I’m pleased to be invited back to onlinevents.co.uk to run a workhsop based on some of the ideas in my book Talking It Better. Onlinevents have been running workshops, lectures, and interviews for counsellors and therapists for years. But over the last twelve months or so, they’ve hugely upped their game. There are lots of good resources on their site. And you can join up for a fee and get access to a library of previous broadcasts.
At the moment all their events are being done using the “self-select” fee model:
To support practitioners in this time of extraordinary circumstances we are offering access to this group for a self-select fee.
The self-select fee is a radical inclusion policy to open learning for all colleagues. The guide price for this event is £20.00, however, we appreciate that income varies greatly in different locations and circumstances. Please contribute what you can to help us maintain inclusive professional training.
About the workshop
Clients – as well as therapists – often hope that gaining insight will smooth the path to making significant change. But all too often, even though gaining insight provides some relief, the therapeutic process remains stuck. This workshop will look closely at this type of therapeutic block, offer some ways of explaining it, and provide practical ideas for how to overcome it.
In particular, we will explore an analogy between achieving psychological change and acquiring complex practical skills, such as driving, sight-reading music, or playing tennis. In all these cases we recognize that just knowing the theory – the equivalent of insight – is not enough. To develop skills also requires practice. Usually, we have to attempt to exercise these skills “badly” before we’re able to exercise them “well”. Sometimes, as with tennis, to gain the skill we also need to practice with another person. I will make the case that the analogy has much to offer practitioners and their clients and, further, that therapeutic work can fruitfully borrow lessons from music, sport, and the learning of other complex skills.
In the workshop we will:
- share experiences of work where the gap between insight and change has arisen in the therapy room
- look at and discuss some case studies where the practical skill analogy has helped both practitioner and client make sense of and overcome stuckness
- learn about some specific techniques inspired by this way of thinking about insight, change, and stuckness
- reflect on some of the potential advantages as well as limitations of this approach.
