of the ISSTD.

Valerie Sinason – Obedience, Hierarchy and Attachment Patterns in all of us when hearing allegations of VIP abuse

Hearing disclosures of abuse often makes us know what we do not want to know (Bowlby 1979). However, when the disclosure also involves the name of influential and famous people, we can hit a secondary level of concern. If our supervisors and senior colleagues consider these allegations present a problem for the service how free are we to say “no”?

Dr Valerie Sinason is a poet, writer, child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist (retired) and adult psychoanalyst. She has specialised in trauma and disability for forty years. She is a prolific writer who has edited, coedited or written 21 books, 264 papers, reviews  and chapters, and given several thousand papers and lectures nationally and internationally. Founder and now Patron for the Clinic for Dissociative Studies UK, President of the Institute for Psychotherapy and Disability, she is also a Fellow and a current Board member of the ISSTD and received their 2017 lifetime Achievement Award and the British Psychoanalytic Council Innovation Excellence Award 2022. She is an Honorary Consultant Psychotherapist at the Cape Town Child Guidance Clinic. Her first novel on this subject is:

The Orpheus Project and will be published by Sphinx books November 2022.

Chair:

Sue Richardson

Sue Richardson is a member of The John Bowlby Centre and a UKCP accredited attachment-based psychotherapist and supervisor. She has over 40 years experience in the helping professions and has integrated her extensive knowledge of child abuse into her work with adults who have suffered complex trauma. A founder member of the UK network of the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation, Sue has been instrumental in raising awareness of dissociation and developing face to face and online training modules. She is committed to working in partnership with experts by experience with whom she has collaborated in making two educational DVD’s and an online training package. The co-editor and co-author of two books and a number of published papers, her publications include Child Sexual Abuse: Whose Problem? (revised 2nd edition, Policy Press, 2018); Reaching for relationship: Exploring the use of an attachment paradigm in the assessment and repair of the dissociative internal world. Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, Vol. 4, March 2010: pp. 7–25. Sue’s personal and professional attachment networks are in the north east of England where she is in independent practice.

Panel Speakers:

Melanie Goodwin

Over thirty years ago when my DID was first fully experienced and then recognized clinically, there was very little information and support, pre Internet days!

I co-founded First Person Plural (FPP) primarily to help address the isolation that so often is a part of living with complex mental health and the lack of knowledge available about DID. I ran a Playgroup and worked in Suffolk Libraries for many years, the last ten in management roles. I was drawn continuously to improve services for children. I learnt how important childhood, including playing, is as a solid foundation for my own adult, DID journey.
A big part of my work with FPP has been awareness raising through training speaking at conferences and being open about my own, personal situation.

Michele Jowett

Michele Jowett is an expert by experience as a person living with DID. She uses her passion for writing as a platform to share her experiences of DID and inform, writing for the ESTD, ISSTD and First Person Plural newsletters. She has presented at the ESTD-UK conference in York and was instrumental in producing the Survivors Trust Resources website. She is a participant of the Survivors Trust Forum, contributing valuable insight to their project development. Michele has studied dissociation and complex trauma exhaustively but her passion to be a therapist in the field of complex trauma and dissociation has been thwarted by a lack of understanding surrounding her diagnosis of DID. This has fuelled her resolve to educate about the condition and advocate for it. Michele currently supports people impacted by domestic abuse in whom she encounters dissociation frequently. Her work provides a platform in which to apply her knowledge of complex trauma and dissociation and to achieve her goal of giving survivors a voice and making a difference. Michele is a published children’s author but her greatest achievement is her three adult children.

Bowlby Centre Online Conference 2021

Saturday 24 April 2021

Attachment, the body and gender

Can we assume there is a link between our early attachment history and how we come to develop our sense of gender?

In what way can the treatment of our bodies as babies impact on our sense of gender?

To what extent do we form our gender identity from our caregivers’ sense of their own gender?

How do our attachments to primary caregivers impact on our ability to safely explore our gender identities?

What is the impact on us when we can’t talk about our gendered sense of self?

This conference will bring together clinicians from diverse backgrounds to explore the ways in which our early attachments may contribute to how we develop our sense of a gendered self and how we come to experience our bodies sexually. Our speakers will be bringing multiple perspectives to this conference – and in particular, perspectives from attachment theory, feminism and transgender theory. The aim of this conference is to explore and develop our understanding of the many ways in which we come to experience our bodies and how we choose to identify ourselves.

Programme

09.00-09.30     Registration/Getting on-line
09.30-09.45     Introduction to the conference – Tori Settle CEO of The Bowlby Centre
09.45-11.00     Meg-John Barker in conversation with Jane Czyzselska
11.00-11.30     Break
11.30-12.45     Igi Moon in conversation with Jane Czyzselska
12.45-13.45     Lunch
13.45-15.00     Susie Orbach in conversation with Anthea Benjamin
15.00-15.30     Break
15.30-16.45     Daniel Edmund in conversation with Anthea Benjamin
16.45-17.15     Plenary
17.15               Closing remarks and thanks – Tori Settle CEO of The Bowlby Centre

Speakers

Meg-John Barker (they/them)

Meg-John Barker is the author of a number of popular books on sex, gender, and relationships, including graphic guides to Queer, Gender, and Sexuality (with Jules Scheele), How To Understand Your Gender, Hell Yeah Self Care, and Life Isn’t Binary (with Alex Iantaffi), Enjoy Sex (How, When, and IF You Want To) (with Justin Hancock), Rewriting the Rules and The Psychology of Sex

They also work as a one-to-one writing mentor, as a creative consultant on various projects, and speak and train on gender, sexual and relationship diversity. They are half of the Meg-John and Justin podcast (megjohnandjustin.com) and blog and publish zines and comics on rewriting-the-rules.com. They regularly speak on their areas of expertise in the media, including Radio 4, Cosmo, and being featured in the Independent on Sunday Rainbow List.

They were an academic psychologist and UKCP accredited therapist for many years before focusing on writing full time. They are an internationally recognised expert on gender, sexual, and relationship diversity (GSRD) and therapy, with numerous academic books and papers on the topics of bisexuality, open non-monogamy, sadomasochism, non-binary gender, and Buddhist mindfulness. They co-founded the journal Psychology & Sexuality and the activist-research organisation BiUK, through which they published The Bisexuality Report. They have advised many organisations, therapeutic bodies, and governmental departments on matters relating to gender, sexual, and relationship diversity (GSRD) including writing the BACP document on the topic. They’ve also been involved in facilitating many public events on sexuality and relationships, including Sense about Sex and Critical Sexology. Twitter: @megjohnbarker, Instagram: @meg_john_barker.Facebook: megjohnbarkerwriter. YouTube: MegJohnBarkerPsych,

Susie Orbach (she/her)

Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and co-founder of The Women’s Therapy Centre in London and The Women’s Therapy Centre in New York. She is the author of many books. Her most recent In Therapy: The Unfolding Story is an expanded edition of In Therapy (an annotated version of the BBC series listened to live by 2 million people)…

Her first book Fat is a Feminist Issue has been continuously in print since 1978. Bodies (which won the APA Psychology of Women’s Book Prize in 2009) was updated in 2019.

She is the recipient of the Inaugural British Psychoanalytic Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL).

Igi Moon (they/them)

Igi Moon is the Chair of the MoU Coalition Against Conversion Therapy.  They are a Senior Lecturer of Counselling Psychology at Roehampton University and they also lecture at Warwick University, Sociology. They have  designed and are now delivering ‘Beyond the Binary: Trans/Forming gender’ which is the first module of its kind in sociology in the UK and they are putting together a textbook for future reference…

They have edited 3 books: ‘Feeling Queer or Queer Feelings? Radical Approaches to Counselling Sex, Sexualities and Genders’; ‘Counselling Ideologies: Queer Challenges to Heteronormativity’ and ‘The Emergence of Trans: Cultures, Politics and Everyday Life’. They are interested in the way therapeutic knowledge and affect is shaped through historical, cultural, political and colonialist tropes. What makes a liveable life?

Daniel Edmund (him/he)

Daniel is a dynamic Speaker, Presenter and Social Entrepreneur. Through all of his endeavours, he is committed to helping to lead this generation to a more inclusive and equitable world for all people. In 2015, Daniel got his start in professional speaking at TEDxBristol where he spoke to an audience of over 2,000 people on the issue of men’s mental health

Since then he has gone on to meet His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales at his summer home at Highgrove, speak at Kensington Palace and join the L’Oreal and Prince’s Trust #AllWorthIt campaign alongside Dame Helen Mirren, amongst other things.

Over the past six years, Daniel has worked with various community groups to further understand the challenges they face and how we can all help progress their lived experiences. From combatting male suicide in the UK, teaching and supporting white working-class young people, campaigning against the sexual harassment of women, fighting for the racial justice of Black and minoritised people, and more, Daniel stands unequivocally firm for the equality and equity of all people.

Daniel is currently the host of the podcast Race & Gender Unfiltered and is working on his debut documentary under the same name. Daniel’s work can be summarised into three main categories: leadership, gender and race. He believes that we are all leaders in our spheres of influence, and that through truth, empathy, integrity and unity we can all play a role in helping to induce positive cultural change in our communities and ultimately the world.

Chairs

Jane Czyzselska

Jane Czyzselska (she/her)

Jane Czyzselska is a relational integrative psychotherapist and counsellor in private practice and a writer. As a practitioner, writer and in life, she endeavours to engage with the harmful impacts of white cis hetero-patriarchy. From 2004-2017 she was the editor of DIVA magazine and was featured in the Independent on Sunday Rainbow List.

She recently helped to promote and wrote about (https://medium.com/stillpointspaces/freuds-famous-case-of-female-homosexuality-a-book-review-on-the-story-of-sidonie-c-328e09111c4b) the new English translation of the biography of Freud’s lesbian patient: The History of Sidonie C. She is currently collaborating with clinicians from a range of modalities and lived experiences on a forthcoming book, Queering the Couch. Her paper, based on her Master’s dissertation: The truth that’s denied: Psychotherapy with LGBTIQ+ clients who identify as intersex, will be published in a forthcoming special issue of the Psychology of Sexualities Review on Intersex and Psychology in the UK. She is a trustee of The Relational School.

Anthea Benjamin

Anthea Benjamin (she/her)

Anthea Benjamin is a UKCP registered Integrative Arts Psychotherapist, Group Analyst and Supervisor. Anthea has worked extensively with children, adolescents, adults, families, couples, and groups for over 15 years in various settings including schools, community projects and within the NHS.

She works as a therapist delivering training and consultancy in a range of professional and educational contexts. Anthea also offers therapeutic services such as self-reflective groups and team supervision both in organizations and within her private practice in south London. Anthea has a special interest in racial trauma, particularly working with racial trauma in the body.   Address for Correspondence info@antheabenjamin.co.uk

‘Through to you’ by Witta Priester

The 23rd John Bowlby Memorial International Conference, London

‘Repetition, Repetition, Repetition: Breaking the Cycle of Attachment Trauma’

3rd & 4th March 2017

When people have experienced attachment trauma, being caught in a never-ending cycle of emotional and relational repetition can dominate their lives. In the words of Selma Fraiberg: “Trauma demands repetition”. Attachment trauma can leave a person with an impaired and constricted life, overwhelming feelings, internal critical voices and a tendency towards an unhealthy dissociation. These features lie at the core of the repetitions we encounter with our clients, often in the form of relational reenactment in the psychotherapy setting. Such reenactments can be difficult to be conscious of for both therapist and the client. Furthermore, such reenactments are not only experienced in the consulting room, but also on a societal level, as seen for example in war and its many impacts.

John Bowlby, with a base in an ever growing body of empirical research, has taught us that it is attachment and secure relationships which are the bedrock of affect regulation and developed reflective functioning. It is in such secure attachment relationships where a client can gradually create and find a new and more coherent narrative, which helps them break away from the painful relational repetitions of the past.

In this conference, we have brought together worldwide specialists who have contributed greatly to the understanding of attachment, trauma, and dissociation. With such a wealth of knowledge and experience, we aim to explore the many pathways that compose traumatic experiences, their repetitive nature and the various ways which can help our clients move on with renewed vitality and hope.

SPEAKERS:

Onno Van der Hart (The Netherlands: co-author of The Haunted Self)

Karl-Heinz Brisch (Germany: author of Treating Attachment Disorders)

Ruth Lanius (Canada: co-author of Healing the Traumatized Self)

Adrienne Harris (USA: co-author of First Do No Harm)

Susie Orbach ( UK: author of Bodies, Fat is a feminist issue)

Guy Hibbert (UK: film director and writer, May 33rd and Eye in the Sky)

Orit Badouk Epstein (UK: co-author of Ritual Abuse and Mind Control)

Daniel Shaw (USA: author of Traumatic Narcissism)

Date: Twenty Second John Bowlby Memorial Conference 2015

Unlocking Pain – Disrupted Attachment and Chronic Physical Pain

Screenshot 2015-11-26 at 16.05.49

Date: 2014 Autumn Conference

ATTACHMENT, MEMORY LOSS and AGEING

 

Autumn Conference 2014

Date: 2014 John Bowlby Memorial Conference

Date: 2013 John Bowlby Memorial Conference

Past Clinical Forums

Online Clinical Forum

 Saturday 13th July 2024

11am to 1pm

Conversations about dementia

Speakers: Maxine Linnell and Kate White

 

Synopsis:

Maxine Linnell and Kate White met through their different experiences of dementia, and have explored their ideas and experiences in conversations together. In this forum, hosted by The Bowlby Centre, they will continue that conversation, and invite people joining them to consider their own questions, responses and approaches. Looking at our own attitudes and beliefs may also help us to support the people concerned in a therapeutic relationship.  There are no easy answers, but we can explore together.

About the speakers:

Maxine Linnell is living with dementia, diagnosed in September 2022.  She was a psychotherapist and teacher for almost thirty years, and is a writer and editor. She has been alongside a close friend and a relative through their diagnosis, progression and death. She has entered this new phase of her life with curiosity, and has a particular interest in the impact of beliefs and attitudes, and in developing therapeutic approaches for people living with dementia, their supporters and professionals. She writes poems and prose about her new life with dementia in a blog, www.maxinelinnell.com. Maxine is a member of DEEP which stands for the Dementia Engagement and Empowerment Project and is a network of groups of people with dementia all across the UK. www.dementiavoices.org.uk

Kate White is a retired Bowlby Centre trained psychotherapist and founder member. She brings her experience of being alongside her partner John who lived with dementia for twelve years and died three years ago. Together they navigated the changes this brought in ways which were both creative and expansive as well as complex and challenging. Her particular interests are how an understanding from attachment theory can support us all in recognising the role fear and shame play in our relationship to dementia. She is especially committed to supporting the recognition and inclusion of people living with dementia to contribute their creativity in our communities.

Both Maxine and Kate are members of Reimagining Dementia: A Creative Coalition for Justice www.reimaginingdementia.com and
Dementia Community www.journalofdementiacare.co.uk/dementia-community-membership

Online Clinical Forum

 Saturday 13th April 2024

11am to 1pm

Attachment implications for racial trauma: theory and practice

Speakers: Anne Aiyegbusi

 

Synopsis:

The implications of racial trauma for attachment patterns and relational experiences will be considered in this seminar. We will explore the implications for working models for relationships, of internalised racial hierarchy, and transgenerational transmissions of racial trauma rooted in atrocity. How might psychotherapists negotiate this in clinical practice in terms of recognising and working with dynamics emerging from racial trauma? Material from theory and practice will inform the seminar.

About the speakers:

Dr Anne Aiyegbusi

Dr Anne Aiyegbusi is a Group Analyst, Forensic Psychotherapist, Supervisor and Teacher. After taking early retirement from an NHS role as Executive Director of Nursing, Anne now works part time as a Principal Psychotherapist and Group Analyst within the NHS. She is also Director, Consultant Nurse and Psychotherapist at Psychological Approaches CIC where the focus of her work is providing training and consultancy to forensic and offender care services. Anne is a member of the Board of Trustees at the Institute of Group Analysis where she is the member for anti-discrimination and intersectionality. Anne has spoken at national and international psychotherapy conferences for many years. She has also published a number of peer reviewed papers, book chapters and co-edited and co-authored books. She is currently writing a book about forensic psychotherapy and racial trauma. Anne maintains an attachment perspective throughout her work and she teaches a module on the Attachment Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy training about the implications of racial trauma on the attachment system.

Online Clinical Forum

Saturday 9th March 2024

11am to 1pm

Reflections on normativity when working with GSRD clients

Speakers: Karen Pollock

 

Synopsis:

In this workshop we will be looking at how our expectations of what is “normal” with regard to relationships can impact negatively on members of the gender, sex and relationship diverse communities (GSRD). Clients whose relationships do not reflect the dominant white cisgender, heterosexual and mononormative expectations often report pathologisiation and othering from their therapists, who can bring their own attachment styles, projections and normative biases into their therapeutic work. From sex workers to swingers, via consensual non monogamy, open relationships, BDSM and queer platonic relationships we will explore our how our own, as well as societal and cultural expectations can impact both in therapy and in the wider world.

About the speakers:

Karen Pollock

Karen is a white, neurodiverse, non binary anti oppressive psychotherapist, supervisor and writer specialising in gender, sex and relationship diversity. An advanced accredited Pink Therapy GSRD therapist and trainer they became a Pink Therapy Clinical Associate in 2022. Their work has been published most recently in the Queering Psychotherapy anthology, and they contributed chapters to Non Binary Lives, and Anthology, and Fandom, Culture and The Archers, as an Academic Archers Research Fellow.

Smoking Fags, Drinking Tea: can therapy disrupt a client’s compulsion to repeat his unhappy past?

Speakers: Rosalind Grainger

'Sheep as Witness' by Gisli Bergmann 2020, oil on board, @gislibergmann

‘Sheep as Witness’ by Gisli Bergmann 2020, oil on board, @gislibergmann

 

Synopsis:

‘Smoking fags, drinking tea’ is how 59 year-old Michael, middle child of seven from a pig-farming family, remembers his mother…holding court like rural royalty, dispensing cigarettes, Battenberg cake and potent wisdom to an enthralled audience of neighbours whilst her children fended for themselves. Let down by parents, school and church, Michael eventually escaped to England. But once arrived, he constantly recreated the rejections and poverty of his childhood. When people sneered that his flat was a pigsty, they couldn’t have known he was re-making the safest place he’d ever been…

Meanwhile, Rosalind, an only child from a pork-free Jewish background in London, needed a two-year training client. Could twice-weekly therapy with the Blues Project make a positive difference to both their lives?

About the speakers:

Rosalind Grainger

Rosalind Grainger (http://e17therapy.com/) is a psychotherapist in private practice in E17. She trained at the Bowlby Centre where current and recently graduated students may meet her with her Blues Project Coordinator hat on. In her previous working life she was a cabaret performer, a legal executive, a magazine journalist and co-founder of a forum for parents of disabled children.

Date: Saturday 3rd February 2024

Time: 11.00am – 1.00pm

Location: Online via Zoom

CPD: 2 hours – (CPD certificate provided)

Musical soundscapes – Attachment informed perspectives on the implications and applications of music in the therapeutic encounter.

Speakers:
Kate Brown

Synopsis:

Sound creates our first awareness of another, informing us, even en utero that we are not alone. In our final moments softly spoken loving words might be the thing that we most long to hear. Throughout the life-span, music and sound informs how we learn, work, rest, and play. Music has implications for how we interact in groups, how we tell stories and construct narratives, and how we regulate or manipulate affect. Music can also be inherently political, voicing the sound of grief, protest and mourning. Yet our responses to music and musical interests might too infrequently claim our attention in the therapeutic encounter. Drawing from examples of music in therapeutic communities, use of music with children in care, and adults in therapeutic-treatment, and lived experience of being a life-long music fan and occasional performer, music’s place in therapy is explored. The therapists use of self as someone with a musical interest and cultural history is also considered. Musicality’s power to enhance therapy and communicate what might be preverbal or unconscious, and possible contra-indications about use of music is explained. This talk concludes with highlighting that although as therapists we might always be listening, when we pay attention to the musicality of the interaction, there is more to be heard.

About the speakers:

Kate Brown

Kate Brown is a Bowlby Centre trained UKCP registered Attachment based psychoanalytic psychotherapist who started her career in therapeutic communities working with adults with a variety of mental health difficulties, and with adolescents individually and in groups. She has worked with young mothers and in mainstream community psychiatric services with patients’ families. She has also provided time limited therapy with former servicemen who had experienced complex trauma. She teaches and is a course tutor at the Bowlby Centre and has also delivered freelance training. Kate completed an MSc in psychotherapeutic approaches in mental health in 2012. Kate has completed her Doctoral thesis entitled ‘Where is the Love? A Psychoanalytic History of the Cotswold Community’ at Middlesex University in 2023. Kate is also on the executive committee of the International Attachment Network (UK). Kate is in private practice in Dorset.

Date: Saturday 9th December 2023

Time: 11.00am – 1.00pm

Narcissism: where should we begin?

Speakers:
Barry Christie

Synopsis:

Psychotherapists need to unmask narcissism in all its forms and work towards understanding its dynamic impact upon human development, relationships, and culture.

The origins, features and consequences of narcissistic abuse will be discussed; reference will also be made to online coverage of the subject.
Clinical themes will be explored with participants encouraged to share their experiences and discuss key questions.

About the speakers:

Barry Christie

Barry Christie is a Bowlby Centre trained psychotherapist who has been registered since 2006. He is a former member of the UKCP Ethics and Professional Conduct Committees. Barry has wide-ranging clinical experience and interests in Psychoanalysis, Sociology, and Stoicism. He currently sits on the CPJA Training Standards Committee and has worked as a course tutor, trainer, and teacher.

The Replacement Child
Speakers:
Kristina Schellinski, M.A., Analytical Psychologist/Psychotherapist, Teaching Analyst and Supervisor, C.G. Jung Institute, Zürich.
Dr Zack Eleftheriadou BPS/HPCP Chartered Counselling Psychologist

Synopsis:

Children and adults can suffer from being born into a family that experienced the loss of a child or other dear member of the family. The attachment is disrupted at the core level when the child is born in the shadow of the loss. Therefore, attachment becomes a structural element to consider in replacement children, in the early years and later in adult life.

This can lead to a hidden, long-term trauma which manifests in low self-esteem, a search for identity, relational issues due to insecure, avoidant, or even hostile-rejecting styles of attachment.

This diagnosis is often overlooked, due to family secrets, loyalties or unawareness of the circumstances, with manifold defences, in both patient and care-provider. To help recognize and work clinically with this, I shall illustrate the core elements with symbols, images and clinical examples. Therapists and analysts can make a major contribution accompanying them ‘back to life’ and to help prevent the ‘making’ of replacement children.

Psychologically, the hope for an adult replacement child lies in the rediscovery of the essence of its original being. In the individuation process, adult replacement children can gain a deep understanding of the long-term consequences of their replacing role and reconnect with their own unique individual self, to discover: “this is who I am”.

About the speakers:

Kristina Schellinski, M.A., Analytical Psychologist/Psychotherapist, Teaching Analyst and Supervisor, C.G. Jung Institute, Zürich.

She is also a Supervisor at the Department of Psychiatry of the Geneva University Hospital, Member of the International Association of Analytical Psychologists (IAAP) and of the Swiss Association of Psychotherapists (ASP). She has published articles in international journals and presented papers at international and national congresses and conferences, and offers training in English, French and German. She is a co-founder of the replacementchildforum.com and its Director of Programs; the website is offering resources to health professionals and adult replacement children.

Dr Zack Eleftheriadou BPS/HPCP Chartered Counselling Psychologist

Zack is BPS/HPCP Chartered Counselling Psychologist and Fellow, a Parent-infant, Child and Adult Psychotherapist (UKCP). She works in private practice in North London with young people and adults. She is a lecturer and infant obs tutor at AGIP and IATE in London. She is a member of The Bowlby Centre and has a long-standing affiliation with the Centre, including guest teaching. As a clinician, she is particularly interested in the ‘replacement child’ dynamics and has previously curated an event on this topic for Confer. She is interested in early intervention and has contributed to The Replacement Forum (see: http://replacementchildforum.com/the-replacement-child-early-intervention-for-babies-and-their-families/) and also on the impact of this early experience in adulthood. Other professional interests include cross-cultural, trauma work and developmental issues in psychotherapy.

Foundations of Self-Agency

Speakers:
Steph Hares, Senior Lived Experience Practitioner – CEN
Dr Adrian Hayes, Consultant in Medical Psychotherapy, Somerset NHS Foundation Trust
Dr Daniel McNamara, General Adult Psychiatry
Sarah Devereux, Attachment-based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Senior Occupational Therapist

Synopsis:

This forum will explore the importance of self-agency in working with people who have a formulation relating to Complex Emotional Needs and/or Personality Disorder. Individual presentations will focus on the following:

  • Engaging service users in talking about their experiences of mental health services and feeding this back to the services directly
  • Working therapeutically with people ‘lost in the system’ using principles of the Therapeutic Community to regain and build on their self-agency.

We will bring these presentations together with an overarching discussion on the concept of self-agency, including how this develops in the early years, how it can be lost in services, and how it can be regained in adult life. In particular we will be discussing practical ways that professionals can work to optimise self-agency in services and limit the iatrogenic harm that occurs when people’s voices and choices are removed.

We will also discuss the importance of peer work and co-production in supporting those with current difficulties.

Our forum will be delivered by a multi-disciplinary staff group with extensive input from people with lived experience and current service users who have worked with us.

We emphasise the ‘human’ response rather than a reliance on operationalised or manualised approaches to intervention.

About the speakers:

Steph Hares
Senior Lived Experience Practitioner – CEN

I currently work as the Senior Lived Experience Practitioner in the Complex Emotional Needs service in Avon & Wiltshire Mental health partnership trust. I have worked in this new to the NHS trust role for around 18 months embedding lived experience into clinical work, staff support and training, and I have set up and support our peer workers in our service.

Dr Adrian Hayes, Consultant in Medical Psychotherapy, Somerset NHS Foundation Trust

I’m a consultant medical psychotherapist working in Complex Emotional Needs using a variety of relational modalities and focussing on self-agency and co-production

Dr Daniel McNamara, ST4 Doctor in General Adult Psychiatry, Bristol

I work as a registrar in General Adult Psychiatry in Bristol. My interests include Narrative therapy, working with asylum seekers and refugees and relational practise in psychiatry. I also like to work on a good data spreadsheet from time to time and I have been helping with outcomes measurement for the foundations group. I feel privileged to be part of our working group which centres around making care for people diagnosed with PD more human.

Sarah Devereux
I am an Adult Psychotherapist and Senior Occupational Therapist, Bowlby Centre member and very recently ex-NHS employee!

THE IMPACT OF PREMATURITY?

With Sarah Wood

Via Video Link

Synopsis: Having worked as an Infant Feeding Supporter for nearly 10 years, I was privileged to support families of premature infants, facilitating mothers to express milk for their tiny babies. During this time, I was able to accompany parents into the neonatal unit, which remains to be something of a hidden world, an exclusive club that families are thrown into at a moment’s notice, with little knowledge or preparation.

I wondered how much prematurity is thought about with clients, from this hidden world, how it can be accessed if its not often talked about.

I will present a client who as born prematurely, followed by discussion with Maggie Cohen, and would like to think together about the impact on different areas of their lives, going through those later stages of development outside of the womb, in a relative hostile environment, with many medical procedures and little skin-to-skin contact.

About the speaker: Sarah Wood

Sarah is a post-taught attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist, having recently trained at the Bowlby Centre and WPF. She works in private practice whilst working towards UKCP registration, and has an honorary contract with an NHS trust.

About the discussant: Maggie Cohen

Maggie Cohen trained at the Tavistock Clinic as a child psychotherapist in the 1970s. From there she went on to work at Great Ormond Street in the Department of Psychological Medicine and particularly in the inpatient unit.

After that she worked for many years in paediatric oncology and in a Neonatal intensive care unit. She wrote a book about this work, particularly about prematurity, entitled Sent before My Time. Now retired from NHS work she supervises child psychotherapists and does adult work.

The disembodied psyche: working with somatic expressions in the subjective space

Via Video Link

Synopsis: In this paper I discuss the clinical case of a client who sought therapy following the diagnosis of a physical illness,
coupled with the loss of a successful career.

My hypothesis is that my client’s physical illness had a psychogenic contribution and I will refer to the possibility that early attachment trauma, coupled with subsequent traumata, may have set the foundations for a vulnerability to somatise her disavowed affects. This hypothesis seems to be corroborated by my client’s tendency to somatise her emotional distress especially at times of separation, and by the fact that the onset of her illness coincided with a prolonged period of heightened anxiety following a traumatic experience.

I will aim to show through clinical material the embodiment of my client’s dissociated affects, and I will describe how their emergence into consciousness, through dreams and transference-countertransference enactments, contributed to a decrease of the somatic expressions and to their verbalisation.

By adopting a Jungian prospective approach to therapy, as well as a relational-intersubjective one, I will argue that, the somatic symptoms and my somatic counter-transference, can be seen as harbingers of meaning, having an important anticipatory role for the development of mentalised affects. I will use a theoretical framework that couples analytical psychology with attachment and relational psychoanalysis.

About the speaker: Raffaella Hilty (MA Phil), is an Attachment-based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and training supervisor with the
Bowlby Centre & an Analytical Psychologist/Jungian Analyst with the Association of Jungian Analysts (AJA). She is a registered professional member of the British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC), of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) and of the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP).

Raffaella has worked as an honorary psychotherapist in the NHS for a number of years and she is now in private practice in North-West London.

She has presented clinical papers at public forums and conferences, and has been published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy and in the International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy. Her book, ‘Primitive Bodily Communications in Psychotherapy. Embodied Expressions of a Disembodied Psyche’ was published by Karnac in 2022.

ONLINE

THE ALMOSTNESS OF YOU – ON AMBIVALENT/PREOCCUPIED ATTACHMENT
RELATIONSHIPS, UNRESOLVED GRIEF AND DOUBLE LOSS

SPEAKER: ORIT BADOUK EPSTEIN

Synopsis:
The profound sadness, confusion and disappointment that some of our clients bring to our consulting rooms, is common and can be debilitating to their intimate relationships and everyday life functioning.

The client’s ambivalent attachment to their caregiver in childhood, has sadly left them with a lingering legacy of feeling stuck between despair and lifelong dependency, which is unable to equip them with self-regulation, selfworth, and self-realisation.

Bowlby considered ambivalent attachment as chronic unresolved grief. In essence, the preoccupied attachment relationship is rarely about safe holding, rather it is about what is left missing. The client I will be presenting, arrived in therapy with a soaring depression after her boyfriend of three years had suddenly left her. The intense relationship she had with her mother was equally charged and counted on erroneous misunderstanding and disappointments that hadn’t come to full light. The client’s pursuit of unrequited love made her inhabit a world without, always yearning and pining for an ideal object that lived two miles away from disappointment.

William James, Auden, Beckett, Sylvia Plath, and many other great writers and poets sensitively depicted aspects of such ambiguous loss in their writing. I will be sharing the wealth of metaphors that helped me organise my thoughts around the micro-dynamics of this intriguing attachment style and which has paved the way to resolving the client’s grief, general confusion and earned security.

About the speaker:
Orit Badouk Epstein is a UKCP Attachment based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Supervisor who trained at the Bowlby Centre. She specialises in Attachment Theory and Complex Trauma.

Orit is a teacher, Editor and a writer. She has recently edited and co-authored the book Shame Matters (Routledge,
2021).

Time: 11.00am – 1.00pm
Cost: £30 (Bowlby Centre members and students – free)
£10 for students from other organisations
CPD: 2 hours – (CPD certificate provided)

Using the McCluskey Model when working with a person with DIDSpeaker: Mark Linington – Via Video Link

10th September

Time:11.00am –1.00pm

Synopsis: Mark will present some of his long-term psychotherapeutic work with a person with a Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). He will use the Una McCluskey model of attachment-based systems (Careseeking, Caregiving, Self-Defence, Interest-Sharing, Sexuality, Internal Environment and External Environment) to explore a way of understanding and working with some key issues in the person’s internal environment and the relational interactions in the psychotherapy.

About the speaker: Mark Linington is an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist with The Bowlby Centre and the Clinic for Dissociative Studies in London UK. From 2013-2018 he was Chair of the Executive Committee at The Bowlby Centre, where he continues to work as as a training therapist and clinical supervisor. He worked for 12 years in the NHS as a psychotherapist with children and adults with intellectual disabilities, who experienced complex trauma and abuse. He also worked as a psychotherapist for several years at a secondary school in London for young people with special needs, including autism, ADHD and other intellectual disabilities. He has written a number of papers and book chapters about his clinical work and presented papers on attachment theory in clinical practice at a number of conferences, including in South Korea, Hong Kong and Paris. He is currently CEO and Clinical Director at the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, where he is also a specialist consultant psychotherapist working with people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.) and clinical supervisor. He works in private practice with children, adults and families, providing supervision to individuals and groups and training to organisations.

Forum Cost:£30 for non-members, £10 for students from other organisations, (Bowlby Centre members and students –free)

CPD:2 hours –(CPD certificate provided)

Tools for working with trauma in the clinical space

Speaker: Catherine Holland

Synopsis:
This workshop provides an opportunity to explore and understand various types of trauma, and how we
are able to consider what may practically work well with clients who are dysregulating in the clinical space.
Video material and practical tools will be shared as we reflect upon what can help or hinder our clients.
We will take time to understand the neurobiological impact of trauma, gather insight from Stephen Porges’
Autonomic Nervous System, and discuss stabilization techniques used by Dan Siegel, Janina Fisher,
Richard Schwartz and Babette Rothchild. Participants will be invited to share together some of our own
resources and experiences. Case examples will be presented to illustrate the importance of being in the
moment of ‘now’ to heal the wounds of the past.

About the speaker:
Catherine is an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist (UKCP) and an Organisational
Consultant (BPC). Primarily trained at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, The Bowlby
Centre and the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, Catherine has had a long career in health and
social care, engaging with various marginalised and disaffected groups and their mental health issues.
Catherine currently teaches at the Bowlby Centre and works therapeutically with students, parents,
couples and individuals, as well as providing supervision and consultation. Catherine has specialist
interest in systemic organisational health, attachment-focused trauma therapy, EMDR, early infant trauma
and forensic issues originating from developmental distress.

‘The Unanswered Self’ Speaker: Candace Orcutt – Via Video Link

14th May

Time:1.00pm –3.00pm

Synopsis: James Masterson’s pioneering work in the understanding and treatment of personality disorder gained a vital and “secure base” in the developmental studies of John Bowlby and his contemporary, Margaret Mahler. Bowlby, especially, stressed the importance of the inner “working model” of relationship that the child learns from the early mother/child interaction. Masterson, in turn, demonstrated how personality disorder is the shadow side of this inner model, and showed how early developmental omissions and distortions are carried over in fundamental assumptions that limit and skew adult relationships. Candace will review and illustrate with clinical examples how her recent book describes the patients [clients?] who enter dynamic psychotherapy with this problem, and how Masterson introduced developmentally-directed interventions as part of the therapeutic relationship. In this presentation, she hopes to extend this view by exploring the importance of Bowlby’s balancing of attachment and exploring behaviours—both for the growing child and in treating the recovering patient.You can watch a short film introducing Candace’s book on YouTube here.

About the speaker: Candace is the author of the recently published The Unanswered Self: The Masterson Approach to the Healing of ”” Personality Disorders –a summation and further extension of the life’s work of a pioneer in contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy. A clinical social worker and psychoanalyst, she worked for twenty years as Masterson’s associate, training with him and participating in building the International Masterson Institute. With the IMI, she has taught, supervised and lectured throughout the United States, Canada, South Africa, Turkey and Australia. In addition to her work with Masterson, she is on the faculty of The New Jersey (US) Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis, and has published numerous articles and an earlier book, Trauma in Personality Disorder: A Clinician’s Handbook. Global outreach is prospering in this era of internet communication, and she is pleased to have this opportunity to talk with clinicians in the homeland of object relations and developmental theory.  A 20% discount is available when buying the book at the Karnac bookshop website, using the code SELF20

Forum Cost:£30 (Bowlby Centre members and students –free) CPD:2 hours –(CPD certificate provided)

Nuts and Bolts

Saturday, 9th April 2022, 11am to 1pm, Via Video Link
Cost: £30 (Bowlby Centre members and students – free)
Presenter: Tori Settle

Synopsis:Tori will give another one of her Nuts and Boltspresentations using some of her long-term psychotherapeutic work with a client who, in her own words “entered therapy as an alien and left as a human.” She will be exploring how the care exchange between them changed in nature over time and explore more explicitly what we mean when we talk about the care seeking and care giving systems in the therapeutic encounter. She will also be exploring how fear systems in both parties can impact on the work together.

About the speaker:Tori is an attachment-based psychoanalytical psychotherapist and supervisor with The Bowlby Centre and is currently the CEO of the organisation. She has taught extensively at The Centre specialising in infant development, and she has written about the importance of this for trainees. She has given talks, and currently runs group supervision for, people who have trained outside the Bowlby Centre and who have an interest in learning about attachment. She works in private practice from Kent with her three dogs, two cats and numerous chickens

Using the McCluskey Model when working with a person with DID

Saturday, 12th March 2022, 11am to 1pm, Via Video Link
Cost: £30 (Bowlby Centre members and students – free)
Presenter: Mark Linington

Synopsis:Mark will present some of his long-term psychotherapeutic work with a person with a Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). He will use the Una McCluskey model of attachment-based systems (Careseeking, Caregiving, Self-Defence, Interest-Sharing, Sexuality, Internal Environment and External Environment) to explore a way of understanding and working with some key issues in the person’s internal environment and the relational interactions in the psychotherapy

About the speaker:Mark Linington is an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist with The Bowlby Centre and the Clinic for Dissociative Studies in London UK.From 2013-2018 he was Chair of the Executive Committee at The Bowlby Centre, where he continues to work as as a training therapist and clinical supervisor.He worked for 12 years in the NHS as a psychotherapist with children and adults with intellectual disabilities, who experienced complex trauma and abuse. He also worked as a psychotherapist for several years ata secondary school in London for young people with special needs, including autism, ADHD and other intellectual disabilities. He has written a number of papers and book chapters about his clinical work and presented papers on attachment theory in clinicalpractice at a number of conferences, including in South Korea, Hong Kong and Paris.He is currently CEO and Clinical Director at the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, where he is also a specialist consultant psychotherapist working with people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.) and clinical supervisor. He works in private practice with children, adults and families, providing supervision to individuals and groups and training to organisations.

‘Seeing is Believing’: using video feedback in parent – infant psychotherapy to help shift parents’ and babies’ negative representations of themselves

Saturday, 12 June 2021, 11am to 1pm, Via Video Link
Cost: £30 (Bowlby Centre members and students – free)
Presenter: Joanna Tucker, Consultant Parent-Infant Psychotherapist

Synopsis: My main hypothesis in this paper is that when parents see something for themselves it can surprise their unconscious, destabilise them, open up the possibility of change and speed it up. We need to find ways of helping parent and baby to connect while the baby is as young as possible, before difficulties in relationships become ‘set’ and much more difficult to shift. At OXPIP we believe that, for some families, integrating a strength-based video-feedback intervention into psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy can help change parents’ representations of themselves, and of their babies, more quickly and effectively than either of these ways of working on their own. In this paper I will explore why that might be. I will use video clips to illustrate how the relationship between a depressed mother and her baby changed over the course of their brief therapy.

About the speaker: Joanna became passionate about the value of early intervention whilst a social worker in the field of child abuse. In 1999, a few years after completing her psychoanalytic psychotherapy training, she became involved with OXPIP (The Oxford Parent-Infant Project.) She has had various roles, including Parent-Infant Psychotherapist, Supervisor, Trainer, Infant Observation Seminar leader, Video Interaction Guidance supervisor, and Clinical Director.In October 2019 she largely retired from OXPIP, but continues to enjoy doing some Consultation and Training for them. Joanna has taught on several therapeutic and academic trainings, and has had a number of articles published about clinical work in the perinatal period.

Clinical Forum – Via Video link – ATTACHMENT THEORY AND ARCHIVAL RESEARCH – REFLECTIONS ON AN ONGOING RESEARCH JOURNEY

Saturday, 13th March 2021   11am – 1pm

Speaker: Kate Brown

Synopsis:
This workshop is a discussion of an ongoing doctoral research project entitled ‘A History of the Cotswold Community, psychoanalytic perspectives on love and hate.’ The Cotswold Community (1967-2011) was a therapeutic community for adolescent boys aged 9-16 who had experienced trauma and disrupted attachments. The discussion will cover a brief description of therapeutic communities, including how therapeutic communities for adults and children differ. The Cotswold Community and it’s past as an approved school for boys will be explored. Themes of deprivation and delinquency, Winnicottian understanding of the therapeutic aspects of love and hate and the importance of gender at the Cotswold Community will be discussed. The research methods used in this research is archival research and is informed by attachment theory.

About the speaker
Kate Brown is a Bowlby Centre trained UKCP registered Attachment based psychoanalytic psychotherapist who started her career in therapeutic communities working with adults with a variety of mental health difficulties, and with adolescents individually and in groups. She has worked with young mothers and in mainstream community psychiatric services with patients’ families. She has also provided time-limited therapy with former servicemen who had experienced complex trauma. She has taught at the
Bowlby Centre and has also delivered freelance training. Kate completed an MSc in psychotherapeutic approaches in mental health in 2012. Kate is a former member of the Attachment journal group, former chair of the clinical forum at the Bowlby Centre and PhD candidate at Middlesex University. Kate is also on the executive committee of the International Attachment Network (UK). Kate is in private practice in Bournemouth.

Date: Saturday, 13th March 2021

Time: 11.00am – 1.00pm

Cost: £30  (Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Download the flyer

CPD: 2 hours (CPD certificate provided)

Download the flyer

Clinical Forum – Via Video link – Nuts and Bolts

Saturday, 12th December 2020   11am – 1pm

Speaker: Tori Settle

Synopsis:
Tori would like to explore in more detail what her approach looks like in the room -using short clinical vignettes and discussion rather than the usual long clinical presentation. She has put together tips for working with avoidance, preoccupation and disorganisation based on her experience over the last 20 years. Her understanding of working with attachment patterns is not about putting people into discreet categories, but of seeing how care seeking and caregiving dynamics can shift from moment to moment in the room. She sees this moment to moment movement between security and insecurityas afluid process –both between the psychotherapist and the clients, and within each of them –as they navigate their levels of confidence and fearfulness in the work and in each other.

About the speaker
Tori Settle is an Attachment-Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Supervisor, trained at the Bowlby Centre. Tori is currently the CEO ofthe Bowlby Centre,having worked in the organisation in many rolesover the last 23 years..

Date: Saturday, 12th December 2020

Time: 11.00am – 1.00pm

Cost: £30  (Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: Online details to follow registration

CPD: 2 hours (CPD certificate provided)

Download the flyer

BOOKINGS NOW CLOSED

Clinical Forum – Via Video link – THE COUPLE IN MIND: WORKING WITH COUPLES AND WITH INDIVIDUALS IN A COUPLE

Saturday, 14th November 2020   11am – 1pm

Speaker: Jenny Riddell

Synopsis:

Using clinical vignettes, Jenny will present some of the core clinical and theoretical concepts and dynamics which present in couple therapy and in individual therapy where the client is in a couple and bringing the relationship as a focus of the work. There will be space for questions and thinking about your own casework, and an opportunity to discuss referral on if necessary.

About the speaker
Jenny Riddell is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist working with individuals and couples. She is a registered member of The Bowlby Centre and Tavistock Relationships. Her specialist interests are in how a couple grieve, infertility, affairs and working with couples in later life. She has a private practice and writes, supervises, trains, teaches and is academic supervisor for MA dissertations on a variety of psychotherapy trainings. She has worked with Relate, WPF, TR, and is a member of BPC (TR), UKCP (BC), and British a
Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Supervision (BAPPS).

Date: Saturday, 14th November 2020

Time: 11.00am – 1.00pm

Cost: £30  (Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: Online details to follow registration

CPD: 2 hours (CPD certificate provided)

Download the flyer

Clinical Forum – Via Video link – Some aspects of practicing EMDR

Saturday, 3rd October 2020   11am – 1pm

Speaker: John Henry

Synopsis:

In his talk, John will introduce you to the bare bones of EMDR and share some case histories to illustrate the diversity of this therapy. Disclaimer: this in no way will qualify you to practice EMDR, but John hopes it will encourage you to seek training from an accredited training organisation.

About the speaker

John Henry is a founder member of the Bowlby Centre. He has been in practice as a psychotherapist since the mid-1980s. Just after the turn of the millennium he began work, first as an honorary and later in a paid post at the Maudsley Hospital in the Traumatic Stress Service.
While there he met Sandi Richman, who was heading up the EMDR service in the TSS. He was encouraged to seek training as an EMDR therapist. This was the best move he felt he had made in his career. He has become an EMDR enthusiast because it works more rapidly than other relational and CBT therapies, and with lasting effect.

Date: Saturday, 3rd October 2020

Time: 11.00am – 1.00pm

Cost: £30  (Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: Online details to follow registration

CPD: 2 hours (CPD certificate provided)

Download the flyer

THE COUPLE IN MIND: WORKING WITH COUPLES AND WITH INDIVIDUALS IN A COUPLE

Speaker: Jenny Riddell

Synopsis: Using clinical vignettes, Jenny will present some of the core clinical and theoretical concepts and dynamics which present in couple therapy and in individual therapy where the client is in a couple and bringing the relationship as a focus of the work. There will be space for questions and thinking about your own casework, and an opportunity to discuss referral on if necessary.

About the speaker, Jenny Riddell

Jenny Riddell is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist working with individuals and couples. She is a registered member of The Bowlby Centre and Tavistock Relationships. Her specialist interests are in how a couple grieve, infertility, affairs and working with couples in later life. She has a private practice and writes, supervises, trains, teaches and is academic supervisor for MA dissertations on a variety of psychotherapy trainings. She has worked with Relate, WPF, TR, and is a member of BPC (TR), UKCP (BC), and British Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Supervision (BAPPS).

Saturday, 21 March 2020

Time:11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £30 (Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

Chair of Clinical Forum: Helene Everitt, member of the Bowlby Centre

CPD:2 hours – (CPD certificate provided)

Download Brochure

21st March 2020

Clinical Forum – Data Protection and GDPR: What you needto know(and do) in your everyday practice

Saturday, 9th March 2019

Synopsis:
Graham Johnston will be leading an interactive clinical forum focusing on what we as practitioners need to know and do in response to the recent General Data Protection Regulation. There is quite a degree of fear and confusion in our sector about how the new legislation affects us, so Graham will be trying to settle those nerves and remove some of the confusion. In advance of the forum, Graham will be asking participants to send him their biggest fears or burning questions about the impact of GDPR so that he can make the session as personal and useful as possible. You can send your questions to:graysjjohnston@hotmail.com

About the speakers

Graham Johnston is a graduate of The Bowlby Centre (intake 2010) and works in private practice at his home in Brockley, South East London.
He previously worked in the civil service in a variety of policy and operational roles and is now the Policy Director of The Bowlby Centre, where data protection is one of his lead areas of responsibility.

Date: Saturday, 9th March 2019

Time: 11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £30

(Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

CPD: 2 hours (CPD certificate provided)

Download the flyer

Clinical Forum – Data Protection and GDPR: What you needto know(and do) in your everyday practice

Saturday, 9th March 2019

Synopsis:
Graham Johnston will be leading an interactive clinical forum focusing on what we as practitioners need to know and do in response to the recent General Data Protection Regulation. There is quite a degree of fear and confusion in our sector about how the new legislation affects us, so Graham will be trying to settle those nerves and remove some of the confusion. In advance of the forum, Graham will be asking participants to send him their biggest fears or burning questions about the impact of GDPR so that he can make the session as personal and useful as possible. You can send your questions to:graysjjohnston@hotmail.com

About the speakers

Graham Johnston is a graduate of The Bowlby Centre (intake 2010) and works in private practice at his home in Brockley, South East London.
He previously worked in the civil service in a variety of policy and operational roles and is now the Policy Director of The Bowlby Centre, where data protection is one of his lead areas of responsibility.

Date: Saturday, 9th March 2019

Time: 11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £30

(Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

CPD: 2 hours (CPD certificate provided)

Download the flyer

Clinical Forum – Speaker: Ruthie Smith

Synopsis: Attachment trauma has major implications for people’s capacity for individuation often resulting in co-dependent relationships, fear of intimacy or separation, living in chronic states of anxiety or disconnection. Trauma is held as stress in the body and scientific research has now proven that traumatic patterns go deep into our cellular memory and DNA. Many people with trauma at conception and in utero, suffer from chronic and undiagnosed PTSD. Energy psychology methods enable us to identify and treat traumatic patterns which are outside conscious awareness, so these methods are particularly useful in working with developmental, abandonment and attachment trauma.

Ruthie Smith will describe how using simple Energy Therapy methods, which clients apply to themselves within relational psychotherapy, makes it possible to treat attachment trauma relatively easily, including pre-verbal trauma such as in utero, pre-birth, birth and early life trauma and the fundamental lack of safety which such trauma engenders. In the process, the client forms a healthy attachment with the therapist, facilitating the experience of the ‘secure base’. The use of energy psychotherapy also provides empowering self-help tools for clients, enabling them to self-regulate their emotions and triggers, bringing them to a state of balance

About the speaker, Ruthie Smith

Ruthie Smith is an Attachment Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist with over 30 years experience. She was a therapist and supervisor at the Women’s Therapy Centre founded by Susie Orbach and worked as a Principal Individual Psychotherapist and Supervisor in the NHS.

Ruthie has taught on many psychotherapy training programmes, including at the Bowlby Centre, where she is currently a training supervisor. She has been teaching energy psychotherapy for the past ten years and founded the Flame Centre in central London in 2010 which specialises in treating trauma using energy methods.

Ruthie is senior course director on the new Confer, Practising Energy Psychotherapy Diploma which starts in January 2020 (https://www.confer.uk.com/depth-courses/energy.html ). She has been a speaker on the Confer CPD programmes on a variety of subjects.
Her other interests include spirituality, running mindfulness and theme centred retreats at her Octagon Centre, and music – singing with chamber choir, playing saxophone in various groups.

Saturday, 11 January 2020

Time:11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £30 (Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

Chair of Clinical Forum: Helene Everitt, member of the Bowlby Centre

CPD:2 hours – (CPD certificate provided)

11th January 2020

Clinical Forum – History taking and assessment of clients

Saturday, 9th February 2019

Synopsis:
This workshop may be of interest to all psychotherapists – both those in training and experienced therapists. Many Bowlby Centre psychotherapists work with clients in agencies where only short-term therapy is available, and where therapists are required to undertake assessments. How important do we consider assessment to be? Are there essentials that need to be covered? How do we go about assessing? A core value of the Bowlby Centre is that everybody should have access to Attachment Based Psychotherapy – how does this value inform our assessments and can we or should we ever say no? The presentation at this forum is more of a workshop style where we will outline some of the features to consider when making assessment. We will also consider issues relating to assessing risk both at assessment stage and during treatment. The workshop will likely raise more questions than answers but will hopefully open up the field for discussion.

About the speakers

Ruthie Smith is a Psychoanalytic Attachment Based Psychotherapist and Energy Psychotherapist with 30 years’ experience in private practice and 10 years as a Principal Individual Psychotherapist and Supervisor in the NHS. She taught on a number of Psychotherapy Training Programmes including at JBC before founding The Flame Centre in London where she works as a psychotherapist and supervisor. She specialises in work with trauma, having studied a variety of energy therapy modalities which clear PTSD from the body. She teaches alongside Phil Mollon on Converging Streams Energy Psychotherapy courses put on by the Energy Psychotherapy network. Ruthie has regularly lectured on a wide range of subjects for Confer conferences, with a specialist interest in the crossovers between psychotherapy and contemporary spirituality. She runs Flame residential retreats in Norfolk and her other interests include music (jazz and classical).

Date: Saturday, 9th February 2019

Time: 11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £30

(Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

CPD: 2 hours (CPD certificate provided)

Download the flyer

Clinical Forum – Masters in the Art of Defence: Working with Avoidant Attachment

Saturday, 8th December 2018 

Synopsis:
Clients with a dismissing/avoidant pattern of attachment can be difficult to engage and frequently leave therapy before any real work can be done. They often evoke uncomfortable feelings in the therapist including boredom, fear, and strong dislike –or may make little impact on us. In this talk, Linda will describe her work with several highly defended dismissing clients and suggest that their internal worlds are governed by shame and self-hatred. This has implications for how we work with such individuals, and the aims of therapeutic work with them. The talk will be followed by refreshments to celebrate the launch of her latest book.

About the speaker Linda Cundy
Linda Cundy trained at the Bowlby Centre in the 1990s. She has taught at a number of psychotherapy trainings for twenty-five years, and instituted a postgraduate diploma in attachment-base therapy at the Wimbledon Guild. She has published a number of papers in professional journals and has contributed to and edited three books to date; Love in the Age of the Internet: Attachment in the Digital Era (Karnac, 2015),Anxiously Attached: Understanding and Workingwith Preoccupied Attachment (Karnac, 2017) and Attachment and the Defence Against Intimacy: Understanding and Working with Avoidant Attachment, Self-Hatred and Shame (Routledge, 2018)

Date: Saturday, 8th December 2018

Time: 11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £30 – 

(Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

CPD: 2 hours (CPD certificate provided)

Download the flyer

Clinical Forum – “I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS NOT LIVING IN FEAR”: FROM SCAREGIVING TO CAREGIVINGATTACHMENT PERSPECTIVE ON WORKING WITH CLIENTS WITH COMPLEX TRAUMAAND SEX ADDICTION

Saturday, 10th November 2018

Synopsis:
Sexual assault on a young child and other forms of abuse and their psychological aftermath cascades through decades. Apart from shattering one’s mind and sense of selfhood, later this manifests in what we professionals would consider as the client’s reckless behaviour and self harm. When working with complex trauma, we soon learn that paradoxically these harmful ways always carry meaning and make sense within the context of the child spending the majority of time during childhood living in terror. In this forum I will share the story of M, a client who suffered organised abuse and who was diagnosed with DID (Dissociative identity Disorder). M had many parts, some suicidal, some had eating disorders, some disabled and other veryable. However I will focus my attention on M’s sexual addiction and the relational journey which we embarked upon showing that a non-pathologising, non-objectifying approach to the client’s many attachment cries eventually pave the way to intersubjectivity and the need to connect in a more adaptive healthy manner.

About the speaker Orit Badouk Epstein
Orit Badouk Epstein is a UKCP registered attachment based Psychoanalytic psychotherapist, a training supervisor and a training therapist. Shetrained at the Bowlby Centre, London where she is the Editor of the journal Attachment-New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis. She teaches Attachment theory and is the chair of the planning group of the Bowlby Memorial conference. She specialises in attachment theory and trauma and regularly writes and present papers and book chapters on these topics. 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 book “Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs”(Karnac Books), co-editor of the book “Terror within & without”and is the co-editor of the ESTD (European Society for Trauma and Dissociation) newsletter where she regularly writes articles and film reviews.

Date: Saturday, 10th November 2018

Time: 11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £30

(Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

CPD: 2 hours (CPD certificate provided)

Download the flyer

Clinical Forum – “FOSTERING FAMILY ATTACHMENTS IN AN AGE OF VIRTUAL RELATIONSHIPS”

Saturday, 13th October 2018

Synopsis:
CHILD-CENTRED ATTACHMENT THERAPY (The CcAT Programme) was developed in
the mid-1990s as a brief assessment and treatment programme to support adoptive families in Essex. Created by Maeja Raicar and social work colleagues, CcAT was then offered independently by them for several years. They worked with a number of adoptive and foster families, as well as with step-families and birth families where parents and children were struggling with attachment and related behavioural difficulties, and quite often with safeguarding issues since attachment and protection are two sides of the same coin.

The therapists’ learning from this period was written up for the Karnac/UKCP series under the title, Child-Centred Atttachment Therapy (2009). In this clinical forum, Maeja will share some of that learning and consider CcAT’s continuing relevance in an age of virtual relationships to helping struggling parents and children to build healthy attachments. Its simple concepts can be applied to therapeutic work with couples struggling with relationship issues, as well as to work with individuals who are stuggling to parent their children effectively.

About the speaker Maeja Raicar
Maeja Raicar trained as a therapist with the Institute for Self-Analysis in the early 1990s, before it evolved into CAPP and, much later, into The Bowlby Centre. Through a synchronicity of happenings, The CcAT Programme was created and piloted by Maeja and colleagues in Essex. She has worked in the field of adoption and fostering for decades, initially as a social worker before qualifying as a therapist. Maeja has a private therapy and supervision practice in Essex

Date: Saturday, 13th October 2018

Time: 11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £30

(Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

CPD: 2 hours (CPD certificate provided)

Download the flyer

Clinical Forum – Attachment-based affect regulation as a guiding principle for work place
counselling and stress management training

Saturday, 9th June 2018

Synopsis:
Sally Rose will introduce the Workable Ranges model, which is a visual psychoeducational tool to convey attachment-based affect and stress regulation. This model is used in individual therapy/counselling and across a range of proactive interventions. It positions safe relational and mindful presence at the centre of healthy, regulated and workable states. It illustrates how mobilised or immobilised forms of threat-based dysregulation sit above and below states of balance. This is used as a rationale for relational therapeutic work and different approaches to self-care, resilience, improving working relationships and optimising performance. Examples from clinical work will be given. As the model derives in part from the work of Dan Siegel, who integrates secure attachment states, care-giver and mindful presence, it can also be a tool to reflect on our therapeutic presence as therapists with our clients.

About the speaker Sally Rose
Sally Rose is a UKCP registered psychotherapist originally trained at the Arbours Association. She is also a trained teacher of mindfulness-based interventions. Attachment Theory is her secure base which widened over time to integrate features of body psychotherapy and mindfulness practice. She is strongly committed to attachment-based, embodied relational therapy and to bringing insights informed by it into the workplace. She leads the Staff Counselling and Psychological Support Service at the University of Leeds.
Chair: Tori Settle, Chair of the Clinical Training Committee

Date: Saturday, 9th June 2018

Time: 11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £30

(Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

CPD: 2 hours (CPD certificate provided)

Download the flyer

Clinical Forum – Fear of abandonment and angry protest: working with preoccupied clients

Sold Out

Synopsis: This talk will highlight some of the challenges and difficulties of working with preoccupied clients and will propose specific aims and areas of therapeutic focus in the work.

About the speaker, Linda Cundy

trained at the Bowlby Centre in the 1990s and has a private therapy and supervision practice in North London. She has taught for more than twenty years and developed the Postgraduate Diploma in Attachment-Based Therapy at the Wimbledon Guild where she is Lead Tutor. Linda’s publications include a single authored book, Love in the Age of the Internet: Attachment in the Digital Era (Karnac, 2015) and an edited monograph, Anxiously Attached: Understanding and Working with Preoccupied Attachment (Karnac, 2017). A companion monograph, Attachment and the Defence Against Intimacy: Understanding and Working with Avoidant Attachment, Self-Hatred, and Shame is due to be published in 2018.

Saturday, 10 February 2018

Time:11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £30 (Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

Chair of Clinical Forum: Helene Everitt, member of the Bowlby Centre

CPD:2 hours – (CPD certificate provided)

Brochure –  10th February 2018

Sold Out

Clinical Forum – The Need for Something more than a Secure Base; is a Secure Base always enough for a Therapeutic Relationship?

Synopsis: In this forum Michaela will be presenting a paper exploring what Bowlby’s concept of a Secure Base means theoretically and clinically. Using clinical examples Michaela will be asking if the Secure Base is always enough and can it always be used.

Through using both Bowlby and Winnicott’s concepts of infant development, the paper is an exploration of what might be at risk for both analysand and therapist when a secure base cannot be used and perhaps the greater risk of when it can.

About the speaker, Michaela Chamberlain

Michaela is an Attachment Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, trained at the Bowlby Centre where she now teaches. Michaela has worked in both the NHS and private sector in learning disability and mental health services for over twenty years and is now in private practice.

About the discussant, Debbie Zimmerman

Debbie Zimmerman is an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist, who trained at the Bowlby Centre, where she is currently a training therapist, teacher and course tutor. She has been involved in developing and teaching on attachment based counselling courses at the Wimbledon Guild. Having workedin the NHS for a number of years as a psychoanalytic and mentalization based therapist for South London and Maudsley Trust, she is now in private practice.

Time:11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £30 (Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

Chair of Clinical Forum: Helene Everitt, member of the Bowlby Centre

CPD:2 hours – (CPD certificate provided)

Brochure –  8th November 2017.pdf

Clinical Forum – Bowlby Centre, International Attachment Network and Institute of Group Analysis
(A threesome workshop: Oedipus revisited?)
John Bowlby: the timeless supervisor*
Arturo Ezquerro**

SPEAKER: This workshop will be convened by Mark Linington, Chair of Bowlby Centre’s Executive Committee.>

The talk will be largely based on Arturo Ezquerro’s experience of fortnightly supervision and mentorship with John Bowlby, at the Tavistock Clinic, during the last 6 years of his life (1984-1990). Bowlby was a humane, enthusiastic, supportive and inspiring supervisor, who encouraged and stimulated open-ended personal and professional development. He provided a reliable secure base from which it was easier to explore new territories and to integrate diverse sources of knowledge. He respected and valued the work and contributions of his colleagues, his supervisees, and the people who had educated him. As a mentor, at no point did he criticise the work of other supervisors, who were mainly of a different theoretical orientation, and saw merit in their contributions. And he offered gentle, deeply caring suggestions that would help patients to become attached, to survive and to grow.

