Professional Training - Recommended Events

Here are a variety of forthcoming CPD events, run and organised by trusted colleagues who have a similar approach and style, which I can recommend.

Recommended training events for practitioners

Lessons from Supervision - The Most Common Traps in Therapy

A one-day CPD workshops for experienced therapists and supervisors with Michael Soth

Sat. 18 February 2012, 10am - 5pm in Ealing, London

In therapy there is no shortcut around engaging with the individual story of each client: we need to get into the detail of their experience, the particularities of their wounding, and the idiosyncrasies of their conflicts.
But in terms of the client-therapist dynamics which arise out of this, and the dilemmas which therapists typically get caught into, we can recognise some recurring patterns in supervision.

This CPD workshop will address the most common traps and pitfalls from a relational and bodymind perspective. It is designed for experienced therapists (i.e. internal self-supervision) and especially those supervising other practitioners.
Typical dilemmas we will address include:

when the client is not interested in the client-therapist relationship
when the client’s conflict becomes the therapist’s conflict
when the therapist gets stuck in championing the client’s ‘true self’
when the client’s unconscious construction of therapy runs the show
when enactments take over: the ‘hot potato’ of projective identifications
when too many therapists spoil the broth: the battle with the client’s internal therapist

Booking through: CABP - Email: cpd@body-psychotherapy.org.uk

The Dangers and Disadvantages of an Integrative Approach

A Sunday morning CPD seminar for counsellors and psychotherapists

Sun. 19 February 2012 10am - 1pm (!) with Michael Soth

Over the last 20 years the fields of counselling and psychotherapy have changed and moved on considerably. The old certainties of the dogmatic and fragmented approaches have broken down. Cross-fertilisation, integration and new hybrid methods combining previously segregated therapeutic approaches abound. Some are thinking in terms of ‘3rd-wave’ therapies, beyond the polarisation between psychodynamic and humanistic paradigms.
However, since the beginnings of the integrative movement in the early 1990’s, there has been concern over the distinction between integration versus eclecticism, based on the recognition that not all integration is a good thing, but that there are dangers and disadvantages in a potentially confusing, ‘muddled’, pick ‘n mix approach.
What are these dangers?
An approach that is too pragmatic and eclectic does not necessarily provide a containing therapeutic space. It may be experienced by the client as fickle, haphazard, reactive and confusing. The most coherent critique of these issues was formulated by Lavinia Gomez in 2004, where she distinguishes two relational stances underlying psychodynamic versus humanistic traditions: she distinguishes working ‘alongside’ the client from working ‘opposite’ the client, and suggests that it may become countertherapeutic to integratively keep switching between the two. This explicitly contradicts one of the central models of the integrative movement, i.e. Clarkson’s five modalities of the therapeutic relationship, where the therapist’s capacity for such switching between modalities is considered a key strength.
So is it an advantage or disadvantage for the client’s overall process if the therapist switches between different stances?
This key conundrum inherent in the integrative endeavour has not been satisfyingly addressed, let alone resolved, but it has far-reaching implications for practice. Clearly, there is not one generalised either-or answer. The answer may differ from context to context and situation to situation. But that begs the further question by which criteria we approach and evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of switching modalities. Such criteria - that would allow us to come to differentiated contextual answer - are sorely lacking.

A central question in addressing these disadvantages of an integrative approach is what happens relationally in the moment when the therapist switches modality. What is it that made the therapist switch, and how is that switch being experienced by the client? Is it a switch towards something or away from something? Is it deepening or avoidant, in the service of wholeness or fragmentation, furthering the process or keeping it superficial?
Usually in these moments the therapist is able to give some kind of theoretical rationale for the switch, but however ‘true’ that rationale may be in an of itself, is it also a rationalisation?

The aim of this workshop is to:

develop an embodied sense both these dangers of the integrative approach
recognise the presence of these dangers in our own work, and identify to what extent they may be undermining our working alliance with the client
enhance our relational sensitivity to the significant moments of switching between modalities or channels
develop a set of criteria for evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of such a switch

The following questions will be important aspects of our exploration: