ACC National Conference 2024
ACC National Conference 2024
In his letter to the Ephesians, the apostle Paul encouraged those in the churches who were facing difficulties and prayed that, “…you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:17-19)
Like the Ephesians we are living through various changes, challenges and opportunities. This generation are witness to seismic changes in personal and communal life, and ways of being. These changes take place on many different fronts and come in different forms. They arise as a result of the impact of new technology, and of rapidly shifting academic, political and societal norms which sometimes lead to confusion, conflict and uncertainty.
Recognising some of these pressures whilst planning for the 2024 conference, the team at ACC sensed that we wanted to provide a space where members and delegates are invited and encouraged to remember that they gain strength through being rooted and established in God’s love. Likewise as practitioners strength comes from being rooted and established in the knowledge and skills of their profession and pastoral roles. It's a 'back to basics' approach.
We hope the conference provides an opportunity to experience
being anchored in the fertile ground of God’s boundless love, and a reminder
that this is what enables us to grow through the changing seasons bearing
fruit, providing shelter, able to weather many storms (Jeremiah 17:8). It is
our prayer that we will gather “with all the Lord’s holy people” not only to
grasp together the “love that surpasses knowledge”, but also to root and
establish ourselves in the foundations of the work of counselling and pastoral
care so that we “may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” in
who He has called us to be and what He has called us to do.
We hope you can join us to learn and grow together in faith and professional development, and we look forward to welcoming you in person at the conference.
Please see our programme (PDF) here (or e-book version).
For information on how to get to the venue, please visit the Hayes conference centre website here.
Ticket options
Early bird 4-day residential (Thursday - Sunday)
Available workshops:
Thursday 19th Sep, 2024, 11:45 - 18:00
SCoPEd column B training Available
Please note this is a 4-day training stream so please only select this if you're intending to attend all 4 days.
The Scope of Practice and Education Framework (SCoPEd) has been developed by six of the main professional counselling organisations, including the ACC, and provides an outline of the core competencies for counselling and psychotherapy practice with adults at three levels: column A, B, and C.
Counselling training at Diploma level provides counsellors with the training to meet the requirements of at least column A. However, to enable ACC registered counsellors to update and extend their skills and experience and also evidence that they can meet column B competencies, delegates can attend and complete this four-day training stream.
The training is a joint venture between Waverley Abbey College and the ACC, with Drs Heather Churchill and Janet Penny delivering the course. This intensive four-day training will cover all of the SCoPEd column B competencies, including areas such as:
- advanced mental health
- developing a comprehensive risk assessment strategy
- inter-professional and multi-agency approaches to mental health
- assumptions that underpin the understanding of identity, culture, values, and worldview
- the impact of technology on counselling
- understanding the role of research in counselling
- using routine outcome monitoring tools
- working with issues of power and authority
- working with unconscious and out of awareness processes
- working with rupture and repair, and therapeutic impasses
- complex endings
- enhancing clients’ self-awareness and understanding of self in relationship
Please note this CPD training is designed for qualified counsellors. Completing this training will enable participants to evidence SCoPEd B competency training as part of their accreditation application with ACC. Please contact ACC office for further details.
Integration of faith into therapy Available
Gaining competence to assess and explore spiritual matters with our clients is the aim of this essential training. I am often asked by trainees and supervisees how and when to explore spiritual issues with clients. Some secular training doesn’t encourage such an exploration leaving counsellors unsure how or if they are ‘allowed’ to explore spiritual matters with clients when God is in the room. Likewise, some Christian counselling training doesn’t adequately address the safe integration of faith into therapy. Learning how and when to safely address a client’s religious history, personal faith or spiritual concerns is an area of angst for many therapists who are fearful of being accused of inappropriately bringing God into the counselling conversation. It is important not to miss vital opportunities to fully support our clients in their spiritual journey.
Trust and betrayal Available
During this two-day training we will look at different ways in which our trust and confidence has been broken, and the ongoing effect this can have on our relationships and the way we live our lives. The training will include issues such as:
- Broken promises
- Broken confidences
- Scapegoating
- Infidelity
- Ghosting
- Finances
- False witness
The training will include video testimony from different people who have experienced betrayal and the impact on their sense of self. We will explore the pain caused within individual relationships and also groups, including churches. Together we will look at how to work with clients to help them recover and experience healing from deep wounds, finding ways to move forward to trust again. Pauline will also share creative ways of working on these key issues.
Working with trauma Available
We will look at the different models used when working with trauma survivors and the latest research. We will have times of discussion where you can contribute your own experiences of working with this client group and there will be the opportunity to share skills, so that we can improve our practice.
Using the reflective therapy workbook, we will explore our own journeys and look at the ways in which we may support our clients on their journeys.
During the two days Kate will also facilitate somatic movement sessions.
Somatics is a slow and controlled way of contracting and releasing muscles that promotes freedom of movement and pain relief. This can be very effective for clients in releasing frozen trauma and emotions that are stored in the body.
These movement sessions are not exercise classes and you do not need any level of fitness to participate. Please wear comfortable clothes.
Love, intimacy and sex in the counselling room Available
This training will explore elements of working with clients on issues related to sex and intimacy, and will delve into current theorists discussing sex and intimacy, and consider different cultural narratives surrounding these topics. Elements such as common issues in psychosexual therapy, mindfulness, porn, masturbation, sexual addiction will also be explored. It will include personal reflection on our own relationship with sex and intimacy, discussion, research, and current practice information, and also when to refer clients elsewhere and available resources for referrals.
We will also address current developments and discussions on working with clients with intimacy and sex questions who are in transition, e.g. after converting to Christianity, or moving out of church-based environments perceived as controlling.
Additionally, there will be an overview of common themes within the genre, with a brief link to the Bible and Christian mystics.
This training is suitable for counsellors and psychotherapists who work with individuals and/or couples and would like to join Rosie for a journey of learning and growth in understanding intimacy through a lens of a Christian psychosexual therapist.
Solution focused therapy Available
Solution Focused Brief Therapy has been around since late 1970s, developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg. During Covid, Elliott Connie and Adam Froerer who are psychotherapists have now come to the fore with online training on Solution Focused Therapy.
Delegates will have time to explore the practice of SFT and how could this work within their own practice or could it?
This is not a problem-solving approach, but solution focused. This will be a different mindset for some as SFT has an overarching attitude of finding hope and has principles 3 of which are:
- If it's not broken, don't fix it.
- If something is working, do more of it.
- If it's not working, do something different.
SFT’s emphasis is on what is changeable and possible.
Learning outcomes:
- Gain an understanding and background of SFT
- Gain an understanding of differences between problem focused and solution focused approaches
- Gain insight of the 7 pillars of SFT
- Gain insight of the assumption about change and about helping within SFT
- Gain insight of the questions to ask
“Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24-25 (NIV)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion and interactive reflective practice including whether this fits with your Christian approach.
Counsellors “bearing” in a broken world, addressing spiritual abuse Available
This 2-day training on spiritual abuse seeks to equip counsellors/psychotherapists to work well as Christians in one of the most challenging areas of practice. The training will provide space for delegates to reflect as they may wish to on the impact of spiritual abuse in their personal experience. We will cover:
- Bearing Witness to what it is and isn’t, similarities and differences to other forms of abuse.
- Bearing witness to how it presents in our clients, acknowledging the damage.
- Bearing the burden, walking alongside our clients.
- Discussing the way our faith directs us and allows us to keep our bearings and influences our clients’ bearings.
- Discussing the way theories of counselling and therapeutic techniques provides effective bearing on spiritual abuse.
- Bearing God’s image, seeing beauty in brokenness, resourcing our clients.
- Discussing self-care and secondary trauma as a result of bearing, reflecting on the impact of our clients’ stories on us and the way our own stories are impacted and triggered in our bearing of others’ stories.
- Bearing hope in the midst of grief, using our greatest clinical tool, our presence.
Continuous becoming Available
“Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature. Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things.” - St Augustine
All psychotherapy is about managing change – whether processing unstoppable change or carrying unchanging burdens. At the pivot of pain is the potential loss of faith in what is Stable and what is Unstable, Known and Unknowable, what Passes and what Endures, ‘What-Might-Be’ and ‘What-Just-Is’.
The Continuous Becoming Frame was developed by psychotherapist Pamela Gawler-Wright from observing deep structural patterns in hundreds of cases where recovery from patterns of suffering seemed hopeless. This easily applied, organic assessment tool generates a systemic conceptualisation method for individual, couple and family cases. It invites client-lead interventions that harness the natural momentum of inevitable change even with our most complex cases, such as depression, trauma and addiction.
Day 1:
- Understanding Continuous Becoming from our own life experience
- Identifying challenge to faith within the process of spiritual growth
- Stories, tools and experiential application
Day 2:
- Utilising the Continuous Becoming Frame in case conceptualisation
- Harnessing the dynamic relationship of stable and unstable factors
- Precision and effectiveness in promoting clients’ healing and growth
Clinical Supervision conditions
By attending, all participants agree to:
- Be willing to reflect on own experience and personal challenge before seeking to apply skills to others’ lives
- Maintain confidentiality of all clinical and personal information shared in the training – strictly no sound or video recording
How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community Available
The Theology & Counselling Department of London School of Theology will set out to demonstrate the potential universality of the REMA model, with the working title being: How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community. The acronym (REMA) is represented as follows: R – Relational; E – Embodiment; M – Meaning; A – Agency. The model was developed at London School of Theology about 15 years ago and offers an approach that helps us to deepen and nurture the integration of our psychotherapeutic theory and practice, with well-grounded theology. Through a blend of theory, discussion and creative activities we will be exploring together how the REMA Model might be used to help us to reflect, both theologically and therapeutically, on the continued search for the unique, valued person within one and all of us.
This will be an opportunity to show the versatility of our REMA Model at work, as it sets about to address the unique needs of each unique individual, such as colour, ethnicity, gender, faith/spirituality, sexuality and economic status. In an ‘ideal’ world, following the successful use of the REMA Model, the unique individual becomes aware of who they are as well as what they can offer their various collective communities.
Skills and self-awareness needed when working with couples Available
This training will focus on skills and interventions needed when helping couples navigate and problem solve. Often people seek help when the relationship has been in “free fall” for a while, and they are looking for miracles. They will often come to counselling sessions with hurt, a lot of mixed emotions, a breakdown in communication, false expectations, anger, fear, affairs, and sexual issues to name some reasons people seek help.
Working with couples is more diverse and varied than working with individuals. You need a different set of tools, interventions, courage, self-awareness, confidence, and problem-solving skills. We all come to couples work with our own stories, prejudices, judgements, liking one client more that the other. But trusting your training and being self-aware can help couples move forward, resolve conflict, have a deeper understanding of each other, and a renewed commitment to the relationship so ultimately making the relationship stronger. This training provides a safe space to learn new skills and self-awareness when working with couples. This training is ideal for those considering expanding their skills to begin working with couples as well as more established practitioners already doing couple work.
The training is geared towards trainee and qualified counsellors. However, those involved in the pastoral care of married couples might find many of the ideas presented quite useful.
Working with loss and grief Available
Loss and grief are part of nearly every life event explored in counselling or supported pastorally - from relationship break-up to chronic illness, gender issues to redundancy, death to infertility, there is always change and so in some way loss and grief.
Grief is therefore a natural and universal experience, but also unique, following no set-pattern or model and for our clients often one of the most difficult of experiences, as CS Lewis said “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
This training is a chance to study (again) at loss and grief, exploring them in this wider context, looking at:
- the counsellors’ and clients’ understanding of the grief process and its purpose
- the impacts of grief physically, psychologically, cognitively, relationally and spiritually
- how we can help clients to grieve well and move to that place of changed meaning and hope
- barriers to the grief process and interactions with trauma, anxiety, attachment, etc.
- looking at tools and practices that can help clients with grief
- looking after ourselves when working with loss and grief
We will also look at different types of grief, including traumatic, anticipatory, disenfranchised, cumulative, complicated, and some of the specific issues and difficulties that arise and how we work with clients in these situations.
The training will include teaching, group work and discussion, case studies and personal exercises.
Friday 20th Sep, 2024, 09:15 - 16:30
SCoPEd column B training Available
Please note this is a 4-day training stream so please only select this if you're intending to attend all 4 days.
The Scope of Practice and Education Framework (SCoPEd) has been developed by six of the main professional counselling organisations, including the ACC, and provides an outline of the core competencies for counselling and psychotherapy practice with adults at three levels: column A, B, and C.
Counselling training at Diploma level provides counsellors with the training to meet the requirements of at least column A. However, to enable ACC registered counsellors to update and extend their skills and experience and also evidence that they can meet column B competencies, delegates can attend and complete this four-day training stream.
The training is a joint venture between Waverley Abbey College and the ACC, with Drs Heather Churchill and Janet Penny delivering the course. This intensive four-day training will cover all of the SCoPEd column B competencies, including areas such as:
- advanced mental health
- developing a comprehensive risk assessment strategy
- inter-professional and multi-agency approaches to mental health
- assumptions that underpin the understanding of identity, culture, values, and worldview
- the impact of technology on counselling
- understanding the role of research in counselling
- using routine outcome monitoring tools
- working with issues of power and authority
- working with unconscious and out of awareness processes
- working with rupture and repair, and therapeutic impasses
- complex endings
- enhancing clients’ self-awareness and understanding of self in relationship
Please note this CPD training is designed for qualified counsellors. Completing this training will enable participants to evidence SCoPEd B competency training as part of their accreditation application with ACC. Please contact ACC office for further details.
Integration of faith into therapy Available
Gaining competence to assess and explore spiritual matters with our clients is the aim of this essential training. I am often asked by trainees and supervisees how and when to explore spiritual issues with clients. Some secular training doesn’t encourage such an exploration leaving counsellors unsure how or if they are ‘allowed’ to explore spiritual matters with clients when God is in the room. Likewise, some Christian counselling training doesn’t adequately address the safe integration of faith into therapy. Learning how and when to safely address a client’s religious history, personal faith or spiritual concerns is an area of angst for many therapists who are fearful of being accused of inappropriately bringing God into the counselling conversation. It is important not to miss vital opportunities to fully support our clients in their spiritual journey.
Trust and betrayal Available
During this two-day training we will look at different ways in which our trust and confidence has been broken, and the ongoing effect this can have on our relationships and the way we live our lives. The training will include issues such as:
- Broken promises
- Broken confidences
- Scapegoating
- Infidelity
- Ghosting
- Finances
- False witness
The training will include video testimony from different people who have experienced betrayal and the impact on their sense of self. We will explore the pain caused within individual relationships and also groups, including churches. Together we will look at how to work with clients to help them recover and experience healing from deep wounds, finding ways to move forward to trust again. Pauline will also share creative ways of working on these key issues.
Working with trauma Available
We will look at the different models used when working with trauma survivors and the latest research. We will have times of discussion where you can contribute your own experiences of working with this client group and there will be the opportunity to share skills, so that we can improve our practice.
Using the reflective therapy workbook, we will explore our own journeys and look at the ways in which we may support our clients on their journeys.
During the two days Kate will also facilitate somatic movement sessions.
Somatics is a slow and controlled way of contracting and releasing muscles that promotes freedom of movement and pain relief. This can be very effective for clients in releasing frozen trauma and emotions that are stored in the body.
These movement sessions are not exercise classes and you do not need any level of fitness to participate. Please wear comfortable clothes.
Love, intimacy and sex in the counselling room Available
This training will explore elements of working with clients on issues related to sex and intimacy, and will delve into current theorists discussing sex and intimacy, and consider different cultural narratives surrounding these topics. Elements such as common issues in psychosexual therapy, mindfulness, porn, masturbation, sexual addiction will also be explored. It will include personal reflection on our own relationship with sex and intimacy, discussion, research, and current practice information, and also when to refer clients elsewhere and available resources for referrals.
We will also address current developments and discussions on working with clients with intimacy and sex questions who are in transition, e.g. after converting to Christianity, or moving out of church-based environments perceived as controlling.
Additionally, there will be an overview of common themes within the genre, with a brief link to the Bible and Christian mystics.
This training is suitable for counsellors and psychotherapists who work with individuals and/or couples and would like to join Rosie for a journey of learning and growth in understanding intimacy through a lens of a Christian psychosexual therapist.
Solution focused therapy Available
Solution Focused Brief Therapy has been around since late 1970s, developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg. During Covid, Elliott Connie and Adam Froerer who are psychotherapists have now come to the fore with online training on Solution Focused Therapy.
Delegates will have time to explore the practice of SFT and how could this work within their own practice or could it?
This is not a problem-solving approach, but solution focused. This will be a different mindset for some as SFT has an overarching attitude of finding hope and has principles 3 of which are:
- If it's not broken, don't fix it.
- If something is working, do more of it.
- If it's not working, do something different.
SFT’s emphasis is on what is changeable and possible.
Learning outcomes:
- Gain an understanding and background of SFT
- Gain an understanding of differences between problem focused and solution focused approaches
- Gain insight of the 7 pillars of SFT
- Gain insight of the assumption about change and about helping within SFT
- Gain insight of the questions to ask
“Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24-25 (NIV)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion and interactive reflective practice including whether this fits with your Christian approach.
Counsellors “bearing” in a broken world, addressing spiritual abuse Available
This 2-day training on spiritual abuse seeks to equip counsellors/psychotherapists to work well as Christians in one of the most challenging areas of practice. The training will provide space for delegates to reflect as they may wish to on the impact of spiritual abuse in their personal experience. We will cover:
- Bearing Witness to what it is and isn’t, similarities and differences to other forms of abuse.
- Bearing witness to how it presents in our clients, acknowledging the damage.
- Bearing the burden, walking alongside our clients.
- Discussing the way our faith directs us and allows us to keep our bearings and influences our clients’ bearings.
- Discussing the way theories of counselling and therapeutic techniques provides effective bearing on spiritual abuse.