About Arturo Ezquerro

**Arturo Ezquerro, a consultant psychiatrist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and group analyst, is senior lecturer, assessor and trainer at the Institute of Group Analysis, and former Head of NHS Medical Psychotherapy Services in Brent, London. He was supervised by John Bowlby at the Tavistock Clinic (1984-1990), has published over 60 articles and book chapters in five languages, and has authored Encounters with John Bowlby: Tales of Attachment (Routledge) and Relatos de Apego (Psimatica).

*This event is part of the Bowlby Centre’s Clinical Forum programme, in association with the Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) and the International Attachment Network (IAN). Members and students of Bowlby Centre, IGA and IAN only have to pay £10 towards catering. The fee for other professionals and public is £30. CPD certificates will be provided.

Venue: IGA, 1 Daleham Gardens, London NW3 5BY

Time: Saturday, 13th May 2017, 12 noon-4.00pm (Registration 10.45)

– 12.00 to 12.30: Registration and coffee

– 12.30 to 01.30: “John Bowlby: the timeless supervisor” by Arturo Ezquerro

– 01.30 to 02.00: Light refreshments

– 02.00 to 03.30: Large group discussion (convened by Mark Linington and Maria Canete)

– 03.30 to 04.00: Light refreshments

Bookings: through the Institute of Group Analysis webpage https://groupanalysis.org

Clinical Forum – Face to Face: Psychotherapy in Black and White

SPEAKER: Charles Brown

How can a black psychotherapist work with the transference and counter transference when working with racial otherness, a direct and present trauma for the black psychotherapist?

This paper examines working with race in psychoanalysis through the exploration of the effect on the patient and the impact on the therapy of the therapist’s black skin. Understanding, through the use of dreams, myth and imagery, allow powerful dynamics to emerge into consciousness. Charles Brown will discuss some clinical examples of patients’ dreams in relation to the image of the black therapist. This is explored through the use and meaning of colour within the patients’ dreams. Charles presents clinical
vignettes, which illustrate the impact of the therapists’ black skin that are linked to the resistance of the patients’ acknowledgement of their own racial stereotypes and its possible significance in the therapy.

About Charles Brown

Charles Brown is a UKCP registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist, clinical supervisor and supervisor of supervision. He qualified from The Guild of Psychotherapists, London in 2006. He is also a specialist addictions therapist and an experienced group facilitator. He is an associate member of AAP, The Bowlby Centre, The APPT.

Charles has experience across the public, voluntary and private sectors. He is the founder of BeMe Therapy, a counselling service for black and ethnic minorities. Charles is also a training therapist, tutor and lecturer. He has a particular interest in identity and race and has published papers in books and journals. He has been in private practice in South London for several years.

Time: Saturday, 13th May 2017, 11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £30

(Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

CPD: 2 hours

(CPD certificate provided)

Clinical Forum – Documentary – Controversial Discussions For the XXIst Century

SPEAKER: Liat Levy in conversation with Svetlana Palmer

It is a pleasure to invite you to a screening of the Controversial Discussions For the XXIst Century with the film maker Svetlana Palmer, followed by a conversation, along with Q & A.

Taking both title and spirit from the Controversial Discussions which took place after the death of Freud in wartime London, PEP Web Video Grant Project Winner Controversial Discussions For the XXIst Century examines the history, legacy and contemporary resonance of the discussions regarded by Andre Green as ‘the most important document in the history of psychoanalysis’. The film features contributions from several generations of British psychoanalysts including Anne-Marie Sandler, Peter Fonagy and Riccardo Steiner, as well as proponent of modern attachment theory Allan Schore and founder of neuropsychoanalysis Mark Solms.

In this clinical forum screening of the film will be followed by a conversation as well as Q & A. We will discuss issues raised by the film including historic difficulties in communication and cross-pollination across modalities which remain endemic to contemporary psychotherapy together with integrating recent findings from neuroscience and neurology which back Bowlby’s original ideas about the key role of attachment in human development.

About Liat Levy

Liat is an experienced Psychoanalytic Adult Psychotherapist and Supervisor. Liat is a Training Therapist, Supervisor, and a teacher on the training programme at the Bowlby Centre. For the last ten years she has worked, part-time, as a Senior Adult Psychotherapist within the NHS for Lambeth Integrative Psychological Therapy, which is part of South London and Maudsley Trust. Liat has a lively private practice based in North London, where she offers psychotherapy, as well as clinical supervision.

About Svetlana Palmer

Svetlana is a British documentary film-maker and author. Her credits include BAFTA-nominated Cold War (BBC2/CNN) RTS-winner The Second World War in Colour (ITV) and The First World War (C4). She is co-author of A War in Words (Simon&Schuster 2003) and We Were Young and At War (Collins 2009). Svetlana graduated as a psychodynamic psychotherapist in 2016 and currently developing her private practice in North London alongside her film-making and writing projects.

Time: Saturday, 8th April 2017, 11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £30

(Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

CPD: 2 hours

(CPD certificate provided)

Clinical Forum – Reflecting on supervision and diversity –

SPEAKER: Anne Power

It is said that we teach what we need to learn. Anne Power also finds that she writes what she needs to understand, and in writing about supervision and diversity she has tried to address an area that she finds difficult and also which she feels has been underexplored in the literature. She will focus this paper largely on social class because other types of discrimination tend to get more space in the literature, and because she has written about these in an earlier paper (Power, 2009). She writes from within the limitations of her group as a white, middle aged and middle class woman.

Thinking about the challenges of working with diversity in supervision, Anne identified ten aspirations which she will explore:

– Modelling comfort and curiosity about our own identity and its impact
– Normalising and containing discomfort about difference so that reflection is more possible.
– Being alert to the potential transference/ countertransference when the therapist and client are either very diverse, or, very alike in identity.
– Initiating conversations about how diversity is impacting both the therapy and the supervisory relationship.
– Supporting the supervisee’s awareness of her own identity and its impact on clients.
– Offering challenge and feedback on how supervisees respond to, or seem to avoid, issues of difference.
– Challenging our psychological theories and becoming more sensitive to how they may be serving the dominant culture.
– Demonstrating a priori knowledge of other cultures whilst resisting the pull to over-generalise.
– Identifying how the setting where supervision takes place may itself perpetuate inequalities.
– Showing willingness and skill in repairing ruptures in the supervisory relationship and using the potential of such enactments to deepen the work.

Anne Power

Anne Power qualified in attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapy at The Bowlby Centre and did an MA in supervision at WPF/ Roehampton. She trained in couple work with Relate. Previously her work was in the NHS and voluntary agencies; she now has a private practice in central London for couples and individuals. Her recent book, Forced Endings in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis: Attachment and loss in retirement, explores the process of closing a practice for retirement or for other reasons. She is UKCP and BACP registered.

Time: Saturday, 14th January 2017, 11.00am – 1.00pm

Clinical – Early thoughts from a newbie therapist

SPEAKER: Graham Johnston

Graham will structure the clinical seminar in particular around his work with a training client, drawing on

key questions that are driving his development as a therapist such as:

– how important is empathetic understanding?

– how important is interpretation?

– do we place too much emphasis on the therapeutic frame and all it contains?

– how do we connect with and relate to those who are most avoidant?

Graham Johnston is currently building a private practice in Brockley, Southeast London after graduating from The Bowlby Centre in 2014. He’s been working for the Government since 2001, but will finish that work at Christmas to concentrate full-time on his therapy practice. His clinical interests include working with young adults struggling to build fulfilling relationships, clients with anger and avoidance issues, and clients with OCD. He balances his work life with looking after two toddlers and, in what little remains of his free time, he runs, listens to podcasts and watches American sport.

Time: Saturday, 10th December 2016, 11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Clinical Forum – Aspects of Attachment-Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy –

SPEAKERS: Mark Linington and Tori Settle

In this clinical forum Mark Linington and Tori Settle will present and explore what it means to work as a psychotherapist from both an attachment theory and psychoanalytic perspective. They will use examples from their extensive clinical experience to reflect on some of the key current areas with which they work, including the nature of the secure base, the significance of the clinician’s experience, the repetition of relational patterns (internal working models) and understanding the therapeutic action.

Mark Linington has been practicing as an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist for more than fifteen
years, including twelve years in the NHS. He works with adults, children and families who have experienced trauma, including those with intellectual disabilities and long term mental health problems. He is Chair of the Executive Committee at The Bowlby Centre, where he is also a training therapist and training supervisor. He currently works as a psychotherapist and supervisor in a special secondary school in London, at the Clinic for Dissociative Studies and in private practice.

Tori Settle has been practising as an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist for 16 years and has a full private clinical practice. She is also a trained massage therapist and specialises in working with pregnant mothers and elderly clients. She gave up her massage practice gradually over the years in order to focus solely on the psychotherapeutic work but her interest in working with the body remains. She is Chair of the Clinical Training Committee at the Bowlby Centre and sits on the Executive committee with Mark Linington.

Further Information Mark and Tori have recently co-authored a chapter on Attachment-based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in the forthcoming Sage Handbook for Counseling and Psychotherapy due for publication later this year.

Time: Saturday, 8th October 2016, 11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £20

(Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

CPD: 2 hours

(CPD certificate provided)

Clinical Forum – GASLIGHT – I feel like I’m going mad, is it me, must be me?

SPEAKER: Orit Badouk Epstein

The 1940s film “Gaslight” is a classic thriller and its strength lies in being psychologically accurate storytelling ahead of its time. Recently, the term “gas-light” has come alive after the broadcasting of the radio drama ‘The Archers’. Since emotional abuse has never received proper public recognition, the revival of the word and its modern interpretation is highly relevant to our work with clients who have been emotionally abused, clients with a poor sense of agency and clients who survived horrendous mind control and torture. From the personal to the societal, I will be discussing the various degrees of gas-lighting, in particular with clients whose lives have been marked by continuous and insidious emotional torment, and how relational approach helps shift their distorted internal working models and sense of selfhood.

Orit Badouk Epstein is an Attachment based Psychoanalytic psychotherapist (UKCP registered) and a supervisor working in private practice. She works relationally with individuals, couples and parents. Orit has a particular interest in working with individuals who have experienced extreme abuse and trauma displaying symptoms of dissociation. She is currently teaching at the Bowlby Centre. Orit is a trustee for the Clinic of Dissociative Studies. She is co-author of the book “Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs” (Karnac Books) and co-editor of the book ‘Terror within & without’. She is the associate editor for Journal Attachment New Direction and co-editor of the ESTD (European Society for Trauma and Dissociation) Newsletter where she regularly writes articles, film and book reviews.

Time: Saturday, 16 July 2016, 11.00am – 1.00pm (Registration 10.45)

Cost: £20

(Bowlby Centre members and students – free)

Venue: The Bowlby Centre 1 Highbury Crescent, London N5 1RN

CPD: 2 hours

(CPD certificate provided)

Date: Clinical Forum 7th May 2016 – pdf brochure

Clinical Forum – ATTACHMENT TRAUMA, ENERGY PSYCHOLOGY AND SOUL CONNECTING

SPEAKER: Ruthie Smith

Ruthie is a Psychoanalytic Attachment Based Psychotherapist, energy psychotherapist, teacher and training supervisor. She spent 10 years as a Principal Individual Psychotherapist in the NHS, and has taught on psychotherapy training programmes, Confer events and at The Freud Museum Conference. After training in Energy Psychotherapy methods, she established The Flame Centre in London, and is part of the Energy Psychotherapy Network which includes Phil Mollon and others. She currently teaches on Converging Streams courses in Energy Psychotherapy and also co-leads residential spiritual retreats.

Date: Sunday 21st February 2016, 11am – 1pm

Price: £12.00 per person

“A Dance to the Music of Violence An account of attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a survivor of past chronic, unremitting violence and abuse”

 

SPEAKER: Helen Cordery

Date: Saturday, 16th January 2016, 11am – 1pm

Price: £12.00 per person

“I’m Someone With A Future And Not Just A Past”

SPEAKER: Hazel Leventhal

 

Saturday, 16 January 2016 11am – 1pm
“I’m Someone With A Future And Not Just A Past”

SPEAKER: Hazel Leventhal
She first came for therapy aged 45. She was brought up ‘in care’ from the age of
four months and lived in 27 different homes or institutions and went to 18 different
schools, leaving school at the age of 16 without any qualifications. Her body was
plagued by physical ailments. She couldn’t sustain relationships. Her life was
lonely and loveless. This is her story and how therapy helped her to change.
Hazel Leventhal
Hazel trained at The Bowlby Centre where she has taught The Life Cycle seminar
and chaired the Clinical Forum for three years. She has worked as a Samaritan
and cared for her sister who suffered from early-onset Alzheimer’s. She now
works in private practice in Bedfordshire.

Download the pdf brochure

Date: Saturday 12th, December 2015, 11am – 1pm

The Danger of Getting Better

SPEAKER:Liat Levy

Getting better is painful as it often involves a degree of overwhelming sadness, and a capacity to mourn. In the process of attempting to help our patients, one may become aware of ‘a force which is defending itself by every possible means against recovery and which is absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering’ (Freud 1937).

Specifically during treatment the availability of someone who is emphatic, reliable and constant provides an arena where archaic relationships get repeated, as well as providing an entirely new experience for the patient. Such dynamic is likely to stir up a wide array of contradictory feelings such as, yearning, hunger of wanting more, uneasy feelings of greed and envy, as well as feelings of love and hate transferred from early frustrating objects. Thus in the attempt to help our patients, we stirs up affects and longing that are truly difficult to bear.

In this clinical forum Liat will describe a case of a long term patient. Focusing on some of the challenges, as well as the ways in which the therapy aimed to support and promote psychic change, in such manner that it is not acted out nor defended against, but rather tolerated within the patient’s psychic life.

Download the full brochure

Date: Sunday, 15 November 2015, 11am – 1pm

Price: £12.00 per person

Thoughts about suicidality in the therapy relationship

Abstract I hope this to be a presentation of clinical material to think about suicidal feelings expressed in the room. I am hoping in the presentation of the material and in the discussion afterwards to think about the anxiety that I and I suspect other therapists experience when confronted with such material. How do we retain and develop the capacity to think about these feelings particularly when they are experienced frequently and over a long period of time, months and sometimes years.

Sarah Devereux has worked in the NHS in secure mental health services for 16 years. She is clinical lead for Occupational therapy for a secure women’s service and an MBT (Menatalisation based therapy) therapist for a community service for those who have received as diagnosis of personality disorder. She is as a Bowlby Centre trained psychotherapist.

Tori Settle s the Chair of the clinical training committee and has been a teacher and course tutor for the Bowlby Centre for the last 12 years. She has a private practice and is a training supervisor for the centre also.

Download the full brochure

Date: Saturday, 10th October 2015 11am – 1pm

Price: £12.00 per person

War – Psychoanalysis and the Unspeakable

Abstract – This presentation starts with a short film, “letters of service” directed by Duncan Wellaway. This is the true story of a man who had been in a psychiatric institution for 80 years following service in the First World War. This presentation examines the place of War in psychoanalysis, including relational psychotherapy informed by Attachment Theory and considers the role of War in the development of psychoanalysis and the therapeutic community movement. Drawing on clinical work with a patient, a former serviceman who had experienced active service in Bosnia and subsequent complex trauma, who was resident in a therapeutic community. Including images from War Propaganda, Poetry and War photography, This presentation examines the themes of confidentiality, transference, vicarious trauma, vulnerability, common humanity and gender.

