CPD Training Days & Workshops 2019
CPD Training: OTS run a programme of training days throughout the year, including and annual free CPD event. Make sure you sign up for our newsletter on the right-hand column of the website to be kept up to date as new events are announced!
Touch and Embodiment - 29th September
Working Relationally with Movement & Touch - 16th/17th Nov
Client's Conflict becomes Therapist's Conflict - 24th November
Erotic Transference - TBA
Groups, Meetings & Talks
OTS Training & Development Group
A new ongoing monthly training and development group is starting at OTS-Witney on Saturday mornings for trainees and newly qualified practitioners.
Personal and Professional Development Group
Practitioners working psychologically and developmentally with clients/patients.
OTS Meetings for this Year
Come and meet us and find out more about OTS.
Oxford Psychotherapy Talks Programme
OPS (Oxford Psychotherapy Society) is a local organisation which runs great talks and workshops throughout the year. Here is the current programme.
Touch and Embodiment
Trainer: Michael Soth
Time: 10:00 – 17:00
Date: Sunday 29th September 2019
Venue: OTS - Oxford Therapy Centre
Fee:
£40 - OTS members
£50 - OTS affiliates
£75 - Non-members
About the training:
This workshop will be an opportunity to explore how your embodied experience and perception contribute to your way of working as a therapist.
How much of your awareness - when you are engaged in the relationship with a client – is attentive to the process between the two bodies (or better: the two bodyminds)?
From your moment-to-moment perceptions of the two bodyminds, how do you extract meaningful information relevant to the therapeutic process?
How can this information help us to deepen the relationship and the process and make it more effective?
How can it give us a context for making therapeutic decisions about whether or not to touch or be touched, and if so, how?
So for the purposes of therapists’ CPD learning, to clarify the safety and parameters of the relational space we are entering into for such a workshop becomes as important an issue as for a client entering into therapy.
For this workshop we will focus on a simple distinction between spontaneous versus reflective processes throughout the bodymind, and how the tension between the two plays out in the relational dynamic between client and therapist moment-to-moment. We will use the diamond model of diverse relational modalities (Michael’s further evolution of Petruska Clarkson’s ideas) to bring a neglected relational perspective to the question of touch between client and therapist, i.e. different kinds of touch corresponding to different relational spaces in therapy.
Full workshop description here.
Click here to apply
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Working Relationally with Movement and Touch
Trainers: Allison Priestman and Stephen Tame
Time: 10:00 – 17:00
Date: Saturday 16th & Sunday 17th November 2019
Venue: OTS - Oxford Therapy Centre
Fee:
£180 (early bird £150)
About the training:
This workshop is for psychotherapists, counsellors and allied practitioners. Much of our clients' formative experiences are of movement and touch. It is important for our clients that we have some confidence and competence to work in these core channels of their experience.
Our bodies are in constant movement, mostly unnoticed. This is an opportunity to open and refresh our insight into how our clients move, how we move, and how our clients move us. We will be working with small and large movements, intentional and unconscious movement, in a gentle and supported way.
Similarly, our clients are always experiencing touch – the touch of fabric on skin, the touch of our emotional contact. We will be introducing a frame for working more confidently and intentionally with touch, in support of our clients safety and unfolding process. This work will be held and explored through a relational framework. Exploring how to make use of and think about, our complex embodied responses to our clients. The weekend will be experiential, underpinned by theoretic input drawn from Embodied-Relational Therapy.
Group size 8-14 participants. This workshop would serve as useful ‘taster’ for the Embodied-Relational Therapy training starting in Derbyshire in April 2020.
About the trainers:
Allison Priestman - I have been working as a psychotherapist for 18 years and as a trainer for 11 years. I am a member of the Embodied-Relational training collective and have worked extensively with Nick Totton. My professional bodies are the European Association for Body Psychotherapy and Chiron Association for Body Psychotherapists. I'm curious about how play, creativity, movement and the wild can resource practitioners in their work. I continue to be stretched, stimulated and nourished by my work with clients, supervisees and trainees.
Stephen Tame - I am an experienced Embodied-Relational Therapist, supervisor and trainer. I work with individual clients and couples, both indoors and out. I see my job as supporting my clients to find their way to manage and process their life experiences. I aim to take a non-expert position, and continue to learn from my clients.
Click here to apply
Click here to return to training events
The Client's Conflict becomes the Therapist's Conflict
Trainer: Michael Soth
Time: 10:00 – 17:00
Date: Sunday 24th November 2019
Venue: OTS-Oxford Therapy Centre
Fee:
£40 - OTS members
£50 - OTS affiliates
£75 - Non-members
About the training:
How to spot it and what to do next - a step-by-step recipe book (for processing the therapist’s dilemmas)
After previous training days on topics such as ‘Relational Dilemmas of First Sessions and Initial Assessments' we have had several enquiries and requests to take the topic further and deeper. There was a clear sense that we needed a Part 2, and it was understood that Michael’s principle that “the client’s conflict becomes the therapist’s conflict” is just the first step in exploring the connection between the client’s and the therapist’s inner world in the context of the working alliance.
Three things stood out from the work we did in the small groups, as borne out by some of the feedback:
1. as therapists we don’t always know when we are in conflict;
2. when we do know, we often hit a blank wall - what to do or how to understand what’s going on;
3. in order to avoid the discomfort of the conflict, we take refuge in default therapeutic interventions, routine manoeuvres and habitual stances, i.e. mechanisms which dilute the necessary charge and tension in the relationship - in doing so, we abort the therapeutic process or unwittingly precipitate ruptures in the alliance
Some of the feedback was: ‘It is scary to feel like you don’t know what to do as a therapist, so it can be a relief to not know you are in conflict.’ (this is rather reminiscent of Bion’s statement: “In every consulting room there ought to be two rather frightened people.”)
Being aware of and acknowledging our internal (countertransference) conflict as therapists feels like we’re losing our therapeutic position, and a sense that we are failing. In order to avoid the inherent sense of feeling powerless and vulnerable, we resort to our ‘habitual position’ as therapists, trying to shore up our shaky therapeutic position. One of the most common manoeuvres is to ask more questions of the client in the hope of ‘getting somewhere else’, where we can feel on safer ground. However, in doing so we then manage to fall into two further pitfalls:
- by trying to ‘move on’ or ‘hold on’ to our therapeutic position, we give the implicit message to the client that we can’t bear their pain, and can’t sit in it with them;
- because we are doing so defensively, prematurely and without awareness or preparation, our interventions precipitate us further into enactment: we fall on one or the other side of our conflict, and fail to ‘hold’ the conflict, or to catch the rupture we are entangled in.
This training day will develop your capacity to be aware of your conflict as a therapist and learn to ‘sit in it’ without being overwhelmed by pressure, fear or shame. It then becomes more possible to extract the precious information which the therapist’s conflict contains about the relational dynamic and the client’s inner world.
Once you have registered for this event, and paid the relevant fee, we will send you preparatory materials to enable you to get the most out of the day.
Click here to apply
Click here to return to training events
Erotic Transference
Date: TBA (details to follow).
Click here to apply
Click here to return to training events
OTS Meetings for this Year
We have a variety of meetings throughout the year, which any practitioners who are interested in finding out more about OTS are welcome to come to. Just send us an email and let us know you would like to come, and we will invite you when they are arranged.
As part of our community culture of development, some meetings are member led on a subject of interest, and some meetings are just about getting together, having coffee and constructing the meeting together on the day!
Meetings for this year: watch this space for more details!
Additional events are planned from time to time where you can come and meet us and find out more about OTS - please email us here for details.
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