- Bearing God’s image, seeing beauty in brokenness, resourcing our clients.
- Discussing self-care and secondary trauma as a result of bearing, reflecting on the impact of our clients’ stories on us and the way our own stories are impacted and triggered in our bearing of others’ stories.
- Bearing hope in the midst of grief, using our greatest clinical tool, our presence.
Continuous becoming Available
“Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature. Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things.” - St Augustine
All psychotherapy is about managing change – whether processing unstoppable change or carrying unchanging burdens. At the pivot of pain is the potential loss of faith in what is Stable and what is Unstable, Known and Unknowable, what Passes and what Endures, ‘What-Might-Be’ and ‘What-Just-Is’.
The Continuous Becoming Frame was developed by psychotherapist Pamela Gawler-Wright from observing deep structural patterns in hundreds of cases where recovery from patterns of suffering seemed hopeless. This easily applied, organic assessment tool generates a systemic conceptualisation method for individual, couple and family cases. It invites client-lead interventions that harness the natural momentum of inevitable change even with our most complex cases, such as depression, trauma and addiction.
Day 1:
- Understanding Continuous Becoming from our own life experience
- Identifying challenge to faith within the process of spiritual growth
- Stories, tools and experiential application
Day 2:
- Utilising the Continuous Becoming Frame in case conceptualisation
- Harnessing the dynamic relationship of stable and unstable factors
- Precision and effectiveness in promoting clients’ healing and growth
Clinical Supervision conditions
By attending, all participants agree to:
- Be willing to reflect on own experience and personal challenge before seeking to apply skills to others’ lives
- Maintain confidentiality of all clinical and personal information shared in the training – strictly no sound or video recording
How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community Available
The Theology & Counselling Department of London School of Theology will set out to demonstrate the potential universality of the REMA model, with the working title being: How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community. The acronym (REMA) is represented as follows: R – Relational; E – Embodiment; M – Meaning; A – Agency. The model was developed at London School of Theology about 15 years ago and offers an approach that helps us to deepen and nurture the integration of our psychotherapeutic theory and practice, with well-grounded theology. Through a blend of theory, discussion and creative activities we will be exploring together how the REMA Model might be used to help us to reflect, both theologically and therapeutically, on the continued search for the unique, valued person within one and all of us.
This will be an opportunity to show the versatility of our REMA Model at work, as it sets about to address the unique needs of each unique individual, such as colour, ethnicity, gender, faith/spirituality, sexuality and economic status. In an ‘ideal’ world, following the successful use of the REMA Model, the unique individual becomes aware of who they are as well as what they can offer their various collective communities.
Skills and self-awareness needed when working with couples Available
This training will focus on skills and interventions needed when helping couples navigate and problem solve. Often people seek help when the relationship has been in “free fall” for a while, and they are looking for miracles. They will often come to counselling sessions with hurt, a lot of mixed emotions, a breakdown in communication, false expectations, anger, fear, affairs, and sexual issues to name some reasons people seek help.
Working with couples is more diverse and varied than working with individuals. You need a different set of tools, interventions, courage, self-awareness, confidence, and problem-solving skills. We all come to couples work with our own stories, prejudices, judgements, liking one client more that the other. But trusting your training and being self-aware can help couples move forward, resolve conflict, have a deeper understanding of each other, and a renewed commitment to the relationship so ultimately making the relationship stronger. This training provides a safe space to learn new skills and self-awareness when working with couples. This training is ideal for those considering expanding their skills to begin working with couples as well as more established practitioners already doing couple work.
The training is geared towards trainee and qualified counsellors. However, those involved in the pastoral care of married couples might find many of the ideas presented quite useful.
Working with loss and grief Available
Loss and grief are part of nearly every life event explored in counselling or supported pastorally - from relationship break-up to chronic illness, gender issues to redundancy, death to infertility, there is always change and so in some way loss and grief.
Grief is therefore a natural and universal experience, but also unique, following no set-pattern or model and for our clients often one of the most difficult of experiences, as CS Lewis said “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
This training is a chance to study (again) at loss and grief, exploring them in this wider context, looking at:
- the counsellors’ and clients’ understanding of the grief process and its purpose
- the impacts of grief physically, psychologically, cognitively, relationally and spiritually
- how we can help clients to grieve well and move to that place of changed meaning and hope
- barriers to the grief process and interactions with trauma, anxiety, attachment, etc.
- looking at tools and practices that can help clients with grief
- looking after ourselves when working with loss and grief
We will also look at different types of grief, including traumatic, anticipatory, disenfranchised, cumulative, complicated, and some of the specific issues and difficulties that arise and how we work with clients in these situations.
The training will include teaching, group work and discussion, case studies and personal exercises.
Saturday 21st Sep, 2024, 11:15 - 18:00
SCoPEd column B training Available
Please note this is a 4-day training stream so please only select this if you're intending to attend all 4 days.
The Scope of Practice and Education Framework (SCoPEd) has been developed by six of the main professional counselling organisations, including the ACC, and provides an outline of the core competencies for counselling and psychotherapy practice with adults at three levels: column A, B, and C.
Counselling training at Diploma level provides counsellors with the training to meet the requirements of at least column A. However, to enable ACC registered counsellors to update and extend their skills and experience and also evidence that they can meet column B competencies, delegates can attend and complete this four-day training stream.
The training is a joint venture between Waverley Abbey College and the ACC, with Drs Heather Churchill and Janet Penny delivering the course. This intensive four-day training will cover all of the SCoPEd column B competencies, including areas such as:
- advanced mental health
- developing a comprehensive risk assessment strategy
- inter-professional and multi-agency approaches to mental health
- assumptions that underpin the understanding of identity, culture, values, and worldview
- the impact of technology on counselling
- understanding the role of research in counselling
- using routine outcome monitoring tools
- working with issues of power and authority
- working with unconscious and out of awareness processes
- working with rupture and repair, and therapeutic impasses
- complex endings
- enhancing clients’ self-awareness and understanding of self in relationship
Please note this CPD training is designed for qualified counsellors. Completing this training will enable participants to evidence SCoPEd B competency training as part of their accreditation application with ACC. Please contact ACC office for further details.
Supervision: another level Available
Using the Systemic lenses of the GRACES (Gender, Generation, Race, Religion, Age, Ability, Class, Culture, Celebrity, Ethnicity, Education, Sexuality, Spirituality) we will explore the dynamic interaction within the Supervisory Relationship (SR) and how it brings out the best and worst in supervision practice. Where supervision has become comfortable or collusive, the GRACES will sharpen the supervisor’s ability to move towards greater collaboration and creativity. It is important for supervisors to not only bring their best efforts to the supervision of others but to look at the interactive processes within the SR; what we need and what we don’t need, identifying adjustments to make with and for our supervisees to enhance and sharpen our supervisory practices. No stone needs to be left unturned.
Should I stay or should I go? When relationships become toxic Available
In this two-day training we will explore how to identify the ways in which relationships become toxic and look at issues which stop people from leaving them.
The training will include:
- Childhood patterns and belief systems
- The narcissistic parent
- Controlling relationships
- Group dynamics
- Spiritual dynamics
- The place of commitment and loyalty
- Conflict resolution
- When to stay and when to leave
Chris and Pauline will share different ways of working with clients, including psychoeducation and creative tools.
Dissociation & dissociative identity Available
Dissociation is present in many conditions - making it invaluable to know how to identify it, what impact it might have and how to respond.
What is dissociation? Who is likely to experience it and why? What effects does it have on clients, their therapy and the therapist? How can we identify different types of dissociation and how can we work with them? Do clients always know when they have multiple “selves”, or might they be unaware of them? When is it okay to do the work and when should we refer on?
This training offers insights and practical information for discerning what, who, why, how and when of dissociation and dissociative disorders (DD):
Participants will be able to:
- identify dissociation and different DD
- distinguish between DD and other challenging conditions
- understand when it is likely and how it may impact therapy
- identify screening interventions and/or assessments
- understand the complexities and effects of its origins and development, including chronic, severe, ritualised and organised abuse
- differentiate between spontaneous and constructed forms of DID, and resulting implications
- appreciate the tasks and goals of therapy and recommended treatment models
- identify the skills, strengths and learning requirements for working with dissociative clients
- identify the help and support clients and practitioners need when working with DD and DID
- reflect on the distinctives of fragmented states and how to work with them
- reflect on the differentiation of wounded parts and spiritual activity
- identify further training sources, ask questions and interact!
Intergenerational trauma Available
This two-day training will use an Internal Family Systems (IFS) informed approach to explore intergenerational trauma. Generous and unhurried space will be given for us to expand our awareness of how intergenerational trauma has impacted us including our Christian identities, and an invitation to explore deeper healing and transformation for ourselves, our clients, our communities, our churches and the world.
This training will be highly experiential in nature, inviting curiosity and courage to turn towards the parts of our individual and collective stories that may have been hidden, banished, silenced, ignored, rejected and shamed.
Shame and secrecy keep us in hiding and disconnected. Love beckons us home with open arms, restoring connection with our true identity as God’s beloved children, paving the way for us to bring our pain and burdens to Him for individual and collective healing and redemption.
This training is for you if you have observed that there are generational patterns that seem to be repeated in yourself, your family and society and you are curious about how to start the journey of being a cycle breaker for yourself and for others.
I invite you to join me in generous, spacious and courageous space to explore and journey this topic, together.
Counselling mediation training Available
This training is for counsellors who want to explore another approach when working with people in conflict such as couples, families or within workplace.
There will be time to explore how to facilitate difficult conversations using mediation skills alongside the professional experience as a counsellor. When the therapy and boundaries are explained to clients, they state it gives them a confidence to proceed and trust the process with the counsellor/s.
The delegates will
- Be able to discuss the approach or method used and how to set up, manage, and use counselling mediation between two or more parties.
- Be able to understand negotiation and specifically principled negotiation and the benefits when working with couples or others in conflict.
- Gain an understanding of four different styles of mediation: formal and informal intermediation, transformative and facilitative mediation, and how or when to use each one.
- Explore conflict styles and the impact this has on communication between couples or groups of people.
“If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him-work it out between you. If he listens you’ve made a friend, if he won’t listen, take one or two others along so that the presence of witnesses will keep things honest.” Matthew 18:15-17 (MSG)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion, and interactive reflective practice.
Understanding and working with addiction Available
The aim of the training is to help participants have:
- An overview of the science of addiction (behavioural and substance); it’s genesis, its maintenance and behavioural implications.
- An understanding of implications for working with people who present with addictions - trauma, family dynamics, genetics.
- An understanding and experiential appreciation of therapeutic interventions. Practical suggestions for working with addiction in the counselling room.
- An understanding of ‘post active addiction’- the importance of building a new life.
Using spiritual and religious interventions in counselling Available
This two-day training is for counsellors who are looking to intentionally integrate a client’s faith into their counselling journey. Specifically it will focus on what it means to ethically introduce spiritual and/or religious interventions. Whilst we will consider 10 interventions overall, the focus will be on the ‘Big Four’ (Prayer, Scripture, Forgiveness and Mindfulness/Meditation).
The two days will give time to practise using these big four interventions in a structured way as well as opportunities for participants to engage in their own style. We will consider the impact of the Christian experience of both the client and counsellor using Foster’s Six streams as a framework for exploration.
The training will be a distilled version of a final year capstone program typically conducted with students studying Master of Counselling at Perth Bible College. The content will be a ‘sneak peek’ into a book scheduled for publication in 2025.
Exploring spiritual direction Available
In this two-day training we will explore spiritual direction from the place of retreating and deepening your own relationship with God.
We will look at the calling of spiritual direction and experience a few of the different modalities used, e.g. Ignatian, lectio Divina, Christian meditation. We will also discuss the training options available.
During the two days, if you would like to, you will have the opportunity to practise spiritual direction, both as directee and as director.
If you are considering a movement in this direction, or feel you are being called to this area of ministry, this training will be a useful discernment tool.
Coaching through change Available
Whether it is our work, family, relocation, health or something else, change is a part of our lives and affects us all at one time or another. Many of the people we work with are navigating some sort of change. In this training we will consider the place for coaching, specifically looking at dealing with change and how we can accompany individuals and organisations through transition.
Topics will be interspersed with different coaching tools and techniques.
Some of the topics we will consider are:
- How is coaching different to counselling?
- Different people deal with change in different ways.
- Why do people resist change?
- Bridges stages of transition.
- How are people affected by organisational change and how can it be done well?
Working with domestic abuse in the context of counselling, psychotherapy and pastoral work Available
This training will explore the new competency framework for working with domestic abuse and faith. It will give an understanding of different forms of domestic abuse and coercive control. Participants will explore the psychological effects of abuse, as well as the practical barriers that can trap victims. We will address issues of gender and intersectionality and expose some common myths about domestic abuse perpetrators. We will also explore domestic abuse in the context of Christian spirituality; understanding spiritual abuse and how Faith can be both a source of support and a tool of abuse. Participants will gain an understanding of how to support victims and survivors in the context of trauma informed care and safeguarding. You will learn to recognise risk factors and signpost clients safely to appropriate support. You will also learn how to respond safely to perpetrators of domestic abuse and how to maintain your own safety and wellbeing while working with these clients.
Sunday 22nd Sep, 2024, 09:15 - 15:15
SCoPEd column B training Available
Please note this is a 4-day training stream so please only select this if you're intending to attend all 4 days.
The Scope of Practice and Education Framework (SCoPEd) has been developed by six of the main professional counselling organisations, including the ACC, and provides an outline of the core competencies for counselling and psychotherapy practice with adults at three levels: column A, B, and C.
Counselling training at Diploma level provides counsellors with the training to meet the requirements of at least column A. However, to enable ACC registered counsellors to update and extend their skills and experience and also evidence that they can meet column B competencies, delegates can attend and complete this four-day training stream.
The training is a joint venture between Waverley Abbey College and the ACC, with Drs Heather Churchill and Janet Penny delivering the course. This intensive four-day training will cover all of the SCoPEd column B competencies, including areas such as:
- advanced mental health
- developing a comprehensive risk assessment strategy
- inter-professional and multi-agency approaches to mental health
- assumptions that underpin the understanding of identity, culture, values, and worldview
- the impact of technology on counselling
- understanding the role of research in counselling
- using routine outcome monitoring tools
- working with issues of power and authority
- working with unconscious and out of awareness processes
- working with rupture and repair, and therapeutic impasses
- complex endings
- enhancing clients’ self-awareness and understanding of self in relationship
Please note this CPD training is designed for qualified counsellors. Completing this training will enable participants to evidence SCoPEd B competency training as part of their accreditation application with ACC. Please contact ACC office for further details.
Supervision: another level Available
Using the Systemic lenses of the GRACES (Gender, Generation, Race, Religion, Age, Ability, Class, Culture, Celebrity, Ethnicity, Education, Sexuality, Spirituality) we will explore the dynamic interaction within the Supervisory Relationship (SR) and how it brings out the best and worst in supervision practice. Where supervision has become comfortable or collusive, the GRACES will sharpen the supervisor’s ability to move towards greater collaboration and creativity. It is important for supervisors to not only bring their best efforts to the supervision of others but to look at the interactive processes within the SR; what we need and what we don’t need, identifying adjustments to make with and for our supervisees to enhance and sharpen our supervisory practices. No stone needs to be left unturned.
Should I stay or should I go? When relationships become toxic Available
In this two-day training we will explore how to identify the ways in which relationships become toxic and look at issues which stop people from leaving them.
The training will include:
- Childhood patterns and belief systems
- The narcissistic parent
- Controlling relationships
- Group dynamics
- Spiritual dynamics
- The place of commitment and loyalty
- Conflict resolution
- When to stay and when to leave
Chris and Pauline will share different ways of working with clients, including psychoeducation and creative tools.
Dissociation & dissociative identity Available
Dissociation is present in many conditions - making it invaluable to know how to identify it, what impact it might have and how to respond.
What is dissociation? Who is likely to experience it and why? What effects does it have on clients, their therapy and the therapist? How can we identify different types of dissociation and how can we work with them? Do clients always know when they have multiple “selves”, or might they be unaware of them? When is it okay to do the work and when should we refer on?
This training offers insights and practical information for discerning what, who, why, how and when of dissociation and dissociative disorders (DD):
Participants will be able to:
- identify dissociation and different DD
- distinguish between DD and other challenging conditions
- understand when it is likely and how it may impact therapy
- identify screening interventions and/or assessments
- understand the complexities and effects of its origins and development, including chronic, severe, ritualised and organised abuse
- differentiate between spontaneous and constructed forms of DID, and resulting implications
- appreciate the tasks and goals of therapy and recommended treatment models
- identify the skills, strengths and learning requirements for working with dissociative clients
- identify the help and support clients and practitioners need when working with DD and DID
- reflect on the distinctives of fragmented states and how to work with them
- reflect on the differentiation of wounded parts and spiritual activity
- identify further training sources, ask questions and interact!
Intergenerational trauma Available
This two-day training will use an Internal Family Systems (IFS) informed approach to explore intergenerational trauma. Generous and unhurried space will be given for us to expand our awareness of how intergenerational trauma has impacted us including our Christian identities, and an invitation to explore deeper healing and transformation for ourselves, our clients, our communities, our churches and the world.
This training will be highly experiential in nature, inviting curiosity and courage to turn towards the parts of our individual and collective stories that may have been hidden, banished, silenced, ignored, rejected and shamed.
Shame and secrecy keep us in hiding and disconnected. Love beckons us home with open arms, restoring connection with our true identity as God’s beloved children, paving the way for us to bring our pain and burdens to Him for individual and collective healing and redemption.
This training is for you if you have observed that there are generational patterns that seem to be repeated in yourself, your family and society and you are curious about how to start the journey of being a cycle breaker for yourself and for others.
I invite you to join me in generous, spacious and courageous space to explore and journey this topic, together.