Speaker Kate Brown is a Bowlby Centre trained UKCP registered attachment based psychoanalytic psychotherapist who started her career in therapeutic communities working with adults with a variety of mental health difficulties, and with adolescents individually and in groups. She has worked with young mothers and in mainstream community psychiatric services with patients’ families. She has also provided time limited therapy with former servicemen who had experienced complex trauma. She teaches at The Bowlby Centre and has also delivered freelance training. Kate completed an MSc in psychotherapeutic approaches in mental health in 2012. She is a member of the Attachment Journal editorial group, former chair of the clinical forum at The Bowlby Centre. Kate has recently begun a PhD in the psychoanalysis department at Middlesex University in the history of the therapeutic community movement and the treatment of trauma. Kate has recently moved to Bournemouth where she will be developing a private practice.

Discussant Natalie Scales is a Senior Manager for Community Housing & Therapy (CHT). She has a background in Psychology and has worked in Therapeutic Communities for the past 8 years, including managing a dispersed community for ex-service personnel. Currently she is mummy to 2 boys, as well as managing marketing and sales for CHT.

Download the full brochure

Date: Saturday, 26 September 2015 11pm – 1pm

Price: £12.00 per person

Who’s Life Are You Living?
Echoism: a relationship dominated by the Other

SPEAKERS: Elisa Morris, Mark Linington and Nell Montgomery

As psychotherapists we are all probably familiar not only with the myth of Narcissus, but also with the self and relational difficulties that one faces with being narcissistic. In this story there was a lesser known person – Echo – who also has something to say to us about relational life.

In this Clinical Forum three clinicians: Elisa Morris, Mark Linington and Nell Montgomery, will present a new theory they have been developing by bringing together their clinical experiences and the story of Echo. The Forum will bring examples from their work to illustrate the themes, difficulties and possible ways of helping someone who is disabled by the nature of their focus on the other, at the expense of their sense of self.

Our Speakers
Mark is an attachment based-psychoanalytic psychotherapist and child psychotherapist. He trained with The Bowlby Centre, where he is Chair of the Executive Committee, a Training Therapist, Clinical Supervisor and Research Lead. He has worked for 12 years in the NHS as a psychotherapist with people with learning disabilities who have experienced trauma and abuse. Currently, he works as psychotherapist for the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, at a secondary school for young people with complex needs, and in private practice with children and adults.

Nell is an attachment based-psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She trained at The Bowlby Centre. She works with adults as a psychotherapist in private practice and for the Pottergate Centre for Trauma and Dissociation. She is a Partner at The Preston Associates, where she is an Executive Coach working with senior leaders and leadership teams across a variety of industries. She is a coach at Insead’s Global Leadership Centre in Paris.

Elisa is an integrative psychotherapist, having completed a transpersonal psychotherapy training at the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education (CCPE) in London. She currently works with adults in private practice in Bath. Previously she has worked for four years in Primary Care. She is a lead member of the Counsellors’ Collective South West, an organisation working to improve access to high quality therapy across this region. She is completing her supervision training at the Centre for Supervision and Team Development in
Bath.

Saturday, 20th June 2015
SPEAKER: Mark Linnington

‘Who Cares?

Mark Linington will present his long term psychotherapy with a man who was abused in his
family and then in care. He will describe the impacts of these attachment traumas on the
careseeking, caregiving and other attachment-based systems of this young man, show how
these emerged in the psychotherapeutic relationship, and explore how he worked with them
and the influence of his own care needs.
Our speaker
Mark is an attachment based-psychoanalytic psychotherapist and child psychotherapist. He
trained with The Bowlby Centre, where he is Chair of the Executive Committee, a Training
Therapist, Clinical Supervisor and Research Lead. He has worked for 12 years in the NHS as a
psychotherapist with people with learning disabilities who have experienced trauma and abuse.
Currently, he works as psychotherapist for the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, at a secondary
school for young people with complex needs, and in private practice with children and adults.

‘Who Cares? – Download a pdf flyer here

Saturday, 9th May 2015
SPEAKER: Orit Badouk Epstein

‘Who needs who? – the roots of traumatic disappointment, often shown in
clients with preoccupied attachment style’

When teaching on the attachment short course participants are often less clear of how preoccupied
attachment patterns translate relationally in adulthood and in the clinical setting. As with all insecure
attachment styles, the clinical work with the preoccupied clients often entails the gathering of internal and
external records of the accumulative traumatic events and experiences, sustained early on in life by their care
givers that can only give rise to forces that interfere with the client’s movement towards mental
wellbeing. The journey I embark upon with my preoccupied clients, therefore, is not so dissimilar to the one
I have with all my other clients but one that more painfully confronts the client’s need to mourn their
relentless disappointment in their wistful searching and yearning for the ideal care-giver. We also need to
pay attention to the client’s vested interest empowered by a protective need to keep things exactly as they
have always been, and by doing so, feeling helplessness and indecisiveness and ‘sitting on the fence’ . In
doing so, the client is not fully aware of his need to constantly recreate the past in the present. This
presentation meant to shed some light into the work with these clients and share some effective ways of
overcoming the client’s feeling of being stuck in relentless hope.

‘Who needs who? – the roots of traumatic disappointment, often shown in clients with preoccupied attachment style’ Download a pdf flyer here

Archived Pschotherapy Training Courses

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 health.

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)

Attachment Theory in Clinical Practice – June  2024

FULLY BOOKED

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

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.

Attachment within a couple relationship -April 2024
A online workshop designed and facilitated by Annie Power

10 hours over 3 Fridays

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.

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.

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.

Attachment and Complex Trauma March 2024

Saturday, 23rd March and Sunday 24th March 2024

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.

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 2024

via Zoom

COURSE FULL

10 hours over 5 Saturdays

With Anne Power

Dates: Saturday, 6 January 2024

Saturday, 20 January 2024

Saturday, 3 February 2024

Saturday, 17 February 2024

Saturday, 2 March 2024

Time: 10 am – 12 noon

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.

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.

Masterclass in Psychotherapy Research: Theory and Practice

A online workshop designed and facilitated by Dr Adrian Hayes

What is it about? This Masterclass is designed to equip participants with essential knowledge and understanding of fundamental research methods, their application in investigating and evaluating psychotherapeutic counselling processes, and the outcomes associated with these interventions.

Is it for me? This course is tailored for individuals with a keen interest in advancing their understanding of psychotherapy research. All are welcome, and attendance is not limited to members of the Bowlby Centre, ensuring inclusivity and accessibility to explore the intricacies of evidence-based practices.

What will I learn? The session aims are to :

  • To provide knowledge and understanding of basic research approaches and techniques, and their application to the investigation and evaluation of psychotherapeutic counselling process and outcomes
  • To summarise the breadth of literature on psychotherapy research and the challenges for working in this area
  • To practice critical appraisal of research in attachment-based psychotherapy

The Masterclass will consist of three hour-long sessions with two fifteen minute breaks:

  • Hour 1: A didactic but interactive session on research methodology, including interventional studies, observational studies, and qualitative studies
  • Hour 2: A discussion of challenges of research in psychotherapy practice and methodology with examples of recent completed and ongoing studies
  • Hour 3: An interactive critical appraisal of a paper relevant to attachment-based psychotherapy (to be agreed). Discussion of research ideas and potential projects

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

About Adrian: I’m Dr Adrian Hayes, Consultant Medical Psychotherapist at Somerset NHS Foundation Trust. I’m trained in medicine, psychiatry and psychotherapies including psychodynamic therapy, group analysis, MBT, CAT and therapeutic communities amongst others, and work mostly with people who identify with Complex Emotional Needs in the NHS. Before clinical training I worked in research at Manchester University, mostly in prison health looking at suicide, management of mental illness, and the needs of elderly people in prison. I now combine clinical and research work always with the aim of improving services for our patients. I hope to bring enthusiasm and energy to research training, and support clinicians in believing they can understand and be a part of research in their professional lives.

Date: Saturday 10th February 2024

Time: 10:00 – 13:30pm

CPD: 3 Hours (CPD certificate provided)

Specialised Safeguarding Awareness Training for Counsellors and Therapists

A two-hour workshop designed and facilitated by Lynn Findlay

Tuesday, 10 October 2023

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 discussionaround 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 abusecovers:
•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 20yrs experience working in safeguarding, with many years of experience designing and delivering training sessions in social care and therapy.

Date: Tuesday, 10 October 2023

Time: 6.30pm –8.30pm

Cost : £40 non – Bowlby Centre members
£30 Bowlby Centre member
CPD : 3 hours for first part of the training
3 hours for both parts of the training (CPD certificates provided)

Safeguarding Awareness Training for Counsellors and Therapists

A two-hour workshop designed and facilitated by Lynn Findlay

Tuesday, 3 October 2023

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 withboth 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:

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

How is it delivered? This is currently 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 20yrs experience working in safeguarding, with many years of experience designing and delivering training sessions in social care and therapy.

Date: Tuesday, 3 October 2023

Time: 6.30pm –8.30pm

Cost : £40 non – Bowlby Centre members
£30 Bowlby Centre member
CPD : 3 hours for first part of the training
3 hours for both parts of the training (CPD certificates provided)

Safeguarding Awareness training plus Working with Suicidality and Safety planning

COURSE FULL

3.25 hour workshop designed and facilitated by Lynn Findlay

Monday, 24 July 2023

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. This workshop has an additional session on working with suicidality and safety planning, focusing on risk assessment, exploration and safeguarding.
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 SAT session covers:
• Legislative and statutory framework which promotes and safeguards children and adults – the focus is on joined up, systemic thinking.
• An overview of contextual safeguarding and the systemic approach.
• An overview of types of harm and a buse for both child and adult safeguarding.
• The role of the therapist within this framework, exploring issues of confidentiality and contracting in the counselling context, with consideration to GDPR
• How the therapeutic relationship and modality may influence safeguarding decisions.
• Making sense of your concerns and threshold dilemmas
• Guidance on recording and reporting concerns
The SASP session covers:
• How to work with a client expressing suicidality
• Understanding risk and protective factors
• Confidentiality and contracting in this context.
• Space for thoughts and reflections.
How is it delivered?  This is currently via Zoom, with information sharing, whole group discussion, and opportunities for questions and personal reflection. The training is in two sections; SAT for 2 hours followed by SASP for 1 hour. Individual CPD certificates are
available for both sessions.
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 s in social care and therapy. She is now an independent safeguarding consultant and trainer.
Date: Monday, 24 July 2023
Time: 1.00pm – 3.00pm – Safeguarding Awareness Training
3.15pm – 4.15pm – Suicidality and safety planning
Cost : £40 non – Bowlby Centre members
£30 Bowlby Centre member
CPD : 3 hours for first part of the training
3 hours for both parts of the training (CPD certificates provided)

Attachment Theory in Clinical Practice – June and July 2023

Saturday 24th, Sunday 25th June & Saturday 8th, Sunday 9th July 2023

COURSE FULL

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.

“Ghosts in The Nursery” Adapting Infant-Parent Psychotherapy to Diverse Populations to Diminish the Intergenerational  Transmission of Trauma

With Stephen Seligman, DMH

Saturday, 10 June 2023

1.00pm – 5.00pm

Venue: The Resource for London

Synopsis

Until relatively recently, psychotherapists have been limited in their ability to help infants, since we usually rely on words or play.  Selma Fraiberg and her colleagues proposed their original model of infant-parent psychotherapy to fill this gap, taking the parent-infant relationship as the pathway to help the baby.  To begin with, the traditional conception of transference was modified and applied to how parents project their childhood traumas onto their babies –“the ghosts in the nursery.”  This traditional psychoanalytic orientation combined with direct support and non-didactic developmental guidance, a way of engaging parents’ positive interest in their babies–without the putting them in the position of feeling inferior or humiliated by unsolicited advice.  The careful development of a working alliance was stressed, and home visiting became the most common intervention format.  Work with infant-parent dyads offers special possibilities for therapeutic progress: The overall emphasis is to enhance whatever potentials for progressive development can emerge in the family and its members, while interrupting destructive dynamics that would otherwise take hold.

This presentation provides an overview of current developments in the model’s core intervention techniques.  As the original infant-parent psychotherapy model and the infant mental health movement have expanded, new groups have been reached: system-involved families, including those with infants and young children in foster care; culturally and economically disadvantaged families—including people of color, those living in poverty, recent immigrants, etc; and neurodiverse populations.

A conceptual-clinical framework will be offered, along with case presentations and video vignettes.  Audience questions and discussion will be encouraged.

About Stephen Seligman DMH: Dr Stephen Seligman, D.M.H. is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco; Editor Emeritus of Psychoanalytic Dialogues; Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California; and Clinical Professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. Dr. Seligman has recently authored Relationships in Development: Infancy, Intersubjectivity, Attachment(Routledge), and is co-editor of the American Psychiatric Press’ Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health: Core Concepts and Clinical Practice.

Date: Saturday 10th June 2023

Group Supervision via Zoom with Tori Settle

Online – THIS SUPERVISION GROUP IS NOW FULL

Monday, 6th March 2023
and then on a 4 – 6 weekly basis

Maximum of 6 participants

Cost:  £30 per person

Tori will be running a group supervision session for 6 participants. Participants are welcome to either bring their own material on this occasion or join in discussion with peers. This is the first of a regular set of group supervision sessions with a closed group – so for those of you who wish to bring clinical material at a later date, there will be opportunities to do so. Future dates and times will be agreed when we meet.

Tori Settle

Tori was the CEO of the Bowlby Centre from 2020 – 2022 and ran the clinical training for 9 years before that. She is a teacher and course tutor for the Centre, with many years of experience. Tori currently runs weekends for professionals who want to explore their own attachment patterns in relation to their clients. She has over 20 years of clinical experience as an Attachment-based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and is a supervisor and trainer.

Attachment and Complex Trauma March 2023

Saturday, 25th March and Sunday 26th March 2023
Time:10 am to 4pm
Cost:£350
Venue:The Bowlby Centre, 1 Highbury Crescent, London, N5 1RN

Course Full

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.

Impacts of the pandemic on children’s development

A three week conversation series

October 2023

What impacts has the pandemic had on children’s development? What are the likely long-term consequences, and what can we do now to mitigate those? These are the questions that will be explored in this Conversation Series, hosted by The Bowlby Centre. Although stories of the pandemic’s impacts now feature regularly within the media, our society has made little space for thinking deeply and proactively about this issue. This Conversation Series brings together leading authors, researchers and practitioners who are well placed to guide us in contemplating this pressing issue. It provides an opportunity for professionals from all sectors to reflect on where they can best invest their attention, energy and resources in order to support the development of children and young people throughout the UK and beyond.

Infants & Early Years: Babies – 5 years

  • Tuesday 3rd October
  • 7pm – 8.30pm

Sally Hogg, Senior Policy Fellow and Lead Author of Casting Long Shadows: The Ongoing Impact of the Pandemic on Babies Families and Services that Support Them.