Counselling mediation training Available
This training is for counsellors who want to explore another approach when working with people in conflict such as couples, families or within workplace.
There will be time to explore how to facilitate difficult conversations using mediation skills alongside the professional experience as a counsellor. When the therapy and boundaries are explained to clients, they state it gives them a confidence to proceed and trust the process with the counsellor/s.
The delegates will
- Be able to discuss the approach or method used and how to set up, manage, and use counselling mediation between two or more parties.
- Be able to understand negotiation and specifically principled negotiation and the benefits when working with couples or others in conflict.
- Gain an understanding of four different styles of mediation: formal and informal intermediation, transformative and facilitative mediation, and how or when to use each one.
- Explore conflict styles and the impact this has on communication between couples or groups of people.
“If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him-work it out between you. If he listens you’ve made a friend, if he won’t listen, take one or two others along so that the presence of witnesses will keep things honest.” Matthew 18:15-17 (MSG)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion, and interactive reflective practice.
Understanding and working with addiction Available
The aim of the training is to help participants have:
- An overview of the science of addiction (behavioural and substance); it’s genesis, its maintenance and behavioural implications.
- An understanding of implications for working with people who present with addictions - trauma, family dynamics, genetics.
- An understanding and experiential appreciation of therapeutic interventions. Practical suggestions for working with addiction in the counselling room.
- An understanding of ‘post active addiction’- the importance of building a new life.
Using spiritual and religious interventions in counselling Available
This two-day training is for counsellors who are looking to intentionally integrate a client’s faith into their counselling journey. Specifically it will focus on what it means to ethically introduce spiritual and/or religious interventions. Whilst we will consider 10 interventions overall, the focus will be on the ‘Big Four’ (Prayer, Scripture, Forgiveness and Mindfulness/Meditation).
The two days will give time to practise using these big four interventions in a structured way as well as opportunities for participants to engage in their own style. We will consider the impact of the Christian experience of both the client and counsellor using Foster’s Six streams as a framework for exploration.
The training will be a distilled version of a final year capstone program typically conducted with students studying Master of Counselling at Perth Bible College. The content will be a ‘sneak peek’ into a book scheduled for publication in 2025.
Exploring spiritual direction Available
In this two-day training we will explore spiritual direction from the place of retreating and deepening your own relationship with God.
We will look at the calling of spiritual direction and experience a few of the different modalities used, e.g. Ignatian, lectio Divina, Christian meditation. We will also discuss the training options available.
During the two days, if you would like to, you will have the opportunity to practise spiritual direction, both as directee and as director.
If you are considering a movement in this direction, or feel you are being called to this area of ministry, this training will be a useful discernment tool.
Coaching through change Available
Whether it is our work, family, relocation, health or something else, change is a part of our lives and affects us all at one time or another. Many of the people we work with are navigating some sort of change. In this training we will consider the place for coaching, specifically looking at dealing with change and how we can accompany individuals and organisations through transition.
Topics will be interspersed with different coaching tools and techniques.
Some of the topics we will consider are:
- How is coaching different to counselling?
- Different people deal with change in different ways.
- Why do people resist change?
- Bridges stages of transition.
- How are people affected by organisational change and how can it be done well?
Working with domestic abuse in the context of counselling, psychotherapy and pastoral work Available
This training will explore the new competency framework for working with domestic abuse and faith. It will give an understanding of different forms of domestic abuse and coercive control. Participants will explore the psychological effects of abuse, as well as the practical barriers that can trap victims. We will address issues of gender and intersectionality and expose some common myths about domestic abuse perpetrators. We will also explore domestic abuse in the context of Christian spirituality; understanding spiritual abuse and how Faith can be both a source of support and a tool of abuse. Participants will gain an understanding of how to support victims and survivors in the context of trauma informed care and safeguarding. You will learn to recognise risk factors and signpost clients safely to appropriate support. You will also learn how to respond safely to perpetrators of domestic abuse and how to maintain your own safety and wellbeing while working with these clients.
Early bird 4-day non-residential (Thursday - Sunday)
Available workshops:
Thursday 19th Sep, 2024, 11:45 - 18:00
SCoPEd column B training Available
Please note this is a 4-day training stream so please only select this if you're intending to attend all 4 days.
The Scope of Practice and Education Framework (SCoPEd) has been developed by six of the main professional counselling organisations, including the ACC, and provides an outline of the core competencies for counselling and psychotherapy practice with adults at three levels: column A, B, and C.
Counselling training at Diploma level provides counsellors with the training to meet the requirements of at least column A. However, to enable ACC registered counsellors to update and extend their skills and experience and also evidence that they can meet column B competencies, delegates can attend and complete this four-day training stream.
The training is a joint venture between Waverley Abbey College and the ACC, with Drs Heather Churchill and Janet Penny delivering the course. This intensive four-day training will cover all of the SCoPEd column B competencies, including areas such as:
- advanced mental health
- developing a comprehensive risk assessment strategy
- inter-professional and multi-agency approaches to mental health
- assumptions that underpin the understanding of identity, culture, values, and worldview
- the impact of technology on counselling
- understanding the role of research in counselling
- using routine outcome monitoring tools
- working with issues of power and authority
- working with unconscious and out of awareness processes
- working with rupture and repair, and therapeutic impasses
- complex endings
- enhancing clients’ self-awareness and understanding of self in relationship
Please note this CPD training is designed for qualified counsellors. Completing this training will enable participants to evidence SCoPEd B competency training as part of their accreditation application with ACC. Please contact ACC office for further details.
Integration of faith into therapy Available
Gaining competence to assess and explore spiritual matters with our clients is the aim of this essential training. I am often asked by trainees and supervisees how and when to explore spiritual issues with clients. Some secular training doesn’t encourage such an exploration leaving counsellors unsure how or if they are ‘allowed’ to explore spiritual matters with clients when God is in the room. Likewise, some Christian counselling training doesn’t adequately address the safe integration of faith into therapy. Learning how and when to safely address a client’s religious history, personal faith or spiritual concerns is an area of angst for many therapists who are fearful of being accused of inappropriately bringing God into the counselling conversation. It is important not to miss vital opportunities to fully support our clients in their spiritual journey.
Trust and betrayal Available
During this two-day training we will look at different ways in which our trust and confidence has been broken, and the ongoing effect this can have on our relationships and the way we live our lives. The training will include issues such as:
- Broken promises
- Broken confidences
- Scapegoating
- Infidelity
- Ghosting
- Finances
- False witness
The training will include video testimony from different people who have experienced betrayal and the impact on their sense of self. We will explore the pain caused within individual relationships and also groups, including churches. Together we will look at how to work with clients to help them recover and experience healing from deep wounds, finding ways to move forward to trust again. Pauline will also share creative ways of working on these key issues.
Working with trauma Available
We will look at the different models used when working with trauma survivors and the latest research. We will have times of discussion where you can contribute your own experiences of working with this client group and there will be the opportunity to share skills, so that we can improve our practice.
Using the reflective therapy workbook, we will explore our own journeys and look at the ways in which we may support our clients on their journeys.
During the two days Kate will also facilitate somatic movement sessions.
Somatics is a slow and controlled way of contracting and releasing muscles that promotes freedom of movement and pain relief. This can be very effective for clients in releasing frozen trauma and emotions that are stored in the body.
These movement sessions are not exercise classes and you do not need any level of fitness to participate. Please wear comfortable clothes.
Love, intimacy and sex in the counselling room Available
This training will explore elements of working with clients on issues related to sex and intimacy, and will delve into current theorists discussing sex and intimacy, and consider different cultural narratives surrounding these topics. Elements such as common issues in psychosexual therapy, mindfulness, porn, masturbation, sexual addiction will also be explored. It will include personal reflection on our own relationship with sex and intimacy, discussion, research, and current practice information, and also when to refer clients elsewhere and available resources for referrals.
We will also address current developments and discussions on working with clients with intimacy and sex questions who are in transition, e.g. after converting to Christianity, or moving out of church-based environments perceived as controlling.
Additionally, there will be an overview of common themes within the genre, with a brief link to the Bible and Christian mystics.
This training is suitable for counsellors and psychotherapists who work with individuals and/or couples and would like to join Rosie for a journey of learning and growth in understanding intimacy through a lens of a Christian psychosexual therapist.
Solution focused therapy Available
Solution Focused Brief Therapy has been around since late 1970s, developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg. During Covid, Elliott Connie and Adam Froerer who are psychotherapists have now come to the fore with online training on Solution Focused Therapy.
Delegates will have time to explore the practice of SFT and how could this work within their own practice or could it?
This is not a problem-solving approach, but solution focused. This will be a different mindset for some as SFT has an overarching attitude of finding hope and has principles 3 of which are:
- If it's not broken, don't fix it.
- If something is working, do more of it.
- If it's not working, do something different.
SFT’s emphasis is on what is changeable and possible.
Learning outcomes:
- Gain an understanding and background of SFT
- Gain an understanding of differences between problem focused and solution focused approaches
- Gain insight of the 7 pillars of SFT
- Gain insight of the assumption about change and about helping within SFT
- Gain insight of the questions to ask
“Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24-25 (NIV)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion and interactive reflective practice including whether this fits with your Christian approach.
Counsellors “bearing” in a broken world, addressing spiritual abuse Available
This 2-day training on spiritual abuse seeks to equip counsellors/psychotherapists to work well as Christians in one of the most challenging areas of practice. The training will provide space for delegates to reflect as they may wish to on the impact of spiritual abuse in their personal experience. We will cover:
- Bearing Witness to what it is and isn’t, similarities and differences to other forms of abuse.
- Bearing witness to how it presents in our clients, acknowledging the damage.
- Bearing the burden, walking alongside our clients.
- Discussing the way our faith directs us and allows us to keep our bearings and influences our clients’ bearings.
- Discussing the way theories of counselling and therapeutic techniques provides effective bearing on spiritual abuse.
- Bearing God’s image, seeing beauty in brokenness, resourcing our clients.
- Discussing self-care and secondary trauma as a result of bearing, reflecting on the impact of our clients’ stories on us and the way our own stories are impacted and triggered in our bearing of others’ stories.
- Bearing hope in the midst of grief, using our greatest clinical tool, our presence.
Continuous becoming Available
“Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature. Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things.” - St Augustine
All psychotherapy is about managing change – whether processing unstoppable change or carrying unchanging burdens. At the pivot of pain is the potential loss of faith in what is Stable and what is Unstable, Known and Unknowable, what Passes and what Endures, ‘What-Might-Be’ and ‘What-Just-Is’.
The Continuous Becoming Frame was developed by psychotherapist Pamela Gawler-Wright from observing deep structural patterns in hundreds of cases where recovery from patterns of suffering seemed hopeless. This easily applied, organic assessment tool generates a systemic conceptualisation method for individual, couple and family cases. It invites client-lead interventions that harness the natural momentum of inevitable change even with our most complex cases, such as depression, trauma and addiction.
Day 1:
- Understanding Continuous Becoming from our own life experience
- Identifying challenge to faith within the process of spiritual growth
- Stories, tools and experiential application
Day 2:
- Utilising the Continuous Becoming Frame in case conceptualisation
- Harnessing the dynamic relationship of stable and unstable factors
- Precision and effectiveness in promoting clients’ healing and growth
Clinical Supervision conditions
By attending, all participants agree to:
- Be willing to reflect on own experience and personal challenge before seeking to apply skills to others’ lives
- Maintain confidentiality of all clinical and personal information shared in the training – strictly no sound or video recording
How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community Available
The Theology & Counselling Department of London School of Theology will set out to demonstrate the potential universality of the REMA model, with the working title being: How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community. The acronym (REMA) is represented as follows: R – Relational; E – Embodiment; M – Meaning; A – Agency. The model was developed at London School of Theology about 15 years ago and offers an approach that helps us to deepen and nurture the integration of our psychotherapeutic theory and practice, with well-grounded theology. Through a blend of theory, discussion and creative activities we will be exploring together how the REMA Model might be used to help us to reflect, both theologically and therapeutically, on the continued search for the unique, valued person within one and all of us.
This will be an opportunity to show the versatility of our REMA Model at work, as it sets about to address the unique needs of each unique individual, such as colour, ethnicity, gender, faith/spirituality, sexuality and economic status. In an ‘ideal’ world, following the successful use of the REMA Model, the unique individual becomes aware of who they are as well as what they can offer their various collective communities.
Skills and self-awareness needed when working with couples Available
This training will focus on skills and interventions needed when helping couples navigate and problem solve. Often people seek help when the relationship has been in “free fall” for a while, and they are looking for miracles. They will often come to counselling sessions with hurt, a lot of mixed emotions, a breakdown in communication, false expectations, anger, fear, affairs, and sexual issues to name some reasons people seek help.
Working with couples is more diverse and varied than working with individuals. You need a different set of tools, interventions, courage, self-awareness, confidence, and problem-solving skills. We all come to couples work with our own stories, prejudices, judgements, liking one client more that the other. But trusting your training and being self-aware can help couples move forward, resolve conflict, have a deeper understanding of each other, and a renewed commitment to the relationship so ultimately making the relationship stronger. This training provides a safe space to learn new skills and self-awareness when working with couples. This training is ideal for those considering expanding their skills to begin working with couples as well as more established practitioners already doing couple work.
The training is geared towards trainee and qualified counsellors. However, those involved in the pastoral care of married couples might find many of the ideas presented quite useful.
Working with loss and grief Available
Loss and grief are part of nearly every life event explored in counselling or supported pastorally - from relationship break-up to chronic illness, gender issues to redundancy, death to infertility, there is always change and so in some way loss and grief.
Grief is therefore a natural and universal experience, but also unique, following no set-pattern or model and for our clients often one of the most difficult of experiences, as CS Lewis said “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
This training is a chance to study (again) at loss and grief, exploring them in this wider context, looking at:
- the counsellors’ and clients’ understanding of the grief process and its purpose
- the impacts of grief physically, psychologically, cognitively, relationally and spiritually
- how we can help clients to grieve well and move to that place of changed meaning and hope
- barriers to the grief process and interactions with trauma, anxiety, attachment, etc.
- looking at tools and practices that can help clients with grief
- looking after ourselves when working with loss and grief
We will also look at different types of grief, including traumatic, anticipatory, disenfranchised, cumulative, complicated, and some of the specific issues and difficulties that arise and how we work with clients in these situations.
The training will include teaching, group work and discussion, case studies and personal exercises.
Friday 20th Sep, 2024, 09:15 - 16:30
SCoPEd column B training Available
Please note this is a 4-day training stream so please only select this if you're intending to attend all 4 days.
The Scope of Practice and Education Framework (SCoPEd) has been developed by six of the main professional counselling organisations, including the ACC, and provides an outline of the core competencies for counselling and psychotherapy practice with adults at three levels: column A, B, and C.
Counselling training at Diploma level provides counsellors with the training to meet the requirements of at least column A. However, to enable ACC registered counsellors to update and extend their skills and experience and also evidence that they can meet column B competencies, delegates can attend and complete this four-day training stream.
The training is a joint venture between Waverley Abbey College and the ACC, with Drs Heather Churchill and Janet Penny delivering the course. This intensive four-day training will cover all of the SCoPEd column B competencies, including areas such as:
- advanced mental health
- developing a comprehensive risk assessment strategy
- inter-professional and multi-agency approaches to mental health
- assumptions that underpin the understanding of identity, culture, values, and worldview
- the impact of technology on counselling
- understanding the role of research in counselling
- using routine outcome monitoring tools
- working with issues of power and authority
- working with unconscious and out of awareness processes
- working with rupture and repair, and therapeutic impasses
- complex endings
- enhancing clients’ self-awareness and understanding of self in relationship
Please note this CPD training is designed for qualified counsellors. Completing this training will enable participants to evidence SCoPEd B competency training as part of their accreditation application with ACC. Please contact ACC office for further details.
Integration of faith into therapy Available
Gaining competence to assess and explore spiritual matters with our clients is the aim of this essential training. I am often asked by trainees and supervisees how and when to explore spiritual issues with clients. Some secular training doesn’t encourage such an exploration leaving counsellors unsure how or if they are ‘allowed’ to explore spiritual matters with clients when God is in the room. Likewise, some Christian counselling training doesn’t adequately address the safe integration of faith into therapy. Learning how and when to safely address a client’s religious history, personal faith or spiritual concerns is an area of angst for many therapists who are fearful of being accused of inappropriately bringing God into the counselling conversation. It is important not to miss vital opportunities to fully support our clients in their spiritual journey.
Trust and betrayal Available
During this two-day training we will look at different ways in which our trust and confidence has been broken, and the ongoing effect this can have on our relationships and the way we live our lives. The training will include issues such as:
- Broken promises
- Broken confidences
- Scapegoating
- Infidelity
- Ghosting
- Finances
- False witness
The training will include video testimony from different people who have experienced betrayal and the impact on their sense of self. We will explore the pain caused within individual relationships and also groups, including churches. Together we will look at how to work with clients to help them recover and experience healing from deep wounds, finding ways to move forward to trust again. Pauline will also share creative ways of working on these key issues.
Working with trauma Available
We will look at the different models used when working with trauma survivors and the latest research. We will have times of discussion where you can contribute your own experiences of working with this client group and there will be the opportunity to share skills, so that we can improve our practice.
Using the reflective therapy workbook, we will explore our own journeys and look at the ways in which we may support our clients on their journeys.
During the two days Kate will also facilitate somatic movement sessions.
Somatics is a slow and controlled way of contracting and releasing muscles that promotes freedom of movement and pain relief. This can be very effective for clients in releasing frozen trauma and emotions that are stored in the body.
These movement sessions are not exercise classes and you do not need any level of fitness to participate. Please wear comfortable clothes.
Love, intimacy and sex in the counselling room Available
This training will explore elements of working with clients on issues related to sex and intimacy, and will delve into current theorists discussing sex and intimacy, and consider different cultural narratives surrounding these topics. Elements such as common issues in psychosexual therapy, mindfulness, porn, masturbation, sexual addiction will also be explored. It will include personal reflection on our own relationship with sex and intimacy, discussion, research, and current practice information, and also when to refer clients elsewhere and available resources for referrals.
We will also address current developments and discussions on working with clients with intimacy and sex questions who are in transition, e.g. after converting to Christianity, or moving out of church-based environments perceived as controlling.
Additionally, there will be an overview of common themes within the genre, with a brief link to the Bible and Christian mystics.
This training is suitable for counsellors and psychotherapists who work with individuals and/or couples and would like to join Rosie for a journey of learning and growth in understanding intimacy through a lens of a Christian psychosexual therapist.
Solution focused therapy Available
Solution Focused Brief Therapy has been around since late 1970s, developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg. During Covid, Elliott Connie and Adam Froerer who are psychotherapists have now come to the fore with online training on Solution Focused Therapy.
Delegates will have time to explore the practice of SFT and how could this work within their own practice or could it?
This is not a problem-solving approach, but solution focused. This will be a different mindset for some as SFT has an overarching attitude of finding hope and has principles 3 of which are:
- If it's not broken, don't fix it.
- If something is working, do more of it.
- If it's not working, do something different.
SFT’s emphasis is on what is changeable and possible.
Learning outcomes:
- Gain an understanding and background of SFT
- Gain an understanding of differences between problem focused and solution focused approaches
- Gain insight of the 7 pillars of SFT
- Gain insight of the assumption about change and about helping within SFT
- Gain insight of the questions to ask
“Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24-25 (NIV)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion and interactive reflective practice including whether this fits with your Christian approach.
Counsellors “bearing” in a broken world, addressing spiritual abuse Available
This 2-day training on spiritual abuse seeks to equip counsellors/psychotherapists to work well as Christians in one of the most challenging areas of practice. The training will provide space for delegates to reflect as they may wish to on the impact of spiritual abuse in their personal experience. We will cover:
- Bearing Witness to what it is and isn’t, similarities and differences to other forms of abuse.
- Bearing witness to how it presents in our clients, acknowledging the damage.
- Bearing the burden, walking alongside our clients.
- Discussing the way our faith directs us and allows us to keep our bearings and influences our clients’ bearings.
- Discussing the way theories of counselling and therapeutic techniques provides effective bearing on spiritual abuse.
- Bearing God’s image, seeing beauty in brokenness, resourcing our clients.
- Discussing self-care and secondary trauma as a result of bearing, reflecting on the impact of our clients’ stories on us and the way our own stories are impacted and triggered in our bearing of others’ stories.
- Bearing hope in the midst of grief, using our greatest clinical tool, our presence.
Continuous becoming Available
“Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature. Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things.” - St Augustine
All psychotherapy is about managing change – whether processing unstoppable change or carrying unchanging burdens. At the pivot of pain is the potential loss of faith in what is Stable and what is Unstable, Known and Unknowable, what Passes and what Endures, ‘What-Might-Be’ and ‘What-Just-Is’.
The Continuous Becoming Frame was developed by psychotherapist Pamela Gawler-Wright from observing deep structural patterns in hundreds of cases where recovery from patterns of suffering seemed hopeless. This easily applied, organic assessment tool generates a systemic conceptualisation method for individual, couple and family cases. It invites client-lead interventions that harness the natural momentum of inevitable change even with our most complex cases, such as depression, trauma and addiction.
Day 1:
- Understanding Continuous Becoming from our own life experience
- Identifying challenge to faith within the process of spiritual growth
- Stories, tools and experiential application
Day 2:
- Utilising the Continuous Becoming Frame in case conceptualisation
- Harnessing the dynamic relationship of stable and unstable factors
- Precision and effectiveness in promoting clients’ healing and growth
Clinical Supervision conditions
By attending, all participants agree to:
- Be willing to reflect on own experience and personal challenge before seeking to apply skills to others’ lives
- Maintain confidentiality of all clinical and personal information shared in the training – strictly no sound or video recording
How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community Available
The Theology & Counselling Department of London School of Theology will set out to demonstrate the potential universality of the REMA model, with the working title being: How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community. The acronym (REMA) is represented as follows: R – Relational; E – Embodiment; M – Meaning; A – Agency. The model was developed at London School of Theology about 15 years ago and offers an approach that helps us to deepen and nurture the integration of our psychotherapeutic theory and practice, with well-grounded theology. Through a blend of theory, discussion and creative activities we will be exploring together how the REMA Model might be used to help us to reflect, both theologically and therapeutically, on the continued search for the unique, valued person within one and all of us.
This will be an opportunity to show the versatility of our REMA Model at work, as it sets about to address the unique needs of each unique individual, such as colour, ethnicity, gender, faith/spirituality, sexuality and economic status. In an ‘ideal’ world, following the successful use of the REMA Model, the unique individual becomes aware of who they are as well as what they can offer their various collective communities.
Skills and self-awareness needed when working with couples Available
This training will focus on skills and interventions needed when helping couples navigate and problem solve. Often people seek help when the relationship has been in “free fall” for a while, and they are looking for miracles. They will often come to counselling sessions with hurt, a lot of mixed emotions, a breakdown in communication, false expectations, anger, fear, affairs, and sexual issues to name some reasons people seek help.
Working with couples is more diverse and varied than working with individuals. You need a different set of tools, interventions, courage, self-awareness, confidence, and problem-solving skills. We all come to couples work with our own stories, prejudices, judgements, liking one client more that the other. But trusting your training and being self-aware can help couples move forward, resolve conflict, have a deeper understanding of each other, and a renewed commitment to the relationship so ultimately making the relationship stronger. This training provides a safe space to learn new skills and self-awareness when working with couples. This training is ideal for those considering expanding their skills to begin working with couples as well as more established practitioners already doing couple work.
The training is geared towards trainee and qualified counsellors. However, those involved in the pastoral care of married couples might find many of the ideas presented quite useful.
Working with loss and grief Available
Loss and grief are part of nearly every life event explored in counselling or supported pastorally - from relationship break-up to chronic illness, gender issues to redundancy, death to infertility, there is always change and so in some way loss and grief.
Grief is therefore a natural and universal experience, but also unique, following no set-pattern or model and for our clients often one of the most difficult of experiences, as CS Lewis said “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
This training is a chance to study (again) at loss and grief, exploring them in this wider context, looking at:
- the counsellors’ and clients’ understanding of the grief process and its purpose
- the impacts of grief physically, psychologically, cognitively, relationally and spiritually
- how we can help clients to grieve well and move to that place of changed meaning and hope
- barriers to the grief process and interactions with trauma, anxiety, attachment, etc.
- looking at tools and practices that can help clients with grief
- looking after ourselves when working with loss and grief
We will also look at different types of grief, including traumatic, anticipatory, disenfranchised, cumulative, complicated, and some of the specific issues and difficulties that arise and how we work with clients in these situations.
The training will include teaching, group work and discussion, case studies and personal exercises.
Saturday 21st Sep, 2024, 11:15 - 18:00
SCoPEd column B training Available
Please note this is a 4-day training stream so please only select this if you're intending to attend all 4 days.
The Scope of Practice and Education Framework (SCoPEd) has been developed by six of the main professional counselling organisations, including the ACC, and provides an outline of the core competencies for counselling and psychotherapy practice with adults at three levels: column A, B, and C.
Counselling training at Diploma level provides counsellors with the training to meet the requirements of at least column A. However, to enable ACC registered counsellors to update and extend their skills and experience and also evidence that they can meet column B competencies, delegates can attend and complete this four-day training stream.
The training is a joint venture between Waverley Abbey College and the ACC, with Drs Heather Churchill and Janet Penny delivering the course. This intensive four-day training will cover all of the SCoPEd column B competencies, including areas such as:
- advanced mental health
- developing a comprehensive risk assessment strategy
- inter-professional and multi-agency approaches to mental health
- assumptions that underpin the understanding of identity, culture, values, and worldview
- the impact of technology on counselling
- understanding the role of research in counselling
- using routine outcome monitoring tools
- working with issues of power and authority
- working with unconscious and out of awareness processes
- working with rupture and repair, and therapeutic impasses
- complex endings
- enhancing clients’ self-awareness and understanding of self in relationship
Please note this CPD training is designed for qualified counsellors. Completing this training will enable participants to evidence SCoPEd B competency training as part of their accreditation application with ACC. Please contact ACC office for further details.
Supervision: another level Available
Using the Systemic lenses of the GRACES (Gender, Generation, Race, Religion, Age, Ability, Class, Culture, Celebrity, Ethnicity, Education, Sexuality, Spirituality) we will explore the dynamic interaction within the Supervisory Relationship (SR) and how it brings out the best and worst in supervision practice. Where supervision has become comfortable or collusive, the GRACES will sharpen the supervisor’s ability to move towards greater collaboration and creativity. It is important for supervisors to not only bring their best efforts to the supervision of others but to look at the interactive processes within the SR; what we need and what we don’t need, identifying adjustments to make with and for our supervisees to enhance and sharpen our supervisory practices. No stone needs to be left unturned.
Should I stay or should I go? When relationships become toxic Available
In this two-day training we will explore how to identify the ways in which relationships become toxic and look at issues which stop people from leaving them.
The training will include:
- Childhood patterns and belief systems
- The narcissistic parent
- Controlling relationships
- Group dynamics
- Spiritual dynamics
- The place of commitment and loyalty
- Conflict resolution
- When to stay and when to leave
Chris and Pauline will share different ways of working with clients, including psychoeducation and creative tools.
Dissociation & dissociative identity Available
Dissociation is present in many conditions - making it invaluable to know how to identify it, what impact it might have and how to respond.
What is dissociation? Who is likely to experience it and why? What effects does it have on clients, their therapy and the therapist? How can we identify different types of dissociation and how can we work with them? Do clients always know when they have multiple “selves”, or might they be unaware of them? When is it okay to do the work and when should we refer on?
This training offers insights and practical information for discerning what, who, why, how and when of dissociation and dissociative disorders (DD):
Participants will be able to:
- identify dissociation and different DD
- distinguish between DD and other challenging conditions
- understand when it is likely and how it may impact therapy
- identify screening interventions and/or assessments
- understand the complexities and effects of its origins and development, including chronic, severe, ritualised and organised abuse
- differentiate between spontaneous and constructed forms of DID, and resulting implications
- appreciate the tasks and goals of therapy and recommended treatment models
- identify the skills, strengths and learning requirements for working with dissociative clients
- identify the help and support clients and practitioners need when working with DD and DID
- reflect on the distinctives of fragmented states and how to work with them
- reflect on the differentiation of wounded parts and spiritual activity
- identify further training sources, ask questions and interact!
Intergenerational trauma Available
This two-day training will use an Internal Family Systems (IFS) informed approach to explore intergenerational trauma. Generous and unhurried space will be given for us to expand our awareness of how intergenerational trauma has impacted us including our Christian identities, and an invitation to explore deeper healing and transformation for ourselves, our clients, our communities, our churches and the world.
This training will be highly experiential in nature, inviting curiosity and courage to turn towards the parts of our individual and collective stories that may have been hidden, banished, silenced, ignored, rejected and shamed.
Shame and secrecy keep us in hiding and disconnected. Love beckons us home with open arms, restoring connection with our true identity as God’s beloved children, paving the way for us to bring our pain and burdens to Him for individual and collective healing and redemption.
This training is for you if you have observed that there are generational patterns that seem to be repeated in yourself, your family and society and you are curious about how to start the journey of being a cycle breaker for yourself and for others.
I invite you to join me in generous, spacious and courageous space to explore and journey this topic, together.
Counselling mediation training Available
This training is for counsellors who want to explore another approach when working with people in conflict such as couples, families or within workplace.
There will be time to explore how to facilitate difficult conversations using mediation skills alongside the professional experience as a counsellor. When the therapy and boundaries are explained to clients, they state it gives them a confidence to proceed and trust the process with the counsellor/s.
The delegates will
- Be able to discuss the approach or method used and how to set up, manage, and use counselling mediation between two or more parties.
- Be able to understand negotiation and specifically principled negotiation and the benefits when working with couples or others in conflict.
- Gain an understanding of four different styles of mediation: formal and informal intermediation, transformative and facilitative mediation, and how or when to use each one.
- Explore conflict styles and the impact this has on communication between couples or groups of people.
“If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him-work it out between you. If he listens you’ve made a friend, if he won’t listen, take one or two others along so that the presence of witnesses will keep things honest.” Matthew 18:15-17 (MSG)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion, and interactive reflective practice.
Understanding and working with addiction Available
The aim of the training is to help participants have:
- An overview of the science of addiction (behavioural and substance); it’s genesis, its maintenance and behavioural implications.
- An understanding of implications for working with people who present with addictions - trauma, family dynamics, genetics.
- An understanding and experiential appreciation of therapeutic interventions. Practical suggestions for working with addiction in the counselling room.
- An understanding of ‘post active addiction’- the importance of building a new life.
Using spiritual and religious interventions in counselling Available
This two-day training is for counsellors who are looking to intentionally integrate a client’s faith into their counselling journey. Specifically it will focus on what it means to ethically introduce spiritual and/or religious interventions. Whilst we will consider 10 interventions overall, the focus will be on the ‘Big Four’ (Prayer, Scripture, Forgiveness and Mindfulness/Meditation).
The two days will give time to practise using these big four interventions in a structured way as well as opportunities for participants to engage in their own style. We will consider the impact of the Christian experience of both the client and counsellor using Foster’s Six streams as a framework for exploration.
The training will be a distilled version of a final year capstone program typically conducted with students studying Master of Counselling at Perth Bible College. The content will be a ‘sneak peek’ into a book scheduled for publication in 2025.
Exploring spiritual direction Available
In this two-day training we will explore spiritual direction from the place of retreating and deepening your own relationship with God.
We will look at the calling of spiritual direction and experience a few of the different modalities used, e.g. Ignatian, lectio Divina, Christian meditation. We will also discuss the training options available.
During the two days, if you would like to, you will have the opportunity to practise spiritual direction, both as directee and as director.
If you are considering a movement in this direction, or feel you are being called to this area of ministry, this training will be a useful discernment tool.
Coaching through change Available
Whether it is our work, family, relocation, health or something else, change is a part of our lives and affects us all at one time or another. Many of the people we work with are navigating some sort of change. In this training we will consider the place for coaching, specifically looking at dealing with change and how we can accompany individuals and organisations through transition.
Topics will be interspersed with different coaching tools and techniques.
Some of the topics we will consider are:
- How is coaching different to counselling?
- Different people deal with change in different ways.
- Why do people resist change?
- Bridges stages of transition.
- How are people affected by organisational change and how can it be done well?
Working with domestic abuse in the context of counselling, psychotherapy and pastoral work Available
This training will explore the new competency framework for working with domestic abuse and faith. It will give an understanding of different forms of domestic abuse and coercive control. Participants will explore the psychological effects of abuse, as well as the practical barriers that can trap victims. We will address issues of gender and intersectionality and expose some common myths about domestic abuse perpetrators. We will also explore domestic abuse in the context of Christian spirituality; understanding spiritual abuse and how Faith can be both a source of support and a tool of abuse. Participants will gain an understanding of how to support victims and survivors in the context of trauma informed care and safeguarding. You will learn to recognise risk factors and signpost clients safely to appropriate support. You will also learn how to respond safely to perpetrators of domestic abuse and how to maintain your own safety and wellbeing while working with these clients.
Sunday 22nd Sep, 2024, 09:15 - 15:15
SCoPEd column B training Available
Please note this is a 4-day training stream so please only select this if you're intending to attend all 4 days.
The Scope of Practice and Education Framework (SCoPEd) has been developed by six of the main professional counselling organisations, including the ACC, and provides an outline of the core competencies for counselling and psychotherapy practice with adults at three levels: column A, B, and C.
Counselling training at Diploma level provides counsellors with the training to meet the requirements of at least column A. However, to enable ACC registered counsellors to update and extend their skills and experience and also evidence that they can meet column B competencies, delegates can attend and complete this four-day training stream.
The training is a joint venture between Waverley Abbey College and the ACC, with Drs Heather Churchill and Janet Penny delivering the course. This intensive four-day training will cover all of the SCoPEd column B competencies, including areas such as:
- advanced mental health
- developing a comprehensive risk assessment strategy
- inter-professional and multi-agency approaches to mental health
- assumptions that underpin the understanding of identity, culture, values, and worldview
- the impact of technology on counselling
- understanding the role of research in counselling
- using routine outcome monitoring tools
- working with issues of power and authority
- working with unconscious and out of awareness processes
- working with rupture and repair, and therapeutic impasses
- complex endings
- enhancing clients’ self-awareness and understanding of self in relationship
Please note this CPD training is designed for qualified counsellors. Completing this training will enable participants to evidence SCoPEd B competency training as part of their accreditation application with ACC. Please contact ACC office for further details.
Supervision: another level Available
Using the Systemic lenses of the GRACES (Gender, Generation, Race, Religion, Age, Ability, Class, Culture, Celebrity, Ethnicity, Education, Sexuality, Spirituality) we will explore the dynamic interaction within the Supervisory Relationship (SR) and how it brings out the best and worst in supervision practice. Where supervision has become comfortable or collusive, the GRACES will sharpen the supervisor’s ability to move towards greater collaboration and creativity. It is important for supervisors to not only bring their best efforts to the supervision of others but to look at the interactive processes within the SR; what we need and what we don’t need, identifying adjustments to make with and for our supervisees to enhance and sharpen our supervisory practices. No stone needs to be left unturned.
Should I stay or should I go? When relationships become toxic Available
In this two-day training we will explore how to identify the ways in which relationships become toxic and look at issues which stop people from leaving them.
The training will include:
- Childhood patterns and belief systems
- The narcissistic parent
- Controlling relationships
- Group dynamics
- Spiritual dynamics
- The place of commitment and loyalty
- Conflict resolution
- When to stay and when to leave
Chris and Pauline will share different ways of working with clients, including psychoeducation and creative tools.
Dissociation & dissociative identity Available
Dissociation is present in many conditions - making it invaluable to know how to identify it, what impact it might have and how to respond.
What is dissociation? Who is likely to experience it and why? What effects does it have on clients, their therapy and the therapist? How can we identify different types of dissociation and how can we work with them? Do clients always know when they have multiple “selves”, or might they be unaware of them? When is it okay to do the work and when should we refer on?
This training offers insights and practical information for discerning what, who, why, how and when of dissociation and dissociative disorders (DD):
Participants will be able to:
- identify dissociation and different DD
- distinguish between DD and other challenging conditions
- understand when it is likely and how it may impact therapy
- identify screening interventions and/or assessments
- understand the complexities and effects of its origins and development, including chronic, severe, ritualised and organised abuse
- differentiate between spontaneous and constructed forms of DID, and resulting implications
- appreciate the tasks and goals of therapy and recommended treatment models
- identify the skills, strengths and learning requirements for working with dissociative clients
- identify the help and support clients and practitioners need when working with DD and DID
- reflect on the distinctives of fragmented states and how to work with them
- reflect on the differentiation of wounded parts and spiritual activity
- identify further training sources, ask questions and interact!
Intergenerational trauma Available
This two-day training will use an Internal Family Systems (IFS) informed approach to explore intergenerational trauma. Generous and unhurried space will be given for us to expand our awareness of how intergenerational trauma has impacted us including our Christian identities, and an invitation to explore deeper healing and transformation for ourselves, our clients, our communities, our churches and the world.
This training will be highly experiential in nature, inviting curiosity and courage to turn towards the parts of our individual and collective stories that may have been hidden, banished, silenced, ignored, rejected and shamed.
Shame and secrecy keep us in hiding and disconnected. Love beckons us home with open arms, restoring connection with our true identity as God’s beloved children, paving the way for us to bring our pain and burdens to Him for individual and collective healing and redemption.
This training is for you if you have observed that there are generational patterns that seem to be repeated in yourself, your family and society and you are curious about how to start the journey of being a cycle breaker for yourself and for others.
I invite you to join me in generous, spacious and courageous space to explore and journey this topic, together.
Counselling mediation training Available
This training is for counsellors who want to explore another approach when working with people in conflict such as couples, families or within workplace.
There will be time to explore how to facilitate difficult conversations using mediation skills alongside the professional experience as a counsellor. When the therapy and boundaries are explained to clients, they state it gives them a confidence to proceed and trust the process with the counsellor/s.
The delegates will
- Be able to discuss the approach or method used and how to set up, manage, and use counselling mediation between two or more parties.
- Be able to understand negotiation and specifically principled negotiation and the benefits when working with couples or others in conflict.
- Gain an understanding of four different styles of mediation: formal and informal intermediation, transformative and facilitative mediation, and how or when to use each one.
- Explore conflict styles and the impact this has on communication between couples or groups of people.
“If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him-work it out between you. If he listens you’ve made a friend, if he won’t listen, take one or two others along so that the presence of witnesses will keep things honest.” Matthew 18:15-17 (MSG)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion, and interactive reflective practice.
Understanding and working with addiction Available
The aim of the training is to help participants have:
- An overview of the science of addiction (behavioural and substance); it’s genesis, its maintenance and behavioural implications.
- An understanding of implications for working with people who present with addictions - trauma, family dynamics, genetics.
- An understanding and experiential appreciation of therapeutic interventions. Practical suggestions for working with addiction in the counselling room.
- An understanding of ‘post active addiction’- the importance of building a new life.
Using spiritual and religious interventions in counselling Available
This two-day training is for counsellors who are looking to intentionally integrate a client’s faith into their counselling journey. Specifically it will focus on what it means to ethically introduce spiritual and/or religious interventions. Whilst we will consider 10 interventions overall, the focus will be on the ‘Big Four’ (Prayer, Scripture, Forgiveness and Mindfulness/Meditation).
The two days will give time to practise using these big four interventions in a structured way as well as opportunities for participants to engage in their own style. We will consider the impact of the Christian experience of both the client and counsellor using Foster’s Six streams as a framework for exploration.
The training will be a distilled version of a final year capstone program typically conducted with students studying Master of Counselling at Perth Bible College. The content will be a ‘sneak peek’ into a book scheduled for publication in 2025.
Exploring spiritual direction Available
In this two-day training we will explore spiritual direction from the place of retreating and deepening your own relationship with God.
We will look at the calling of spiritual direction and experience a few of the different modalities used, e.g. Ignatian, lectio Divina, Christian meditation. We will also discuss the training options available.
During the two days, if you would like to, you will have the opportunity to practise spiritual direction, both as directee and as director.
If you are considering a movement in this direction, or feel you are being called to this area of ministry, this training will be a useful discernment tool.
Coaching through change Available
Whether it is our work, family, relocation, health or something else, change is a part of our lives and affects us all at one time or another. Many of the people we work with are navigating some sort of change. In this training we will consider the place for coaching, specifically looking at dealing with change and how we can accompany individuals and organisations through transition.
Topics will be interspersed with different coaching tools and techniques.
Some of the topics we will consider are:
- How is coaching different to counselling?
- Different people deal with change in different ways.
- Why do people resist change?
- Bridges stages of transition.
- How are people affected by organisational change and how can it be done well?
Working with domestic abuse in the context of counselling, psychotherapy and pastoral work Available
This training will explore the new competency framework for working with domestic abuse and faith. It will give an understanding of different forms of domestic abuse and coercive control. Participants will explore the psychological effects of abuse, as well as the practical barriers that can trap victims. We will address issues of gender and intersectionality and expose some common myths about domestic abuse perpetrators. We will also explore domestic abuse in the context of Christian spirituality; understanding spiritual abuse and how Faith can be both a source of support and a tool of abuse. Participants will gain an understanding of how to support victims and survivors in the context of trauma informed care and safeguarding. You will learn to recognise risk factors and signpost clients safely to appropriate support. You will also learn how to respond safely to perpetrators of domestic abuse and how to maintain your own safety and wellbeing while working with these clients.
Early bird 2-day residential (Thursday & Friday)
Available workshops:
Thursday 19th Sep, 2024, 11:45 - 18:00
Integration of faith into therapy Available
Gaining competence to assess and explore spiritual matters with our clients is the aim of this essential training. I am often asked by trainees and supervisees how and when to explore spiritual issues with clients. Some secular training doesn’t encourage such an exploration leaving counsellors unsure how or if they are ‘allowed’ to explore spiritual matters with clients when God is in the room. Likewise, some Christian counselling training doesn’t adequately address the safe integration of faith into therapy. Learning how and when to safely address a client’s religious history, personal faith or spiritual concerns is an area of angst for many therapists who are fearful of being accused of inappropriately bringing God into the counselling conversation. It is important not to miss vital opportunities to fully support our clients in their spiritual journey.
Trust and betrayal Available
During this two-day training we will look at different ways in which our trust and confidence has been broken, and the ongoing effect this can have on our relationships and the way we live our lives. The training will include issues such as:
- Broken promises
- Broken confidences
- Scapegoating
- Infidelity
- Ghosting
- Finances
- False witness
The training will include video testimony from different people who have experienced betrayal and the impact on their sense of self. We will explore the pain caused within individual relationships and also groups, including churches. Together we will look at how to work with clients to help them recover and experience healing from deep wounds, finding ways to move forward to trust again. Pauline will also share creative ways of working on these key issues.
Working with trauma Available
We will look at the different models used when working with trauma survivors and the latest research. We will have times of discussion where you can contribute your own experiences of working with this client group and there will be the opportunity to share skills, so that we can improve our practice.
Using the reflective therapy workbook, we will explore our own journeys and look at the ways in which we may support our clients on their journeys.
During the two days Kate will also facilitate somatic movement sessions.
Somatics is a slow and controlled way of contracting and releasing muscles that promotes freedom of movement and pain relief. This can be very effective for clients in releasing frozen trauma and emotions that are stored in the body.
These movement sessions are not exercise classes and you do not need any level of fitness to participate. Please wear comfortable clothes.
Love, intimacy and sex in the counselling room Available
This training will explore elements of working with clients on issues related to sex and intimacy, and will delve into current theorists discussing sex and intimacy, and consider different cultural narratives surrounding these topics. Elements such as common issues in psychosexual therapy, mindfulness, porn, masturbation, sexual addiction will also be explored. It will include personal reflection on our own relationship with sex and intimacy, discussion, research, and current practice information, and also when to refer clients elsewhere and available resources for referrals.
We will also address current developments and discussions on working with clients with intimacy and sex questions who are in transition, e.g. after converting to Christianity, or moving out of church-based environments perceived as controlling.
Additionally, there will be an overview of common themes within the genre, with a brief link to the Bible and Christian mystics.
This training is suitable for counsellors and psychotherapists who work with individuals and/or couples and would like to join Rosie for a journey of learning and growth in understanding intimacy through a lens of a Christian psychosexual therapist.
Solution focused therapy Available
Solution Focused Brief Therapy has been around since late 1970s, developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg. During Covid, Elliott Connie and Adam Froerer who are psychotherapists have now come to the fore with online training on Solution Focused Therapy.
Delegates will have time to explore the practice of SFT and how could this work within their own practice or could it?
This is not a problem-solving approach, but solution focused. This will be a different mindset for some as SFT has an overarching attitude of finding hope and has principles 3 of which are:
- If it's not broken, don't fix it.
- If something is working, do more of it.
- If it's not working, do something different.
SFT’s emphasis is on what is changeable and possible.
Learning outcomes:
- Gain an understanding and background of SFT
- Gain an understanding of differences between problem focused and solution focused approaches
- Gain insight of the 7 pillars of SFT
- Gain insight of the assumption about change and about helping within SFT
- Gain insight of the questions to ask
“Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24-25 (NIV)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion and interactive reflective practice including whether this fits with your Christian approach.
Counsellors “bearing” in a broken world, addressing spiritual abuse Available
This 2-day training on spiritual abuse seeks to equip counsellors/psychotherapists to work well as Christians in one of the most challenging areas of practice. The training will provide space for delegates to reflect as they may wish to on the impact of spiritual abuse in their personal experience. We will cover:
- Bearing Witness to what it is and isn’t, similarities and differences to other forms of abuse.
- Bearing witness to how it presents in our clients, acknowledging the damage.
- Bearing the burden, walking alongside our clients.
- Discussing the way our faith directs us and allows us to keep our bearings and influences our clients’ bearings.
- Discussing the way theories of counselling and therapeutic techniques provides effective bearing on spiritual abuse.
- Bearing God’s image, seeing beauty in brokenness, resourcing our clients.
- Discussing self-care and secondary trauma as a result of bearing, reflecting on the impact of our clients’ stories on us and the way our own stories are impacted and triggered in our bearing of others’ stories.
- Bearing hope in the midst of grief, using our greatest clinical tool, our presence.
Continuous becoming Available
“Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature. Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things.” - St Augustine
All psychotherapy is about managing change – whether processing unstoppable change or carrying unchanging burdens. At the pivot of pain is the potential loss of faith in what is Stable and what is Unstable, Known and Unknowable, what Passes and what Endures, ‘What-Might-Be’ and ‘What-Just-Is’.
The Continuous Becoming Frame was developed by psychotherapist Pamela Gawler-Wright from observing deep structural patterns in hundreds of cases where recovery from patterns of suffering seemed hopeless. This easily applied, organic assessment tool generates a systemic conceptualisation method for individual, couple and family cases. It invites client-lead interventions that harness the natural momentum of inevitable change even with our most complex cases, such as depression, trauma and addiction.
Day 1:
- Understanding Continuous Becoming from our own life experience
- Identifying challenge to faith within the process of spiritual growth
- Stories, tools and experiential application
Day 2:
- Utilising the Continuous Becoming Frame in case conceptualisation
- Harnessing the dynamic relationship of stable and unstable factors
- Precision and effectiveness in promoting clients’ healing and growth
Clinical Supervision conditions
By attending, all participants agree to:
- Be willing to reflect on own experience and personal challenge before seeking to apply skills to others’ lives
- Maintain confidentiality of all clinical and personal information shared in the training – strictly no sound or video recording
How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community Available
The Theology & Counselling Department of London School of Theology will set out to demonstrate the potential universality of the REMA model, with the working title being: How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community. The acronym (REMA) is represented as follows: R – Relational; E – Embodiment; M – Meaning; A – Agency. The model was developed at London School of Theology about 15 years ago and offers an approach that helps us to deepen and nurture the integration of our psychotherapeutic theory and practice, with well-grounded theology. Through a blend of theory, discussion and creative activities we will be exploring together how the REMA Model might be used to help us to reflect, both theologically and therapeutically, on the continued search for the unique, valued person within one and all of us.
This will be an opportunity to show the versatility of our REMA Model at work, as it sets about to address the unique needs of each unique individual, such as colour, ethnicity, gender, faith/spirituality, sexuality and economic status. In an ‘ideal’ world, following the successful use of the REMA Model, the unique individual becomes aware of who they are as well as what they can offer their various collective communities.
Skills and self-awareness needed when working with couples Available
This training will focus on skills and interventions needed when helping couples navigate and problem solve. Often people seek help when the relationship has been in “free fall” for a while, and they are looking for miracles. They will often come to counselling sessions with hurt, a lot of mixed emotions, a breakdown in communication, false expectations, anger, fear, affairs, and sexual issues to name some reasons people seek help.
Working with couples is more diverse and varied than working with individuals. You need a different set of tools, interventions, courage, self-awareness, confidence, and problem-solving skills. We all come to couples work with our own stories, prejudices, judgements, liking one client more that the other. But trusting your training and being self-aware can help couples move forward, resolve conflict, have a deeper understanding of each other, and a renewed commitment to the relationship so ultimately making the relationship stronger. This training provides a safe space to learn new skills and self-awareness when working with couples. This training is ideal for those considering expanding their skills to begin working with couples as well as more established practitioners already doing couple work.
The training is geared towards trainee and qualified counsellors. However, those involved in the pastoral care of married couples might find many of the ideas presented quite useful.
Working with loss and grief Available
Loss and grief are part of nearly every life event explored in counselling or supported pastorally - from relationship break-up to chronic illness, gender issues to redundancy, death to infertility, there is always change and so in some way loss and grief.
Grief is therefore a natural and universal experience, but also unique, following no set-pattern or model and for our clients often one of the most difficult of experiences, as CS Lewis said “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
This training is a chance to study (again) at loss and grief, exploring them in this wider context, looking at:
- the counsellors’ and clients’ understanding of the grief process and its purpose
- the impacts of grief physically, psychologically, cognitively, relationally and spiritually
- how we can help clients to grieve well and move to that place of changed meaning and hope
- barriers to the grief process and interactions with trauma, anxiety, attachment, etc.
- looking at tools and practices that can help clients with grief
- looking after ourselves when working with loss and grief
We will also look at different types of grief, including traumatic, anticipatory, disenfranchised, cumulative, complicated, and some of the specific issues and difficulties that arise and how we work with clients in these situations.
The training will include teaching, group work and discussion, case studies and personal exercises.
Friday 20th Sep, 2024, 09:15 - 16:30
Integration of faith into therapy Available
Gaining competence to assess and explore spiritual matters with our clients is the aim of this essential training. I am often asked by trainees and supervisees how and when to explore spiritual issues with clients. Some secular training doesn’t encourage such an exploration leaving counsellors unsure how or if they are ‘allowed’ to explore spiritual matters with clients when God is in the room. Likewise, some Christian counselling training doesn’t adequately address the safe integration of faith into therapy. Learning how and when to safely address a client’s religious history, personal faith or spiritual concerns is an area of angst for many therapists who are fearful of being accused of inappropriately bringing God into the counselling conversation. It is important not to miss vital opportunities to fully support our clients in their spiritual journey.
Trust and betrayal Available
During this two-day training we will look at different ways in which our trust and confidence has been broken, and the ongoing effect this can have on our relationships and the way we live our lives. The training will include issues such as:
- Broken promises
- Broken confidences
- Scapegoating
- Infidelity
- Ghosting
- Finances
- False witness
The training will include video testimony from different people who have experienced betrayal and the impact on their sense of self. We will explore the pain caused within individual relationships and also groups, including churches. Together we will look at how to work with clients to help them recover and experience healing from deep wounds, finding ways to move forward to trust again. Pauline will also share creative ways of working on these key issues.
Working with trauma Available
We will look at the different models used when working with trauma survivors and the latest research. We will have times of discussion where you can contribute your own experiences of working with this client group and there will be the opportunity to share skills, so that we can improve our practice.
Using the reflective therapy workbook, we will explore our own journeys and look at the ways in which we may support our clients on their journeys.
During the two days Kate will also facilitate somatic movement sessions.
Somatics is a slow and controlled way of contracting and releasing muscles that promotes freedom of movement and pain relief. This can be very effective for clients in releasing frozen trauma and emotions that are stored in the body.
These movement sessions are not exercise classes and you do not need any level of fitness to participate. Please wear comfortable clothes.
Love, intimacy and sex in the counselling room Available
This training will explore elements of working with clients on issues related to sex and intimacy, and will delve into current theorists discussing sex and intimacy, and consider different cultural narratives surrounding these topics. Elements such as common issues in psychosexual therapy, mindfulness, porn, masturbation, sexual addiction will also be explored. It will include personal reflection on our own relationship with sex and intimacy, discussion, research, and current practice information, and also when to refer clients elsewhere and available resources for referrals.
We will also address current developments and discussions on working with clients with intimacy and sex questions who are in transition, e.g. after converting to Christianity, or moving out of church-based environments perceived as controlling.
Additionally, there will be an overview of common themes within the genre, with a brief link to the Bible and Christian mystics.
This training is suitable for counsellors and psychotherapists who work with individuals and/or couples and would like to join Rosie for a journey of learning and growth in understanding intimacy through a lens of a Christian psychosexual therapist.
Solution focused therapy Available
Solution Focused Brief Therapy has been around since late 1970s, developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg. During Covid, Elliott Connie and Adam Froerer who are psychotherapists have now come to the fore with online training on Solution Focused Therapy.
Delegates will have time to explore the practice of SFT and how could this work within their own practice or could it?
This is not a problem-solving approach, but solution focused. This will be a different mindset for some as SFT has an overarching attitude of finding hope and has principles 3 of which are:
- If it's not broken, don't fix it.
- If something is working, do more of it.
- If it's not working, do something different.
SFT’s emphasis is on what is changeable and possible.
Learning outcomes:
- Gain an understanding and background of SFT
- Gain an understanding of differences between problem focused and solution focused approaches
- Gain insight of the 7 pillars of SFT
- Gain insight of the assumption about change and about helping within SFT
- Gain insight of the questions to ask
“Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24-25 (NIV)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion and interactive reflective practice including whether this fits with your Christian approach.
Counsellors “bearing” in a broken world, addressing spiritual abuse Available
This 2-day training on spiritual abuse seeks to equip counsellors/psychotherapists to work well as Christians in one of the most challenging areas of practice. The training will provide space for delegates to reflect as they may wish to on the impact of spiritual abuse in their personal experience. We will cover:
- Bearing Witness to what it is and isn’t, similarities and differences to other forms of abuse.
- Bearing witness to how it presents in our clients, acknowledging the damage.
- Bearing the burden, walking alongside our clients.
- Discussing the way our faith directs us and allows us to keep our bearings and influences our clients’ bearings.
- Discussing the way theories of counselling and therapeutic techniques provides effective bearing on spiritual abuse.
- Bearing God’s image, seeing beauty in brokenness, resourcing our clients.
- Discussing self-care and secondary trauma as a result of bearing, reflecting on the impact of our clients’ stories on us and the way our own stories are impacted and triggered in our bearing of others’ stories.
- Bearing hope in the midst of grief, using our greatest clinical tool, our presence.
Continuous becoming Available
“Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature. Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things.” - St Augustine
All psychotherapy is about managing change – whether processing unstoppable change or carrying unchanging burdens. At the pivot of pain is the potential loss of faith in what is Stable and what is Unstable, Known and Unknowable, what Passes and what Endures, ‘What-Might-Be’ and ‘What-Just-Is’.
The Continuous Becoming Frame was developed by psychotherapist Pamela Gawler-Wright from observing deep structural patterns in hundreds of cases where recovery from patterns of suffering seemed hopeless. This easily applied, organic assessment tool generates a systemic conceptualisation method for individual, couple and family cases. It invites client-lead interventions that harness the natural momentum of inevitable change even with our most complex cases, such as depression, trauma and addiction.
Day 1:
- Understanding Continuous Becoming from our own life experience
- Identifying challenge to faith within the process of spiritual growth
- Stories, tools and experiential application
Day 2:
- Utilising the Continuous Becoming Frame in case conceptualisation
- Harnessing the dynamic relationship of stable and unstable factors
- Precision and effectiveness in promoting clients’ healing and growth
Clinical Supervision conditions
By attending, all participants agree to:
- Be willing to reflect on own experience and personal challenge before seeking to apply skills to others’ lives
- Maintain confidentiality of all clinical and personal information shared in the training – strictly no sound or video recording
How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community Available
The Theology & Counselling Department of London School of Theology will set out to demonstrate the potential universality of the REMA model, with the working title being: How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community. The acronym (REMA) is represented as follows: R – Relational; E – Embodiment; M – Meaning; A – Agency. The model was developed at London School of Theology about 15 years ago and offers an approach that helps us to deepen and nurture the integration of our psychotherapeutic theory and practice, with well-grounded theology. Through a blend of theory, discussion and creative activities we will be exploring together how the REMA Model might be used to help us to reflect, both theologically and therapeutically, on the continued search for the unique, valued person within one and all of us.
This will be an opportunity to show the versatility of our REMA Model at work, as it sets about to address the unique needs of each unique individual, such as colour, ethnicity, gender, faith/spirituality, sexuality and economic status. In an ‘ideal’ world, following the successful use of the REMA Model, the unique individual becomes aware of who they are as well as what they can offer their various collective communities.
Skills and self-awareness needed when working with couples Available
This training will focus on skills and interventions needed when helping couples navigate and problem solve. Often people seek help when the relationship has been in “free fall” for a while, and they are looking for miracles. They will often come to counselling sessions with hurt, a lot of mixed emotions, a breakdown in communication, false expectations, anger, fear, affairs, and sexual issues to name some reasons people seek help.
Working with couples is more diverse and varied than working with individuals. You need a different set of tools, interventions, courage, self-awareness, confidence, and problem-solving skills. We all come to couples work with our own stories, prejudices, judgements, liking one client more that the other. But trusting your training and being self-aware can help couples move forward, resolve conflict, have a deeper understanding of each other, and a renewed commitment to the relationship so ultimately making the relationship stronger. This training provides a safe space to learn new skills and self-awareness when working with couples. This training is ideal for those considering expanding their skills to begin working with couples as well as more established practitioners already doing couple work.
The training is geared towards trainee and qualified counsellors. However, those involved in the pastoral care of married couples might find many of the ideas presented quite useful.
Working with loss and grief Available
Loss and grief are part of nearly every life event explored in counselling or supported pastorally - from relationship break-up to chronic illness, gender issues to redundancy, death to infertility, there is always change and so in some way loss and grief.
Grief is therefore a natural and universal experience, but also unique, following no set-pattern or model and for our clients often one of the most difficult of experiences, as CS Lewis said “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
This training is a chance to study (again) at loss and grief, exploring them in this wider context, looking at:
- the counsellors’ and clients’ understanding of the grief process and its purpose
- the impacts of grief physically, psychologically, cognitively, relationally and spiritually
- how we can help clients to grieve well and move to that place of changed meaning and hope
- barriers to the grief process and interactions with trauma, anxiety, attachment, etc.
- looking at tools and practices that can help clients with grief
- looking after ourselves when working with loss and grief
We will also look at different types of grief, including traumatic, anticipatory, disenfranchised, cumulative, complicated, and some of the specific issues and difficulties that arise and how we work with clients in these situations.
The training will include teaching, group work and discussion, case studies and personal exercises.
Early bird 2-day residential (Saturday & Sunday)
Available workshops:
Saturday 21st Sep, 2024, 11:15 - 18:00
Supervision: another level Available
Using the Systemic lenses of the GRACES (Gender, Generation, Race, Religion, Age, Ability, Class, Culture, Celebrity, Ethnicity, Education, Sexuality, Spirituality) we will explore the dynamic interaction within the Supervisory Relationship (SR) and how it brings out the best and worst in supervision practice. Where supervision has become comfortable or collusive, the GRACES will sharpen the supervisor’s ability to move towards greater collaboration and creativity. It is important for supervisors to not only bring their best efforts to the supervision of others but to look at the interactive processes within the SR; what we need and what we don’t need, identifying adjustments to make with and for our supervisees to enhance and sharpen our supervisory practices. No stone needs to be left unturned.
Should I stay or should I go? When relationships become toxic Available
In this two-day training we will explore how to identify the ways in which relationships become toxic and look at issues which stop people from leaving them.
The training will include:
- Childhood patterns and belief systems
- The narcissistic parent
- Controlling relationships
- Group dynamics
- Spiritual dynamics
- The place of commitment and loyalty
- Conflict resolution
- When to stay and when to leave
Chris and Pauline will share different ways of working with clients, including psychoeducation and creative tools.
Dissociation & dissociative identity Available
Dissociation is present in many conditions - making it invaluable to know how to identify it, what impact it might have and how to respond.
What is dissociation? Who is likely to experience it and why? What effects does it have on clients, their therapy and the therapist? How can we identify different types of dissociation and how can we work with them? Do clients always know when they have multiple “selves”, or might they be unaware of them? When is it okay to do the work and when should we refer on?
This training offers insights and practical information for discerning what, who, why, how and when of dissociation and dissociative disorders (DD):
Participants will be able to:
- identify dissociation and different DD
- distinguish between DD and other challenging conditions
- understand when it is likely and how it may impact therapy
- identify screening interventions and/or assessments
- understand the complexities and effects of its origins and development, including chronic, severe, ritualised and organised abuse
- differentiate between spontaneous and constructed forms of DID, and resulting implications
- appreciate the tasks and goals of therapy and recommended treatment models
- identify the skills, strengths and learning requirements for working with dissociative clients
- identify the help and support clients and practitioners need when working with DD and DID
- reflect on the distinctives of fragmented states and how to work with them
- reflect on the differentiation of wounded parts and spiritual activity
- identify further training sources, ask questions and interact!
Intergenerational trauma Available
This two-day training will use an Internal Family Systems (IFS) informed approach to explore intergenerational trauma. Generous and unhurried space will be given for us to expand our awareness of how intergenerational trauma has impacted us including our Christian identities, and an invitation to explore deeper healing and transformation for ourselves, our clients, our communities, our churches and the world.
This training will be highly experiential in nature, inviting curiosity and courage to turn towards the parts of our individual and collective stories that may have been hidden, banished, silenced, ignored, rejected and shamed.
Shame and secrecy keep us in hiding and disconnected. Love beckons us home with open arms, restoring connection with our true identity as God’s beloved children, paving the way for us to bring our pain and burdens to Him for individual and collective healing and redemption.
This training is for you if you have observed that there are generational patterns that seem to be repeated in yourself, your family and society and you are curious about how to start the journey of being a cycle breaker for yourself and for others.
I invite you to join me in generous, spacious and courageous space to explore and journey this topic, together.
Counselling mediation training Available
This training is for counsellors who want to explore another approach when working with people in conflict such as couples, families or within workplace.
There will be time to explore how to facilitate difficult conversations using mediation skills alongside the professional experience as a counsellor. When the therapy and boundaries are explained to clients, they state it gives them a confidence to proceed and trust the process with the counsellor/s.
The delegates will
- Be able to discuss the approach or method used and how to set up, manage, and use counselling mediation between two or more parties.
- Be able to understand negotiation and specifically principled negotiation and the benefits when working with couples or others in conflict.
- Gain an understanding of four different styles of mediation: formal and informal intermediation, transformative and facilitative mediation, and how or when to use each one.
- Explore conflict styles and the impact this has on communication between couples or groups of people.
“If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him-work it out between you. If he listens you’ve made a friend, if he won’t listen, take one or two others along so that the presence of witnesses will keep things honest.” Matthew 18:15-17 (MSG)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion, and interactive reflective practice.
Understanding and working with addiction Available
The aim of the training is to help participants have:
- An overview of the science of addiction (behavioural and substance); it’s genesis, its maintenance and behavioural implications.
- An understanding of implications for working with people who present with addictions - trauma, family dynamics, genetics.
- An understanding and experiential appreciation of therapeutic interventions. Practical suggestions for working with addiction in the counselling room.
- An understanding of ‘post active addiction’- the importance of building a new life.
Using spiritual and religious interventions in counselling Available
This two-day training is for counsellors who are looking to intentionally integrate a client’s faith into their counselling journey. Specifically it will focus on what it means to ethically introduce spiritual and/or religious interventions. Whilst we will consider 10 interventions overall, the focus will be on the ‘Big Four’ (Prayer, Scripture, Forgiveness and Mindfulness/Meditation).
The two days will give time to practise using these big four interventions in a structured way as well as opportunities for participants to engage in their own style. We will consider the impact of the Christian experience of both the client and counsellor using Foster’s Six streams as a framework for exploration.
The training will be a distilled version of a final year capstone program typically conducted with students studying Master of Counselling at Perth Bible College. The content will be a ‘sneak peek’ into a book scheduled for publication in 2025.
Exploring spiritual direction Available
In this two-day training we will explore spiritual direction from the place of retreating and deepening your own relationship with God.
We will look at the calling of spiritual direction and experience a few of the different modalities used, e.g. Ignatian, lectio Divina, Christian meditation. We will also discuss the training options available.
During the two days, if you would like to, you will have the opportunity to practise spiritual direction, both as directee and as director.
If you are considering a movement in this direction, or feel you are being called to this area of ministry, this training will be a useful discernment tool.
Coaching through change Available
Whether it is our work, family, relocation, health or something else, change is a part of our lives and affects us all at one time or another. Many of the people we work with are navigating some sort of change. In this training we will consider the place for coaching, specifically looking at dealing with change and how we can accompany individuals and organisations through transition.
Topics will be interspersed with different coaching tools and techniques.
Some of the topics we will consider are:
- How is coaching different to counselling?
- Different people deal with change in different ways.
- Why do people resist change?
- Bridges stages of transition.
- How are people affected by organisational change and how can it be done well?
Working with domestic abuse in the context of counselling, psychotherapy and pastoral work Available
This training will explore the new competency framework for working with domestic abuse and faith. It will give an understanding of different forms of domestic abuse and coercive control. Participants will explore the psychological effects of abuse, as well as the practical barriers that can trap victims. We will address issues of gender and intersectionality and expose some common myths about domestic abuse perpetrators. We will also explore domestic abuse in the context of Christian spirituality; understanding spiritual abuse and how Faith can be both a source of support and a tool of abuse. Participants will gain an understanding of how to support victims and survivors in the context of trauma informed care and safeguarding. You will learn to recognise risk factors and signpost clients safely to appropriate support. You will also learn how to respond safely to perpetrators of domestic abuse and how to maintain your own safety and wellbeing while working with these clients.
Sunday 22nd Sep, 2024, 09:15 - 15:15
Supervision: another level Available
Using the Systemic lenses of the GRACES (Gender, Generation, Race, Religion, Age, Ability, Class, Culture, Celebrity, Ethnicity, Education, Sexuality, Spirituality) we will explore the dynamic interaction within the Supervisory Relationship (SR) and how it brings out the best and worst in supervision practice. Where supervision has become comfortable or collusive, the GRACES will sharpen the supervisor’s ability to move towards greater collaboration and creativity. It is important for supervisors to not only bring their best efforts to the supervision of others but to look at the interactive processes within the SR; what we need and what we don’t need, identifying adjustments to make with and for our supervisees to enhance and sharpen our supervisory practices. No stone needs to be left unturned.
Should I stay or should I go? When relationships become toxic Available
In this two-day training we will explore how to identify the ways in which relationships become toxic and look at issues which stop people from leaving them.
The training will include:
- Childhood patterns and belief systems
- The narcissistic parent
- Controlling relationships
- Group dynamics
- Spiritual dynamics
- The place of commitment and loyalty
- Conflict resolution
- When to stay and when to leave
Chris and Pauline will share different ways of working with clients, including psychoeducation and creative tools.
Dissociation & dissociative identity Available
Dissociation is present in many conditions - making it invaluable to know how to identify it, what impact it might have and how to respond.
What is dissociation? Who is likely to experience it and why? What effects does it have on clients, their therapy and the therapist? How can we identify different types of dissociation and how can we work with them? Do clients always know when they have multiple “selves”, or might they be unaware of them? When is it okay to do the work and when should we refer on?
This training offers insights and practical information for discerning what, who, why, how and when of dissociation and dissociative disorders (DD):
Participants will be able to:
- identify dissociation and different DD
- distinguish between DD and other challenging conditions
- understand when it is likely and how it may impact therapy
- identify screening interventions and/or assessments
- understand the complexities and effects of its origins and development, including chronic, severe, ritualised and organised abuse
- differentiate between spontaneous and constructed forms of DID, and resulting implications
- appreciate the tasks and goals of therapy and recommended treatment models
- identify the skills, strengths and learning requirements for working with dissociative clients
- identify the help and support clients and practitioners need when working with DD and DID
- reflect on the distinctives of fragmented states and how to work with them
- reflect on the differentiation of wounded parts and spiritual activity
- identify further training sources, ask questions and interact!
Intergenerational trauma Available
This two-day training will use an Internal Family Systems (IFS) informed approach to explore intergenerational trauma. Generous and unhurried space will be given for us to expand our awareness of how intergenerational trauma has impacted us including our Christian identities, and an invitation to explore deeper healing and transformation for ourselves, our clients, our communities, our churches and the world.
This training will be highly experiential in nature, inviting curiosity and courage to turn towards the parts of our individual and collective stories that may have been hidden, banished, silenced, ignored, rejected and shamed.
Shame and secrecy keep us in hiding and disconnected. Love beckons us home with open arms, restoring connection with our true identity as God’s beloved children, paving the way for us to bring our pain and burdens to Him for individual and collective healing and redemption.
This training is for you if you have observed that there are generational patterns that seem to be repeated in yourself, your family and society and you are curious about how to start the journey of being a cycle breaker for yourself and for others.
I invite you to join me in generous, spacious and courageous space to explore and journey this topic, together.
Counselling mediation training Available
This training is for counsellors who want to explore another approach when working with people in conflict such as couples, families or within workplace.
There will be time to explore how to facilitate difficult conversations using mediation skills alongside the professional experience as a counsellor. When the therapy and boundaries are explained to clients, they state it gives them a confidence to proceed and trust the process with the counsellor/s.
The delegates will
- Be able to discuss the approach or method used and how to set up, manage, and use counselling mediation between two or more parties.
- Be able to understand negotiation and specifically principled negotiation and the benefits when working with couples or others in conflict.
- Gain an understanding of four different styles of mediation: formal and informal intermediation, transformative and facilitative mediation, and how or when to use each one.
- Explore conflict styles and the impact this has on communication between couples or groups of people.