Claudia Gold, Paediatrician and Author of Keeping Your Child in Mind

Children: 5 – 12 years

  • Tuesday 10th October
  • 7pm – 8.30pm

Naomi Fisher, Author of Changing Our Minds: How Children Can Take Control of their Own Learning

Kate Silverton, Author of There’s No Such Thing as Naughty

Young People: 12 – 18 years

  • Tuesday 17th October
  • 7pm – 8.30pm

Gerry Diamond, Nurture Lead at award-winning Clydebank High School

Kathy Evans, Children England

Location: Online Via Zoom

Safeguarding Awareness Training for Counsellors and Therapists September 2022

A two hour online workshop designed and facilitated by Lynn Findlay

Tuesday 27th September 2022

NOW FULL
6.30pm – 8.30pm
£30 non-Bowlby Centre members
£20 Bowlby Centre members

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

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

Please get in touch if I can help. The training can be tailored directly to your learning needs.

About Lynn:
Lynn is a qualified counsellor and psychotherapist, working with both adults and young people. She is a registered social worker with over 20yrs experience working in safeguarding, with many years of experience designing and delivering training sessions in social care and therapy.

Specialised Safeguarding Training for Counsellors and Therapists October 2022

A two hour online workshop designed and facilitated by Lynn Findlay 

Tuesday 4th October 2022 – COURSE FULL
6.30pm – 8.30pm
£30 non-Bowlby Centre members
£20 Bowlby Centre members

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 20yrs experience working in safeguarding, with many years experience designing and delivering training sessions in social care and therapy.

Exploring Attachment Theory October 2022

An online weekend course designed and facilitated by Tori Settle

Saturday, 22nd and Sunday, 23rd October 2022
10.00am – 4.00pm
Cost – £300
Venue – Online

What is it about?
We will be exploring how our ‘attachment system’ is comprised of various elements or sub systems – a care giving system, a care seeking system and a fear system (fight/flight) being just three of them. We will be concentrating on how these three systems are connected and how our internal and external worlds impact on them. We will be referencing Bowlby’s attachment theory and Una McCluskey’s work on the Dynamics of Attachment in professional encounters.

Is it for me?
If you are a professional care giver in any area that covers mental health or wellbeing then this course is for you. Typically participants are counsellors, psychotherapists, social workers, nurses, coaches and teachers – but this course is open for anyone who wants to learn more about their patterns of giving care to others, all through an attachment lens.

What will I learn?
We will be exploring how our attachment patterns influence how we give and receive care and how, when we become anxious or fearful in relationship, our capacity to give and receive care effectively break down. A good therapeutic encounter relies on this care exchange being secure and attuned. When it becomes insecure, the therapeutic relationship can be vulnerable to breaking down – resulting in therapeutic encounters being prematurely terminated and professionals or caregivers feeling deskilled or dreading the work.

About Tori:
I am currently the CEO of The Bowlby Centre and have a private practice in Kent. I have a passion for teaching and am a registered attachment based psychoanalytic psychotherapist and supervisor

Attachment and Complex Trauma – October 2021

Saturday, 23 and Sunday 24 October 2021
and
Saturday, 30 and Sunday 31 October 2021

10.00am – 4.00pm

Cost: £600

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 teach about 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 challengingsituations 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 of trauma and adverse childhood experiences.

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 trainee supervisor and a trainee therapist. She trained at the Bowlby Centre, London where she is 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, Routledge (in Press) 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.

Becoming Secure: What Are The Ingredients of a Successful Psychotherapy?

Date: Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th January 2020
Time: 10 am to 4pm Saturday, 10 am to 3pm Sunday
Cost: £200, £175 Bowlby Centre members, £150 Bowlby Centre students
Venue: Resource for London, 356 Holloway Rd, London, N7 6PA

COURSE FULL

Attachment Theory has always integrated findings from related disciplines. Bowlby’s thinking was influenced by concepts from ethology, animal research and information processing. More recently, it has benefitted from research into linguistics, the effects of trauma, neuroscience, and contemporary developmental theories. But what does this mean for the practice of attachment-informed psychotherapy? If the overall aim is secure attachment, what needs to happen in an effective therapy to bring that about?

This two-day seminar will propose key ingredients, areas of focus in clinical work that facilitate ‘earned security.’ While each individual client is unique, and the balance of ingredients will also vary according to core attachment style, anxieties and defences, these areas of focus can be helpful throughout the lifetime of each therapy; as part of the assessment process, as a framework to review the work, and as part of ending. It also provides a guide when
therapies get stuck, as part of supervision, and for self-supervision There will be ample opportunities throughout these two days to reflect on clinical material in the light of these ‘key ingredients.’

Linda Cundy is an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist and supervisor in private practice in north London. As an independent trainer she has twenty-five years’ experience of teaching, including setting up a
postgraduate diploma in attachment-based therapy. She has contributed to and edited three books to date; “Love in the Age of the Internet: Attachment in the Digital Era” (2015, Karnac), “Anxiously Attached: Understanding and Working with Preoccupied Attachment” (2017, Karnac) and “Attachment and the Defence Against Intimacy: Understanding and Working With Avoidant Attachment, Self-Hatred, and Shame” (2018, Routledge).

Attachment Theory in Clinical Practice – October – COURSE FULL

Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th October 2019 and
Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd November 2019

Cost: £580 Organisations, £540 Individuals

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 • Dismissing • 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 is 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…”

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 is the Editor of the journal Attachment-New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis (published by Karnac books). She teaches Attachment theory and is the head of the planning group of the International Bowlby Memorial conference. She specialises in attachment theory and trauma and regularly writes and present papers on these topics. 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 book “Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs” (Karnac Books), co-editor of the book “Terror within & without”, and is the co-editor of the ESTD (European Society for Trauma and Dissociation) newsletter where she regularly writes articles and film reviews.

COURSE FULL

Attachment Theory in Clinical Practice

Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th October 2019 and
Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd November 2019

Cost: £580 Organisations, £540 Individuals

Download the pdf brochure

Adult Attachment Interview Training Workshop – November 2019

10 Days
Monday, November 4th – Friday, November 8th  plus
Monday, November 11th – Friday, November 15th

Cost: £2000  (deposit of £385 payable on booking with the balance payable on invoice when accepted on the course)

Non-refundable deposit payable upon booking, no later than 1st August 2019

Balance due on acceptance of course, no later than 21 October 2019

Applicants not accepted will be refunded their deposit monies.

The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) developed by Mary Main and colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, investigates an individual’s current mental representations of attachment-related experiences from childhood. Adult Attachment Interview Institutes last ten days, and are usually held Monday through Friday of two weeks in succession. One transcript is assigned over the weekend, hopefully leaving you time to take one day off.

The AAI institute is intensive and involves analysis of about 7 or 8 AAI transcripts in succession. Meetings take place about 5–6 hours a day (though sometimes considerably more time is needed to discuss a particular case). Their central purpose is to discuss scoring and classification of the transcript assigned for the previous night, which will also take you at least 6 hours to prepare. In addition to the group meeting, we will be available to see individuals or small groups another hour each day if necessary.

The cost for the institute is USD 2600 (GBP 2000), which includes training, training materials, refreshment & snack during the two weeks as well as reliability testing and associated materials.

The maximum number of participants is 20.

Kazuko Behrens, Ph.D.
Assoc. professor
Dept. of Social Behavioral Sciences
State University of New York
Tel. + 1 315 787 3964
E-mail: behrenk@sunypoly.edu

Pehr Granqvist, Ph D
Professor
Developmental psychology
Stockholm University
Tel. + 46 73 616 26 12
E-mail: pehr.granqvist@psychology.su.se

Introduction To AEDP – Poetry In Motion: Dyadic Regulation Of Emotion And Transformation Of Self – COURSE FULL

Saturday 16th November 2019

10.00am – 4.30pm

Cost: £150

In this one day workshop we will introduce Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), a transformative, non pathological model of change developed by Dr Diana Fosha in New York. Drawing on the art and science of psychotherapy, Angela Massucco and Dr Heather Gretton, will introduce AEDP as a healing oriented, experiential, attachment based psychotherapy that translates affective neuroscience and developmental research, into the musicality of AEDP language as an unfolding, moment to moment, therapeutic dance. AEDP is an approach that seeks glimmers of potential healing from the moment of meeting. Engaging the client through a collaborative process, the therapist privileges the healing potential of the relationship to undo aloneness, regulate anxiety, and provide the safety necessary to process previously avoided affective experience.

The body is a vessel for emotional experience. Within the body, felt experience is sensed, encoded in the brain and re-experienced within the brain and body. Through the exquisite attunement between therapist and client, the therapist accompanies the client to access their affective experience, and to regulate and deepen waves of emotion to completion. Out of these completed waves of emotion, relief and hope can emerge, and new adaptive action can come alive. Through meta processing, the therapist engages the person in a self-reflective process, bringing implicit experience into mindful awareness that supports the deepening of the transformational experience. AEDP detects glimmers of hope, undoing fear and shame so that joy and a compassionate and coherent sense of self can emerge. In this introductory workshop Angela Massucco and Dr Heather Gretton, will explore how creative and scientific elements of AEDP meet to access hidden resources, and release resilience and positive growth at the very core of self.

COURSE FULL

Presenters:
Angela Massucco is an Attachment based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and trained at Bowlby Centre. She is an AEDP Therapist and Emotionally Focused Couples Therapist and holds a Psychosexual Certificate with Tavistock Relationships. She is an Art Therapist and Gestalt Arts Coach. Integral to influencing her work is Dr Fosha’s AEDP for Individuals and David Mars development of her work for couples (AEDPfC). Inspiring her work with emotional depth and a well spring of hope for transformational change in individuals and couples. She enjoys the creative process in devising workshops and welcomes Dr Gretton to the UK. She works in private practice in the City of London and in Cambridge.
.
Dr Heather Gretton is a psychologist and AEDP Therapist in private practice in British Columbia, Canada. Dr Gretton is involved with the AEDP Institute Research Team. She is interested in the weaving together of science, theory, and clinical knowledge with the authentic and therapeutic use of the self in psychotherapy, to promote transformational change and wellness. Her background includes AEDP for individuals and couples; Adult-Attachment based Psychotherapy;
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy; Mindfulness based Therapies, Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples, and Gottman Method Couples Therapy. She has presented at workshops, conferences and published articles in academic journals nationally and internationally.

Attachment Theory in Clinical Practice – February, March

COURSE FULL

Saturday 24th February and Sunday 25th February 2018

and Saturday 10th March and Sunday 11th March 2018

Cost: £580 Organisations, £540 Individuals

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 • Dismissing • 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 thetherapeutic process.

The objectives of this course is 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…”

“Attachment theory is at the core of our being. This course has opened my eyes”
 
“I benefited greatly from this course both personally and professionally.”

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 is the Editor of the journal Attachment-New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis (published by Karnac books). She teaches Attachment theory and is the head of the planning group of the International Bowlby Memorial conference. She specialises in attachment theory and trauma and regularly writes and present papers on these topics. 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 book “Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs” (Karnac Books), co-editor of the book “Terror within & without”, and is the co-editor of the ESTD (European Society for Trauma and Dissociation) newsletter where she regularly writes articles and film reviews.

Attachment Theory in Clinical Practice

Saturday 24th February and Sunday 25th February 2018

and Saturday 10th March and Sunday 11th March 2018

Cost: £580 Organisations, £540 Individuals

COURSE FULL

Attachment Theory in Clinical Practice Brochure

Hold Me Tight: Conversations for Connection – 22nd and 23rd April 2017

SOLD OUT

An interactive Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy workshop

Creating resilience, emotional depth and trust in long term relationships

This is an interactive relational education programme for couples based on the book
Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love’ by Dr. Sue Johnson, the
founder of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT). This experiential workshop
comprises a weekend of deep engaging conversations that help couples develop more
openness, responsiveness and trust in each other that transforms long term
relationships.
Our aim: You will learn to understand and change the negative relational dance that keeps you
apart and causes conflict. Shape a more secure loving bond based on open intimate
dialogues. To begin a transformative healing experience and to bring back aliveness,
emotional intimacy, sexual connection and joy in your relationship.
This workshop is offered to Psychotherapists, Counsellors, Psychologists and their
partners: for a maximum of eight couples (sixteen participants) to ensure a safe space
for every couple to be supported by EFT therapists in connecting with each other. Each
couple will be given time and support to process their emotional responses to the
shared exercises and watch video clips of couples taking part in Hold Me Tight sessions
with Dr. Sue Johnson.

Date: 22nd and 23rd April 2017
Time: 10.00am to 4.00pm
Cost:£500 per couple (Maximum 8 couples)

Angela Massucco is an Attachment based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist UKCP and
trained at Bowlby Centre. She is an Emotionally Focused Couples Therapist and holds
an Adv Dip in Couples & Psychosexual Therapy and a Psychosexual Certificate with
TCCR. She is also an Art Therapist BAAT. Her experience of EFT, and Diana Fosha
AEDP Training has impacted deeply personally and professionally with these
experiential models that believe emotional intimacy is at the core of a rich relationship.
Angela is in full time practice at Number 42, The Complete Psychotherapy Practice,
London Bridge.
Helene Igwebuike is a certified Emotionally Focused Therapist and Supervisor
approved by the International Centre for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy
(ICEEFT). Helene uses an integrative model incorporating elements of Person-centred,
Systemic Practice, Psychodynamic and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), while
specialising in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), which focuses on accessing
emotions and facilitating heart-to-heart conversations that create a safe and secure
relationship. Helene’s practice is based in Enfield, King’s Cross and online Skype
sessions.

SOLD OUT

Undoing Aloneness: Introduction to Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP)

Saturday 24th June 2017  COURSE FULL

In this one day workshop we will outline the four state AEDP model of change as developed by Dr Diana Fosha in New York AEDP is attachment based and experiential way of working with individuals that aims to ‘Undo Aloneness’ at the core of client self and fully encourages positive growth in their relationships. By working with trauma and loss and the painful consequences, therapist and client work together to discover places within that have always been strong, places that were never broken. By harnessing glimmers of vitality AEDP uses transformational processes in the psychotherapy journey – to deepen and expand emotion and accelerate positive healing and growth towards oneself. To ‘Undo Aloneness’ in their internal world and world of relationships as Van der Kolk says, ”to be safe in the here and now you have to give patients what they needed in the there and then”.

AEDP engages clients in the process of healing from the first moment of therapy. It honors somatic experience, emotion and the therapy relationship to melt defences, it tracks and meta processes emotion that is frozen to awaken innate healing energy. A positive moment in the process may well be an intensely felt painful experience that is both raw and opens the client to genuine possibility of change. Angela and Fumie will present this four state model and the specific elements that assist accelerated healing with video tape/s of a session/s revealing how AEDP can move a client from a distant and defended stance to gradually softening and the release of authentic emotion. This one day workshop aims to offer practical, (including work in pairs) and powerful, creative skills for your work as a therapist.
In AEDP the therapist aims to provide a safe haven and secure base to explore together the previously unbearable overwhelming experiences/emotions to undo aloneness and unleash the adaptive action tendencies s/he always possessed, but never had a chance to utilize creatively with positive effect. We are delighted to introduce Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy – with its subtle, powerful focus on sensitive attunement – accompanied with courageous heart.

Date: Saturday 24th June 2017  SOLD OUT
Time: 10.00am to 5.00pm
Cost:£150

Angela Massucco is an Attachment based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist UKCP and trained at Bowlby Centre. She is an Emotionally Focused Couples Therapist and holds an Adv Dip in Couples & Psychosexual Therapy and a Psychosexual Certificate with TCCR. She is also an Art Therapist BAAT. Her experience of completing Diana Fosha AEDP Individual and Couples Training in New York has impacted deeply personally and professionally with these experiential models that believe emotional intimacy is at the core of a rich relationship. She also co presents Hold Me Tight Workshops for therapists and their partners at Bowlby Centre. Angela is in full time practice at Number 42, The Complete Psychotherapy Practice, London Bridge.