“If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him-work it out between you. If he listens you’ve made a friend, if he won’t listen, take one or two others along so that the presence of witnesses will keep things honest.” Matthew 18:15-17 (MSG)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion, and interactive reflective practice.
Understanding and working with addiction Available
The aim of the training is to help participants have:
- An overview of the science of addiction (behavioural and substance); it’s genesis, its maintenance and behavioural implications.
- An understanding of implications for working with people who present with addictions - trauma, family dynamics, genetics.
- An understanding and experiential appreciation of therapeutic interventions. Practical suggestions for working with addiction in the counselling room.
- An understanding of ‘post active addiction’- the importance of building a new life.
Using spiritual and religious interventions in counselling Available
This two-day training is for counsellors who are looking to intentionally integrate a client’s faith into their counselling journey. Specifically it will focus on what it means to ethically introduce spiritual and/or religious interventions. Whilst we will consider 10 interventions overall, the focus will be on the ‘Big Four’ (Prayer, Scripture, Forgiveness and Mindfulness/Meditation).
The two days will give time to practise using these big four interventions in a structured way as well as opportunities for participants to engage in their own style. We will consider the impact of the Christian experience of both the client and counsellor using Foster’s Six streams as a framework for exploration.
The training will be a distilled version of a final year capstone program typically conducted with students studying Master of Counselling at Perth Bible College. The content will be a ‘sneak peek’ into a book scheduled for publication in 2025.
Exploring spiritual direction Available
In this two-day training we will explore spiritual direction from the place of retreating and deepening your own relationship with God.
We will look at the calling of spiritual direction and experience a few of the different modalities used, e.g. Ignatian, lectio Divina, Christian meditation. We will also discuss the training options available.
During the two days, if you would like to, you will have the opportunity to practise spiritual direction, both as directee and as director.
If you are considering a movement in this direction, or feel you are being called to this area of ministry, this training will be a useful discernment tool.
Coaching through change Available
Whether it is our work, family, relocation, health or something else, change is a part of our lives and affects us all at one time or another. Many of the people we work with are navigating some sort of change. In this training we will consider the place for coaching, specifically looking at dealing with change and how we can accompany individuals and organisations through transition.
Topics will be interspersed with different coaching tools and techniques.
Some of the topics we will consider are:
- How is coaching different to counselling?
- Different people deal with change in different ways.
- Why do people resist change?
- Bridges stages of transition.
- How are people affected by organisational change and how can it be done well?
Working with domestic abuse in the context of counselling, psychotherapy and pastoral work Available
This training will explore the new competency framework for working with domestic abuse and faith. It will give an understanding of different forms of domestic abuse and coercive control. Participants will explore the psychological effects of abuse, as well as the practical barriers that can trap victims. We will address issues of gender and intersectionality and expose some common myths about domestic abuse perpetrators. We will also explore domestic abuse in the context of Christian spirituality; understanding spiritual abuse and how Faith can be both a source of support and a tool of abuse. Participants will gain an understanding of how to support victims and survivors in the context of trauma informed care and safeguarding. You will learn to recognise risk factors and signpost clients safely to appropriate support. You will also learn how to respond safely to perpetrators of domestic abuse and how to maintain your own safety and wellbeing while working with these clients.
Early bird 2-day non-residential (Thursday & Friday)
Available workshops:
Thursday 19th Sep, 2024, 11:45 - 18:00
Integration of faith into therapy Available
Gaining competence to assess and explore spiritual matters with our clients is the aim of this essential training. I am often asked by trainees and supervisees how and when to explore spiritual issues with clients. Some secular training doesn’t encourage such an exploration leaving counsellors unsure how or if they are ‘allowed’ to explore spiritual matters with clients when God is in the room. Likewise, some Christian counselling training doesn’t adequately address the safe integration of faith into therapy. Learning how and when to safely address a client’s religious history, personal faith or spiritual concerns is an area of angst for many therapists who are fearful of being accused of inappropriately bringing God into the counselling conversation. It is important not to miss vital opportunities to fully support our clients in their spiritual journey.
Trust and betrayal Available
During this two-day training we will look at different ways in which our trust and confidence has been broken, and the ongoing effect this can have on our relationships and the way we live our lives. The training will include issues such as:
- Broken promises
- Broken confidences
- Scapegoating
- Infidelity
- Ghosting
- Finances
- False witness
The training will include video testimony from different people who have experienced betrayal and the impact on their sense of self. We will explore the pain caused within individual relationships and also groups, including churches. Together we will look at how to work with clients to help them recover and experience healing from deep wounds, finding ways to move forward to trust again. Pauline will also share creative ways of working on these key issues.
Working with trauma Available
We will look at the different models used when working with trauma survivors and the latest research. We will have times of discussion where you can contribute your own experiences of working with this client group and there will be the opportunity to share skills, so that we can improve our practice.
Using the reflective therapy workbook, we will explore our own journeys and look at the ways in which we may support our clients on their journeys.
During the two days Kate will also facilitate somatic movement sessions.
Somatics is a slow and controlled way of contracting and releasing muscles that promotes freedom of movement and pain relief. This can be very effective for clients in releasing frozen trauma and emotions that are stored in the body.
These movement sessions are not exercise classes and you do not need any level of fitness to participate. Please wear comfortable clothes.
Love, intimacy and sex in the counselling room Available
This training will explore elements of working with clients on issues related to sex and intimacy, and will delve into current theorists discussing sex and intimacy, and consider different cultural narratives surrounding these topics. Elements such as common issues in psychosexual therapy, mindfulness, porn, masturbation, sexual addiction will also be explored. It will include personal reflection on our own relationship with sex and intimacy, discussion, research, and current practice information, and also when to refer clients elsewhere and available resources for referrals.
We will also address current developments and discussions on working with clients with intimacy and sex questions who are in transition, e.g. after converting to Christianity, or moving out of church-based environments perceived as controlling.
Additionally, there will be an overview of common themes within the genre, with a brief link to the Bible and Christian mystics.
This training is suitable for counsellors and psychotherapists who work with individuals and/or couples and would like to join Rosie for a journey of learning and growth in understanding intimacy through a lens of a Christian psychosexual therapist.
Solution focused therapy Available
Solution Focused Brief Therapy has been around since late 1970s, developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg. During Covid, Elliott Connie and Adam Froerer who are psychotherapists have now come to the fore with online training on Solution Focused Therapy.
Delegates will have time to explore the practice of SFT and how could this work within their own practice or could it?
This is not a problem-solving approach, but solution focused. This will be a different mindset for some as SFT has an overarching attitude of finding hope and has principles 3 of which are:
- If it's not broken, don't fix it.
- If something is working, do more of it.
- If it's not working, do something different.
SFT’s emphasis is on what is changeable and possible.
Learning outcomes:
- Gain an understanding and background of SFT
- Gain an understanding of differences between problem focused and solution focused approaches
- Gain insight of the 7 pillars of SFT
- Gain insight of the assumption about change and about helping within SFT
- Gain insight of the questions to ask
“Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24-25 (NIV)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion and interactive reflective practice including whether this fits with your Christian approach.
Counsellors “bearing” in a broken world, addressing spiritual abuse Available
This 2-day training on spiritual abuse seeks to equip counsellors/psychotherapists to work well as Christians in one of the most challenging areas of practice. The training will provide space for delegates to reflect as they may wish to on the impact of spiritual abuse in their personal experience. We will cover:
- Bearing Witness to what it is and isn’t, similarities and differences to other forms of abuse.
- Bearing witness to how it presents in our clients, acknowledging the damage.
- Bearing the burden, walking alongside our clients.
- Discussing the way our faith directs us and allows us to keep our bearings and influences our clients’ bearings.
- Discussing the way theories of counselling and therapeutic techniques provides effective bearing on spiritual abuse.
- Bearing God’s image, seeing beauty in brokenness, resourcing our clients.
- Discussing self-care and secondary trauma as a result of bearing, reflecting on the impact of our clients’ stories on us and the way our own stories are impacted and triggered in our bearing of others’ stories.
- Bearing hope in the midst of grief, using our greatest clinical tool, our presence.
Continuous becoming Available
“Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature. Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things.” - St Augustine
All psychotherapy is about managing change – whether processing unstoppable change or carrying unchanging burdens. At the pivot of pain is the potential loss of faith in what is Stable and what is Unstable, Known and Unknowable, what Passes and what Endures, ‘What-Might-Be’ and ‘What-Just-Is’.
The Continuous Becoming Frame was developed by psychotherapist Pamela Gawler-Wright from observing deep structural patterns in hundreds of cases where recovery from patterns of suffering seemed hopeless. This easily applied, organic assessment tool generates a systemic conceptualisation method for individual, couple and family cases. It invites client-lead interventions that harness the natural momentum of inevitable change even with our most complex cases, such as depression, trauma and addiction.
Day 1:
- Understanding Continuous Becoming from our own life experience
- Identifying challenge to faith within the process of spiritual growth
- Stories, tools and experiential application
Day 2:
- Utilising the Continuous Becoming Frame in case conceptualisation
- Harnessing the dynamic relationship of stable and unstable factors
- Precision and effectiveness in promoting clients’ healing and growth
Clinical Supervision conditions
By attending, all participants agree to:
- Be willing to reflect on own experience and personal challenge before seeking to apply skills to others’ lives
- Maintain confidentiality of all clinical and personal information shared in the training – strictly no sound or video recording
How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community Available
The Theology & Counselling Department of London School of Theology will set out to demonstrate the potential universality of the REMA model, with the working title being: How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community. The acronym (REMA) is represented as follows: R – Relational; E – Embodiment; M – Meaning; A – Agency. The model was developed at London School of Theology about 15 years ago and offers an approach that helps us to deepen and nurture the integration of our psychotherapeutic theory and practice, with well-grounded theology. Through a blend of theory, discussion and creative activities we will be exploring together how the REMA Model might be used to help us to reflect, both theologically and therapeutically, on the continued search for the unique, valued person within one and all of us.
This will be an opportunity to show the versatility of our REMA Model at work, as it sets about to address the unique needs of each unique individual, such as colour, ethnicity, gender, faith/spirituality, sexuality and economic status. In an ‘ideal’ world, following the successful use of the REMA Model, the unique individual becomes aware of who they are as well as what they can offer their various collective communities.
Skills and self-awareness needed when working with couples Available
This training will focus on skills and interventions needed when helping couples navigate and problem solve. Often people seek help when the relationship has been in “free fall” for a while, and they are looking for miracles. They will often come to counselling sessions with hurt, a lot of mixed emotions, a breakdown in communication, false expectations, anger, fear, affairs, and sexual issues to name some reasons people seek help.
Working with couples is more diverse and varied than working with individuals. You need a different set of tools, interventions, courage, self-awareness, confidence, and problem-solving skills. We all come to couples work with our own stories, prejudices, judgements, liking one client more that the other. But trusting your training and being self-aware can help couples move forward, resolve conflict, have a deeper understanding of each other, and a renewed commitment to the relationship so ultimately making the relationship stronger. This training provides a safe space to learn new skills and self-awareness when working with couples. This training is ideal for those considering expanding their skills to begin working with couples as well as more established practitioners already doing couple work.
The training is geared towards trainee and qualified counsellors. However, those involved in the pastoral care of married couples might find many of the ideas presented quite useful.
Working with loss and grief Available
Loss and grief are part of nearly every life event explored in counselling or supported pastorally - from relationship break-up to chronic illness, gender issues to redundancy, death to infertility, there is always change and so in some way loss and grief.
Grief is therefore a natural and universal experience, but also unique, following no set-pattern or model and for our clients often one of the most difficult of experiences, as CS Lewis said “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
This training is a chance to study (again) at loss and grief, exploring them in this wider context, looking at:
- the counsellors’ and clients’ understanding of the grief process and its purpose
- the impacts of grief physically, psychologically, cognitively, relationally and spiritually
- how we can help clients to grieve well and move to that place of changed meaning and hope
- barriers to the grief process and interactions with trauma, anxiety, attachment, etc.
- looking at tools and practices that can help clients with grief
- looking after ourselves when working with loss and grief
We will also look at different types of grief, including traumatic, anticipatory, disenfranchised, cumulative, complicated, and some of the specific issues and difficulties that arise and how we work with clients in these situations.
The training will include teaching, group work and discussion, case studies and personal exercises.
Friday 20th Sep, 2024, 09:15 - 16:30
Integration of faith into therapy Available
Gaining competence to assess and explore spiritual matters with our clients is the aim of this essential training. I am often asked by trainees and supervisees how and when to explore spiritual issues with clients. Some secular training doesn’t encourage such an exploration leaving counsellors unsure how or if they are ‘allowed’ to explore spiritual matters with clients when God is in the room. Likewise, some Christian counselling training doesn’t adequately address the safe integration of faith into therapy. Learning how and when to safely address a client’s religious history, personal faith or spiritual concerns is an area of angst for many therapists who are fearful of being accused of inappropriately bringing God into the counselling conversation. It is important not to miss vital opportunities to fully support our clients in their spiritual journey.
Trust and betrayal Available
During this two-day training we will look at different ways in which our trust and confidence has been broken, and the ongoing effect this can have on our relationships and the way we live our lives. The training will include issues such as:
- Broken promises
- Broken confidences
- Scapegoating
- Infidelity
- Ghosting
- Finances
- False witness
The training will include video testimony from different people who have experienced betrayal and the impact on their sense of self. We will explore the pain caused within individual relationships and also groups, including churches. Together we will look at how to work with clients to help them recover and experience healing from deep wounds, finding ways to move forward to trust again. Pauline will also share creative ways of working on these key issues.
Working with trauma Available
We will look at the different models used when working with trauma survivors and the latest research. We will have times of discussion where you can contribute your own experiences of working with this client group and there will be the opportunity to share skills, so that we can improve our practice.
Using the reflective therapy workbook, we will explore our own journeys and look at the ways in which we may support our clients on their journeys.
During the two days Kate will also facilitate somatic movement sessions.
Somatics is a slow and controlled way of contracting and releasing muscles that promotes freedom of movement and pain relief. This can be very effective for clients in releasing frozen trauma and emotions that are stored in the body.
These movement sessions are not exercise classes and you do not need any level of fitness to participate. Please wear comfortable clothes.
Love, intimacy and sex in the counselling room Available
This training will explore elements of working with clients on issues related to sex and intimacy, and will delve into current theorists discussing sex and intimacy, and consider different cultural narratives surrounding these topics. Elements such as common issues in psychosexual therapy, mindfulness, porn, masturbation, sexual addiction will also be explored. It will include personal reflection on our own relationship with sex and intimacy, discussion, research, and current practice information, and also when to refer clients elsewhere and available resources for referrals.
We will also address current developments and discussions on working with clients with intimacy and sex questions who are in transition, e.g. after converting to Christianity, or moving out of church-based environments perceived as controlling.
Additionally, there will be an overview of common themes within the genre, with a brief link to the Bible and Christian mystics.
This training is suitable for counsellors and psychotherapists who work with individuals and/or couples and would like to join Rosie for a journey of learning and growth in understanding intimacy through a lens of a Christian psychosexual therapist.
Solution focused therapy Available
Solution Focused Brief Therapy has been around since late 1970s, developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg. During Covid, Elliott Connie and Adam Froerer who are psychotherapists have now come to the fore with online training on Solution Focused Therapy.
Delegates will have time to explore the practice of SFT and how could this work within their own practice or could it?
This is not a problem-solving approach, but solution focused. This will be a different mindset for some as SFT has an overarching attitude of finding hope and has principles 3 of which are:
- If it's not broken, don't fix it.
- If something is working, do more of it.
- If it's not working, do something different.
SFT’s emphasis is on what is changeable and possible.
Learning outcomes:
- Gain an understanding and background of SFT
- Gain an understanding of differences between problem focused and solution focused approaches
- Gain insight of the 7 pillars of SFT
- Gain insight of the assumption about change and about helping within SFT
- Gain insight of the questions to ask
“Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24-25 (NIV)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion and interactive reflective practice including whether this fits with your Christian approach.
Counsellors “bearing” in a broken world, addressing spiritual abuse Available
This 2-day training on spiritual abuse seeks to equip counsellors/psychotherapists to work well as Christians in one of the most challenging areas of practice. The training will provide space for delegates to reflect as they may wish to on the impact of spiritual abuse in their personal experience. We will cover:
- Bearing Witness to what it is and isn’t, similarities and differences to other forms of abuse.
- Bearing witness to how it presents in our clients, acknowledging the damage.
- Bearing the burden, walking alongside our clients.
- Discussing the way our faith directs us and allows us to keep our bearings and influences our clients’ bearings.
- Discussing the way theories of counselling and therapeutic techniques provides effective bearing on spiritual abuse.
- Bearing God’s image, seeing beauty in brokenness, resourcing our clients.
- Discussing self-care and secondary trauma as a result of bearing, reflecting on the impact of our clients’ stories on us and the way our own stories are impacted and triggered in our bearing of others’ stories.
- Bearing hope in the midst of grief, using our greatest clinical tool, our presence.
Continuous becoming Available
“Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature. Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things.” - St Augustine
All psychotherapy is about managing change – whether processing unstoppable change or carrying unchanging burdens. At the pivot of pain is the potential loss of faith in what is Stable and what is Unstable, Known and Unknowable, what Passes and what Endures, ‘What-Might-Be’ and ‘What-Just-Is’.
The Continuous Becoming Frame was developed by psychotherapist Pamela Gawler-Wright from observing deep structural patterns in hundreds of cases where recovery from patterns of suffering seemed hopeless. This easily applied, organic assessment tool generates a systemic conceptualisation method for individual, couple and family cases. It invites client-lead interventions that harness the natural momentum of inevitable change even with our most complex cases, such as depression, trauma and addiction.
Day 1:
- Understanding Continuous Becoming from our own life experience
- Identifying challenge to faith within the process of spiritual growth
- Stories, tools and experiential application
Day 2:
- Utilising the Continuous Becoming Frame in case conceptualisation
- Harnessing the dynamic relationship of stable and unstable factors
- Precision and effectiveness in promoting clients’ healing and growth
Clinical Supervision conditions
By attending, all participants agree to:
- Be willing to reflect on own experience and personal challenge before seeking to apply skills to others’ lives
- Maintain confidentiality of all clinical and personal information shared in the training – strictly no sound or video recording
How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community Available
The Theology & Counselling Department of London School of Theology will set out to demonstrate the potential universality of the REMA model, with the working title being: How the REMA Model works in, on and through individuals to the benefit of our collective community. The acronym (REMA) is represented as follows: R – Relational; E – Embodiment; M – Meaning; A – Agency. The model was developed at London School of Theology about 15 years ago and offers an approach that helps us to deepen and nurture the integration of our psychotherapeutic theory and practice, with well-grounded theology. Through a blend of theory, discussion and creative activities we will be exploring together how the REMA Model might be used to help us to reflect, both theologically and therapeutically, on the continued search for the unique, valued person within one and all of us.
This will be an opportunity to show the versatility of our REMA Model at work, as it sets about to address the unique needs of each unique individual, such as colour, ethnicity, gender, faith/spirituality, sexuality and economic status. In an ‘ideal’ world, following the successful use of the REMA Model, the unique individual becomes aware of who they are as well as what they can offer their various collective communities.
Skills and self-awareness needed when working with couples Available
This training will focus on skills and interventions needed when helping couples navigate and problem solve. Often people seek help when the relationship has been in “free fall” for a while, and they are looking for miracles. They will often come to counselling sessions with hurt, a lot of mixed emotions, a breakdown in communication, false expectations, anger, fear, affairs, and sexual issues to name some reasons people seek help.
Working with couples is more diverse and varied than working with individuals. You need a different set of tools, interventions, courage, self-awareness, confidence, and problem-solving skills. We all come to couples work with our own stories, prejudices, judgements, liking one client more that the other. But trusting your training and being self-aware can help couples move forward, resolve conflict, have a deeper understanding of each other, and a renewed commitment to the relationship so ultimately making the relationship stronger. This training provides a safe space to learn new skills and self-awareness when working with couples. This training is ideal for those considering expanding their skills to begin working with couples as well as more established practitioners already doing couple work.
The training is geared towards trainee and qualified counsellors. However, those involved in the pastoral care of married couples might find many of the ideas presented quite useful.
Working with loss and grief Available
Loss and grief are part of nearly every life event explored in counselling or supported pastorally - from relationship break-up to chronic illness, gender issues to redundancy, death to infertility, there is always change and so in some way loss and grief.
Grief is therefore a natural and universal experience, but also unique, following no set-pattern or model and for our clients often one of the most difficult of experiences, as CS Lewis said “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
This training is a chance to study (again) at loss and grief, exploring them in this wider context, looking at:
- the counsellors’ and clients’ understanding of the grief process and its purpose
- the impacts of grief physically, psychologically, cognitively, relationally and spiritually
- how we can help clients to grieve well and move to that place of changed meaning and hope
- barriers to the grief process and interactions with trauma, anxiety, attachment, etc.
- looking at tools and practices that can help clients with grief
- looking after ourselves when working with loss and grief
We will also look at different types of grief, including traumatic, anticipatory, disenfranchised, cumulative, complicated, and some of the specific issues and difficulties that arise and how we work with clients in these situations.
The training will include teaching, group work and discussion, case studies and personal exercises.
Early bird 2-day non-residential (Saturday & Sunday)
Available workshops:
Saturday 21st Sep, 2024, 11:15 - 18:00
Supervision: another level Available
Using the Systemic lenses of the GRACES (Gender, Generation, Race, Religion, Age, Ability, Class, Culture, Celebrity, Ethnicity, Education, Sexuality, Spirituality) we will explore the dynamic interaction within the Supervisory Relationship (SR) and how it brings out the best and worst in supervision practice. Where supervision has become comfortable or collusive, the GRACES will sharpen the supervisor’s ability to move towards greater collaboration and creativity. It is important for supervisors to not only bring their best efforts to the supervision of others but to look at the interactive processes within the SR; what we need and what we don’t need, identifying adjustments to make with and for our supervisees to enhance and sharpen our supervisory practices. No stone needs to be left unturned.
Should I stay or should I go? When relationships become toxic Available
In this two-day training we will explore how to identify the ways in which relationships become toxic and look at issues which stop people from leaving them.
The training will include:
- Childhood patterns and belief systems
- The narcissistic parent
- Controlling relationships
- Group dynamics
- Spiritual dynamics
- The place of commitment and loyalty
- Conflict resolution
- When to stay and when to leave
Chris and Pauline will share different ways of working with clients, including psychoeducation and creative tools.
Dissociation & dissociative identity Available
Dissociation is present in many conditions - making it invaluable to know how to identify it, what impact it might have and how to respond.
What is dissociation? Who is likely to experience it and why? What effects does it have on clients, their therapy and the therapist? How can we identify different types of dissociation and how can we work with them? Do clients always know when they have multiple “selves”, or might they be unaware of them? When is it okay to do the work and when should we refer on?
This training offers insights and practical information for discerning what, who, why, how and when of dissociation and dissociative disorders (DD):
Participants will be able to:
- identify dissociation and different DD
- distinguish between DD and other challenging conditions
- understand when it is likely and how it may impact therapy
- identify screening interventions and/or assessments
- understand the complexities and effects of its origins and development, including chronic, severe, ritualised and organised abuse
- differentiate between spontaneous and constructed forms of DID, and resulting implications
- appreciate the tasks and goals of therapy and recommended treatment models
- identify the skills, strengths and learning requirements for working with dissociative clients
- identify the help and support clients and practitioners need when working with DD and DID
- reflect on the distinctives of fragmented states and how to work with them
- reflect on the differentiation of wounded parts and spiritual activity
- identify further training sources, ask questions and interact!
Intergenerational trauma Available
This two-day training will use an Internal Family Systems (IFS) informed approach to explore intergenerational trauma. Generous and unhurried space will be given for us to expand our awareness of how intergenerational trauma has impacted us including our Christian identities, and an invitation to explore deeper healing and transformation for ourselves, our clients, our communities, our churches and the world.
This training will be highly experiential in nature, inviting curiosity and courage to turn towards the parts of our individual and collective stories that may have been hidden, banished, silenced, ignored, rejected and shamed.
Shame and secrecy keep us in hiding and disconnected. Love beckons us home with open arms, restoring connection with our true identity as God’s beloved children, paving the way for us to bring our pain and burdens to Him for individual and collective healing and redemption.
This training is for you if you have observed that there are generational patterns that seem to be repeated in yourself, your family and society and you are curious about how to start the journey of being a cycle breaker for yourself and for others.
I invite you to join me in generous, spacious and courageous space to explore and journey this topic, together.
Counselling mediation training Available
This training is for counsellors who want to explore another approach when working with people in conflict such as couples, families or within workplace.
There will be time to explore how to facilitate difficult conversations using mediation skills alongside the professional experience as a counsellor. When the therapy and boundaries are explained to clients, they state it gives them a confidence to proceed and trust the process with the counsellor/s.
The delegates will
- Be able to discuss the approach or method used and how to set up, manage, and use counselling mediation between two or more parties.
- Be able to understand negotiation and specifically principled negotiation and the benefits when working with couples or others in conflict.
- Gain an understanding of four different styles of mediation: formal and informal intermediation, transformative and facilitative mediation, and how or when to use each one.
- Explore conflict styles and the impact this has on communication between couples or groups of people.
“If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him-work it out between you. If he listens you’ve made a friend, if he won’t listen, take one or two others along so that the presence of witnesses will keep things honest.” Matthew 18:15-17 (MSG)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion, and interactive reflective practice.
Understanding and working with addiction Available
The aim of the training is to help participants have:
- An overview of the science of addiction (behavioural and substance); it’s genesis, its maintenance and behavioural implications.
- An understanding of implications for working with people who present with addictions - trauma, family dynamics, genetics.
- An understanding and experiential appreciation of therapeutic interventions. Practical suggestions for working with addiction in the counselling room.
- An understanding of ‘post active addiction’- the importance of building a new life.
Using spiritual and religious interventions in counselling Available
This two-day training is for counsellors who are looking to intentionally integrate a client’s faith into their counselling journey. Specifically it will focus on what it means to ethically introduce spiritual and/or religious interventions. Whilst we will consider 10 interventions overall, the focus will be on the ‘Big Four’ (Prayer, Scripture, Forgiveness and Mindfulness/Meditation).
The two days will give time to practise using these big four interventions in a structured way as well as opportunities for participants to engage in their own style. We will consider the impact of the Christian experience of both the client and counsellor using Foster’s Six streams as a framework for exploration.
The training will be a distilled version of a final year capstone program typically conducted with students studying Master of Counselling at Perth Bible College. The content will be a ‘sneak peek’ into a book scheduled for publication in 2025.
Exploring spiritual direction Available
In this two-day training we will explore spiritual direction from the place of retreating and deepening your own relationship with God.
We will look at the calling of spiritual direction and experience a few of the different modalities used, e.g. Ignatian, lectio Divina, Christian meditation. We will also discuss the training options available.
During the two days, if you would like to, you will have the opportunity to practise spiritual direction, both as directee and as director.
If you are considering a movement in this direction, or feel you are being called to this area of ministry, this training will be a useful discernment tool.
Coaching through change Available
Whether it is our work, family, relocation, health or something else, change is a part of our lives and affects us all at one time or another. Many of the people we work with are navigating some sort of change. In this training we will consider the place for coaching, specifically looking at dealing with change and how we can accompany individuals and organisations through transition.
Topics will be interspersed with different coaching tools and techniques.
Some of the topics we will consider are:
- How is coaching different to counselling?
- Different people deal with change in different ways.
- Why do people resist change?
- Bridges stages of transition.
- How are people affected by organisational change and how can it be done well?
Working with domestic abuse in the context of counselling, psychotherapy and pastoral work Available
This training will explore the new competency framework for working with domestic abuse and faith. It will give an understanding of different forms of domestic abuse and coercive control. Participants will explore the psychological effects of abuse, as well as the practical barriers that can trap victims. We will address issues of gender and intersectionality and expose some common myths about domestic abuse perpetrators. We will also explore domestic abuse in the context of Christian spirituality; understanding spiritual abuse and how Faith can be both a source of support and a tool of abuse. Participants will gain an understanding of how to support victims and survivors in the context of trauma informed care and safeguarding. You will learn to recognise risk factors and signpost clients safely to appropriate support. You will also learn how to respond safely to perpetrators of domestic abuse and how to maintain your own safety and wellbeing while working with these clients.
Sunday 22nd Sep, 2024, 09:15 - 15:15
Supervision: another level Available
Using the Systemic lenses of the GRACES (Gender, Generation, Race, Religion, Age, Ability, Class, Culture, Celebrity, Ethnicity, Education, Sexuality, Spirituality) we will explore the dynamic interaction within the Supervisory Relationship (SR) and how it brings out the best and worst in supervision practice. Where supervision has become comfortable or collusive, the GRACES will sharpen the supervisor’s ability to move towards greater collaboration and creativity. It is important for supervisors to not only bring their best efforts to the supervision of others but to look at the interactive processes within the SR; what we need and what we don’t need, identifying adjustments to make with and for our supervisees to enhance and sharpen our supervisory practices. No stone needs to be left unturned.
Should I stay or should I go? When relationships become toxic Available
In this two-day training we will explore how to identify the ways in which relationships become toxic and look at issues which stop people from leaving them.
The training will include:
- Childhood patterns and belief systems
- The narcissistic parent
- Controlling relationships
- Group dynamics
- Spiritual dynamics
- The place of commitment and loyalty
- Conflict resolution
- When to stay and when to leave
Chris and Pauline will share different ways of working with clients, including psychoeducation and creative tools.
Dissociation & dissociative identity Available
Dissociation is present in many conditions - making it invaluable to know how to identify it, what impact it might have and how to respond.
What is dissociation? Who is likely to experience it and why? What effects does it have on clients, their therapy and the therapist? How can we identify different types of dissociation and how can we work with them? Do clients always know when they have multiple “selves”, or might they be unaware of them? When is it okay to do the work and when should we refer on?
This training offers insights and practical information for discerning what, who, why, how and when of dissociation and dissociative disorders (DD):
Participants will be able to:
- identify dissociation and different DD
- distinguish between DD and other challenging conditions
- understand when it is likely and how it may impact therapy
- identify screening interventions and/or assessments
- understand the complexities and effects of its origins and development, including chronic, severe, ritualised and organised abuse
- differentiate between spontaneous and constructed forms of DID, and resulting implications
- appreciate the tasks and goals of therapy and recommended treatment models
- identify the skills, strengths and learning requirements for working with dissociative clients
- identify the help and support clients and practitioners need when working with DD and DID
- reflect on the distinctives of fragmented states and how to work with them
- reflect on the differentiation of wounded parts and spiritual activity
- identify further training sources, ask questions and interact!
Intergenerational trauma Available
This two-day training will use an Internal Family Systems (IFS) informed approach to explore intergenerational trauma. Generous and unhurried space will be given for us to expand our awareness of how intergenerational trauma has impacted us including our Christian identities, and an invitation to explore deeper healing and transformation for ourselves, our clients, our communities, our churches and the world.
This training will be highly experiential in nature, inviting curiosity and courage to turn towards the parts of our individual and collective stories that may have been hidden, banished, silenced, ignored, rejected and shamed.
Shame and secrecy keep us in hiding and disconnected. Love beckons us home with open arms, restoring connection with our true identity as God’s beloved children, paving the way for us to bring our pain and burdens to Him for individual and collective healing and redemption.
This training is for you if you have observed that there are generational patterns that seem to be repeated in yourself, your family and society and you are curious about how to start the journey of being a cycle breaker for yourself and for others.
I invite you to join me in generous, spacious and courageous space to explore and journey this topic, together.
Counselling mediation training Available
This training is for counsellors who want to explore another approach when working with people in conflict such as couples, families or within workplace.
There will be time to explore how to facilitate difficult conversations using mediation skills alongside the professional experience as a counsellor. When the therapy and boundaries are explained to clients, they state it gives them a confidence to proceed and trust the process with the counsellor/s.
The delegates will
- Be able to discuss the approach or method used and how to set up, manage, and use counselling mediation between two or more parties.
- Be able to understand negotiation and specifically principled negotiation and the benefits when working with couples or others in conflict.
- Gain an understanding of four different styles of mediation: formal and informal intermediation, transformative and facilitative mediation, and how or when to use each one.
- Explore conflict styles and the impact this has on communication between couples or groups of people.
“If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him-work it out between you. If he listens you’ve made a friend, if he won’t listen, take one or two others along so that the presence of witnesses will keep things honest.” Matthew 18:15-17 (MSG)
This training will consist of theory with skills practice, casework, discussion, and interactive reflective practice.
Understanding and working with addiction Available
The aim of the training is to help participants have:
- An overview of the science of addiction (behavioural and substance); it’s genesis, its maintenance and behavioural implications.
- An understanding of implications for working with people who present with addictions - trauma, family dynamics, genetics.
- An understanding and experiential appreciation of therapeutic interventions. Practical suggestions for working with addiction in the counselling room.
- An understanding of ‘post active addiction’- the importance of building a new life.
Using spiritual and religious interventions in counselling Available
This two-day training is for counsellors who are looking to intentionally integrate a client’s faith into their counselling journey. Specifically it will focus on what it means to ethically introduce spiritual and/or religious interventions. Whilst we will consider 10 interventions overall, the focus will be on the ‘Big Four’ (Prayer, Scripture, Forgiveness and Mindfulness/Meditation).
The two days will give time to practise using these big four interventions in a structured way as well as opportunities for participants to engage in their own style. We will consider the impact of the Christian experience of both the client and counsellor using Foster’s Six streams as a framework for exploration.
The training will be a distilled version of a final year capstone program typically conducted with students studying Master of Counselling at Perth Bible College. The content will be a ‘sneak peek’ into a book scheduled for publication in 2025.
Exploring spiritual direction Available
In this two-day training we will explore spiritual direction from the place of retreating and deepening your own relationship with God.
We will look at the calling of spiritual direction and experience a few of the different modalities used, e.g. Ignatian, lectio Divina, Christian meditation. We will also discuss the training options available.
During the two days, if you would like to, you will have the opportunity to practise spiritual direction, both as directee and as director.
If you are considering a movement in this direction, or feel you are being called to this area of ministry, this training will be a useful discernment tool.
Coaching through change Available
Whether it is our work, family, relocation, health or something else, change is a part of our lives and affects us all at one time or another. Many of the people we work with are navigating some sort of change. In this training we will consider the place for coaching, specifically looking at dealing with change and how we can accompany individuals and organisations through transition.
Topics will be interspersed with different coaching tools and techniques.
Some of the topics we will consider are:
- How is coaching different to counselling?
- Different people deal with change in different ways.
- Why do people resist change?
- Bridges stages of transition.
- How are people affected by organisational change and how can it be done well?
Working with domestic abuse in the context of counselling, psychotherapy and pastoral work Available
This training will explore the new competency framework for working with domestic abuse and faith. It will give an understanding of different forms of domestic abuse and coercive control. Participants will explore the psychological effects of abuse, as well as the practical barriers that can trap victims. We will address issues of gender and intersectionality and expose some common myths about domestic abuse perpetrators. We will also explore domestic abuse in the context of Christian spirituality; understanding spiritual abuse and how Faith can be both a source of support and a tool of abuse. Participants will gain an understanding of how to support victims and survivors in the context of trauma informed care and safeguarding. You will learn to recognise risk factors and signpost clients safely to appropriate support. You will also learn how to respond safely to perpetrators of domestic abuse and how to maintain your own safety and wellbeing while working with these clients.
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