Fumie Kamitoh is a Japanese Certified Clinical Psychologist based in Tokyo. She received her training in US, returned to Japan and provides individual and couples therapy in Japanese and English in private practice. EFT, AEDP and attachment theory has a profound impact on Fumie and now she sees herself and the world through the attachment lens. Fumie has undertaken AEDP training, Immersion, Essential Skills 1 with ongoing Essential Skills 2. She serves as AEDP Japan coordinator and started the Salon in Tokyo in 2016. She presents at conferences and facilitates Experiential Groups in Tokyo and Osaka. This is Fumie’s first professional AEDP engagement in the UK and she is looking forward to presenting at Bowlby Centre.

Attachment Theory in Clinical Practice 2017, 2 weekends (June)

SOLD OUT

Presented by: Orit Badouk Epstein

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 • Dismissing • 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.
“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…”

Date: June 2017
Time: 10.00am to 4pm on Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th, and Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th
Cost: £580 Organisations, £540 Individuals

SOLD OUT

“WHEN MUMMY WANTS YOU TO DIE”: UNCONSCIOUS DEATH WISHES AND THE INFANTICIDAL ATTACHMENT

A Special Event with Professor Brett Kahr

Every human being has, from time to time, wished someone else dead. Fortunately, most of us manage to verbalise our hatred in a safe fashion. But what happens when one harbours murderous rage towards another person and does not always know about it? Do unconscious death wishes really exist? And what impact do they have, especially parental death wishes towards infants and children?

Drawing upon nearly forty years of work in the mental health field, Brett Kahr will present the latest version of his theory of the role of unconscious parental death wishes in the genesis of child and adult psychopathology, and will explore the dynamics of the “infanticidal attachment”, and how this destroys intimacy across the lifespan. Kahr will also discuss the ways in which the infanticidal attachment style manifests itself in the psychotherapeutic process and how clinicians can become more proficient in both the diagnosis and treatment of death wishes and their long-term impact.

This workshop will consist of theoretical and clinical presentations as well as “live” supervision of clinical material from participants. This training event will be ideal for all mental health professionals who work with challenging cases, especially colleagues steeped in the treatment of individuals and families struggling with psychosis, borderline states, post-traumatic stress disorder, and related states.

About Professor Brett Kahr

Professor Brett Kahr has worked in the mental health field since 1976. He is currently Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships at the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology, in London. He also holds the post of Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Psychotherapy and Mental Health at the Centre for Child Mental Health. He has enjoyed a long relationship with The Bowlby Centre, and has served as its Consultant in Psychology since 1992. Author of eight books and series editor of more than forty additional volumes in the fields of forensic mental health and in the history of psychoanalysis, he also serves as Trustee of the Freud Museum London. His most recent book is entitled Tea with Winnicott. His forthcoming book on The Traumatic Roots of Schizophrenia will be published in late 2016.

Saturday, 26th November, 2016

Please note venue will be: Resource for London, 356 Holloway Road, London, N7 6PA

4 Day Externship In Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy – This course is full

with Scott Woolley from San Diego Center for EFT

Speaker: Professor Scott Woolley

The Externship in EFT is a four-day foundation training in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy and a pre-requisite for Core Skills training and EFT Certification. It includes an overview of all aspects of the model including steps and stages, interventions, adult attachment theory, and application of EFT with couples and families. The Externship material is taught with a variety of teaching methods including lectures, interactive discussions, experiential small group work – supported by EFT therapists, video demonstrations and ‘live’ couple sessions.

Who Should Attend?

We welcome applications from psychotherapists, counsellors and mental health clinicians who work with couples and those interested in doing so. This evidence-based model and training is specifically focused on EFT with couples. We highly encourage participants to read Dr Sue Johnson’s Creating Connections (2004), the basic text of EFT, before the start of the Externship.

Brief Objectives:

Externship participants learn how to view relationship distress from an attachment perspective, help partners reprocess the emotional experiences that led to their relationship distress, help couples create new bonding events, and work with clinical impasses. Participants will learn the steps and stages of the model, interventions most commonly used, and how to work with the couple’s vulnerability by deepening affect and tracking their underlying interactional pattern. The four-day Externship in Emotionally Focused Therapy will show how by working with this attachment-based experiential person-centred and systemic model, you can work through conflict to arrive at connection. It will help you become successful in your work with couple relationships and enhance your empathy for others and strengthen your own relationships. We know from recent research (Levenson and Sandberg, 2010) that attending an EFT Externship offers a powerful and hopeful learning experience. The EFT Externship was developed by Dr Sue Johnson and other EFT Trainers over the past 15 years.

Scott R. Woolley, PhD, served for 17 years as Director of the Couple and Family Therapy Masters and Doctoral Programs at Alliant International University. He is a founder and Director of the San Diego Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy and the Executive Director of the Training and Research Institute for EFT at Alliant (TRI-EFT Alliant). He is an AAMFT Clinical Member and Approved Supervisor, and a Certified EFT Therapist, Supervisor, and Trainer.

He has trained therapists in EFT in Canada, Chili, Finland, Great Britain, Guam, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Taiwan, The Netherlands, and throughout the U.S., and works closely with EFT founder Dr Susan Johnson.

Working with Professor Scott Woolley:

Angela Massucco UKCP ICEEFT, Attachment based Couples and Individual Psychotherapist, Helene Igwebuike BACP ICEEFT Certified EFT Therapist and Supervisor.

Therapists need to be working clinically to attend the Externship.

Date: 29th June to 2nd July 2016

Attachment Theory in Clinical Practice, 2016 weekends –  This course is full

Presented by: Orit Badouk Epstein

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 • Dismissing • 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.
“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…”

Course Full

Date: Saturday 4th June and Sunday 5th June 2016, Saturday 18th June and Sunday 19th June 2016
Time: 10.00am to 4.00pm
Cost:£540 Organisations, £480 Individuals,  (£400 for Bowlby Centre members)

Exploring the Dynamics of Attachment in Adult Life™ – COURSE FULL – see below for alternative dates in June

This is a 3 day course for professionals offering an opportunity to explore one’s own experience of attachment dynamics in the context of a confidential closed experiential group. The work will be supported by didactic input and time for reflection, application and analysis.

Dr Una McCluskey. Psychoanalytic and Systemic Psychotherapist (UKCP)

Part time Senior Research Fellow at the University of York and freelance Attachment Consultant. Author of To be Met as a Person: the Dynamics of Attachment in Professional Encounters. Karnac London, co-author of The Psychodynamics of abuse: the cost of fear, Jessica Kingsley, and joint author with Dr Dorothy Heard and Dr Brian Lake of Attachment Therapy with Adolescents and Adults: theory and practice post Bowlby 2009.

Presented with the Award for Vision, Innovation, Dedication and Achievement (VIDA) in 2004 by the Group Psychotherapy Association of Southern California in appreciation of her contribution to the field of psychotherapy.

COURSE CONTENT

This course seeks to address the fact that as we work in jobs that require us to respond to the needs of others, too often we don’t create the conditions to support our own personal and psychological development.

Experiences of careseeking and caregiving have their roots in infancy and shape our expectations and responses to careseeking and caregiving in adult life.

As professionals offering a service in the field of mental health and social care we will be aware of the many different ways that people express their careseeking needs, and how difficult it is sometimes to interpret these accurately and respond. People who have had contradictory experiences of caregiving will often tend to miscue professional caregivers so that any attempt at caregiving is frustrated and can end up as a frustrating experience for both parties.

The dynamics of attachment consist of several goal-corrected systems. These are careseeking, caregiving, sexuality, exploratory interest sharing with peers, the personal system for self defence, the internal supportive or unsupportive environments and the personally created external supportive environment (home/lifestyle). The theory suggests that these systems work together as a single process to contribute to and maintain maximum wellbeing. Each session will have a short didactic input on the attachment system to be explored that day, followed by two experiential groups with a short break in between. There will be time to identify what people are learning, discovering or applying to their own practice. Una McCluskey has been researching attachment dynamics for many years and will seek permission from the group to continue this work.

Thursday 10th March 2016

Friday 11th March 2016

Saturday 12th March 2016

FEE: £480 for Bowlby Centre members and £525 for non-members

To be held at The Bowlby Centre, 1 Highbury Crescent, London, N5 1RN

See below for alternative dates in June

Please see www.unamccluskey.com for further details.

Una McCluskey, DPhil., Wold Farm, Kilnwick Percy, York. YO42 1SN

Email: info@unamccluskey.com Website: www.unamccluskey.com

Tel: +44 1759 302104 Mob: +44 7747 568562

Exploring the Dynamics of Attachment in Adult Life™ – Course Now Full

This is a 3 day course for professionals offering an opportunity to explore one’s own experience of attachment dynamics in the context of a confidential closed experiential group. The work will be supported by didactic input and time for reflection, application and analysis.

Dr Una McCluskey. Psychoanalytic and Systemic Psychotherapist (UKCP)

Part time Senior Research Fellow at the University of York and freelance Attachment Consultant. Author of To be Met as a Person: the Dynamics of Attachment in Professional Encounters. Karnac London, co-author of The Psychodynamics of abuse: the cost of fear, Jessica Kingsley, and joint author with Dr Dorothy Heard and Dr Brian Lake of Attachment Therapy with Adolescents and Adults: theory and practice post Bowlby 2009.

Presented with the Award for Vision, Innovation, Dedication and Achievement (VIDA) in 2004 by the Group Psychotherapy Association of Southern California in appreciation of her contribution to the field of psychotherapy.

COURSE CONTENT

This course seeks to address the fact that as we work in jobs that require us to respond to the needs of others, too often we don’t create the conditions to support our own personal and psychological development.

Experiences of careseeking and caregiving have their roots in infancy and shape our expectations and responses to careseeking and caregiving in adult life.

As professionals offering a service in the field of mental health and social care we will be aware of the many different ways that people express their careseeking needs, and how difficult it is sometimes to interpret these accurately and respond. People who have had contradictory experiences of caregiving will often tend to miscue professional caregivers so that any attempt at caregiving is frustrated and can end up as a frustrating experience for both parties.

The dynamics of attachment consist of several goal-corrected systems. These are careseeking, caregiving, sexuality, exploratory interest sharing with peers, the personal system for self defence, the internal supportive or unsupportive environments and the personally created external supportive environment (home/lifestyle). The theory suggests that these systems work together as a single process to contribute to and maintain maximum wellbeing. Each session will have a short didactic input on the attachment system to be explored that day, followed by two experiential groups with a short break in between. There will be time to identify what people are learning, discovering or applying to their own practice. Una McCluskey has been researching attachment dynamics for many years and will seek permission from the group to continue this work.

Thursday 23rd June 2016

Friday 24th June 2016

Saturday 25th June 2016

FEE: £480 for Bowlby Centre members and £525 for non-members

To be held at The Bowlby Centre, 1 Highbury Crescent, London, N5 1RN

40 Hour course on Attachment Narrative Therapy – COURSE FULL

Presented by: Prof. Rudi Dallo and Prof. Arlene Vetere

Attachment Narrative Therapy: Working Systemically with Attachment Narratives

This course will provide training in the implementation of an integrative therapeutic approach

(ANT) which combines attachment, narrative and systemic theories and techniques. This

combines a consideration of the systemic processes encapsulating problems in families with

an analysis of how these are fuelled by underlying attachment dynamics. In turn this is

explored in terms of how family members’ narratives – explanations and understanding of

their problems – are connected to and in turn shape the attachment and systemic patterns.

The training utilises a range of therapeutic interventions – ‘Formats for Exploration’ which can

be employed in various clinical contexts.

The training programme will provide clinical examples in terms of case studies to illustrate the

approach, DVD material, experiential learning activities and group discussion. The training

programme will cover applications in child, adult and couples settings with illustrations of

work with a wide range of clinical presentations including conduct problems, eating disorders,

self-harm, addictions, domestic violence and trauma. The programme will be in four two-day

blocks of training with a focus on: Integrative Framework and Creating Safety; Exploration

and Formulation; Looking for Alternatives; Complexity, Trauma and Maintaining Change.

Participants will have the opportunity to work in small supervised groups on their own clinical

case material in each of the 4 blocks.

COURSE CONTENT

The Course will cover the following main themes: representational systems of attachment;

intergenerational learning and care in families; trauma and the restriction of attempted

solutions; recursive processes of intervention – paying attention to pattern and process; the

use of self in therapeutic work; developing and monitoring the secure base in therapy and in

families; the use of action techniques in therapy; and healing in relationships.

Block 1 – 22-23 January, 2016

Introduction and Implications of Attachment

Formats for Exploration

Block 2 – 26-27 February, 2016

Attachment Narratives

Formats for Exploration

Block 3 – 18-19 March 2016

Working Therapeutically with Couples

Formats for Exploration

Block 4 – 15-16 April 2016

Working Therapeutically with Trauma and Loss

Formats for Exploration

The Course consists of 4 teaching blocks on Attachment Narrative Therapy.

The 4 blocks will take place at the end of January and February, and March and April, 2016.

Each block starts on a Friday, from 3pm – 8.30pm and finishes on the next day, Saturday,

from 9.30 am to 2pm.

Rudi Dallos

r.dallos@plymouth.ac.uk

Arlene Vetere

drarlenevetere@hotmail.com

Date: 22-23 January, 26-27 February, 2016, 18-19 March, 15-16 April 2016

Cost:£650,  (£500 for Bowlby Centre members ,limited to 5 places) – SOLD OUT

Attachment Repair & Creativity – Course now FULL

SOLD OUT

With Mary Sue Moore

Mary Sue’s presentation will bring together some new information about how the brain learns about, and creates, a knowledge of self and self in relation to another. This happens in large part by ordinary brain responses to relationships built on shared experience. What’s really new in the ideas is that cognitive learning is greatly advanced, when the relationship fosters curiosity, but not authority. Certain kinds of cells (“Glia”-Astrocytes, in particular) that have been thought to be essentially “filler material” found in some key areas of the brain, are actually as important to learning and problem solving than neurons are. It turns out that these “white matter, glial” cells actually potentiate learning as well as neuron growth, and are best activated when both creative activities and interaction with nature are experienced by the child or adult. In addition, as these parts of the brain are nurtured, there is increased ability in the individual to deal with interpersonal and attachment relationship stress. There are many ways to activate these “glial cells” in children and adults — and to foster the growth of a sense of self as competent to meet and surmount challenges in life, despite the experience of early adversity. Clinical/psychotherapeutic and interpersonal applications of this new knowledge of how we learn who we are, and how best to deal with stressful situations, will be a key focus. The presentation will also include discussion of various forms of self-expression and autobiographic narratives as avenues to access and develop the experience of one’s resiliency in adversity.

Date: Saturday 21st November 2015
Time: 10.00am to 4.30pm
Cost:£140 Organisations, £120 Individuals,  (£100 for Bowlby Centre members)

Mary Sue Moore, Ph.D.

Mary Sue is a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and educator in Colorado. She has taught and participated in a variety of clinical research projects in the U.S., U.K., and Australia over the past 25 years. Her research has focused on attachment theory and the impact of trauma on the developing brain. From 1986 to 1988, Mary Sue undertook a Fulbright Research Fellowship in London, where she worked with John Bowlby at the Tavistock Clinic.

SOLD OUT

 

Saturday 21st Nov. 2015

10.00am to 4.30pm

Cost:£140 Organisations, £120 Individuals, (£100 for Bowlby Centre members)

 

Attachment Repair & Creativity With Mary Sue Moore – pdf brochure