Transactional Analysis (TA) is a practical model for understanding how people relate to themselves and others, and why certain patterns can feel so hard to shift. It helps us notice what’s happening in communication, how early experiences shape beliefs and “scripts,” and how we can support clients to respond with more choice, self-compassion, and relational confidence.
Working with self-injury can evoke strong emotional responses in both clients and counsellors. Many practitioners report feeling anxious, uncertain, or overly cautious when self-harm is disclosed. Today’s training offers a compassionate, evidence-informed approach to understanding and responding to self-injury within counselling relationships.
Through a combination of theory, demonstration, and creative ways of working, participants will explore how dreams can be approached as meaningful emotional experiences rather than symbols to be interpreted. You will learn how to invite, explore, and close dreamwork safely, while remaining firmly client-led and ethically attuned.
As counsellors, we may sit with clients for whom spiritual pain is central to their presenting issues, yet difficult to name. This training day will help us meet clients in a spiritually literate, ethically safe and non-preachy way, with sensitivity to both the potential resources and the potential harms of spirituality.
We all play games - sometimes without even realising it. From “Poor Little Me” and “Look What You Made Me Do” to “Sweetheart” and “Hit and Run”, these familiar patterns of blame, avoidance, and manipulation show up everywhere - in our clients, in our families, and even within ourselves! Based on Eric Berne’s classic “Games […]
Step Into the Dance: A Warm, Experiential Weekend of TA & Gestalt
This full board residential weekend will include lively creative workshops, opportunities for networking and making new friends with other counsellors, great food, and a comfortable en-suite bedroom all to yourself.
Two of the most practical, relational approaches, woven together for real therapeutic impact
Join us for a friendly, energising weekend where Transactional Analysis and Gestalt come together in a beautifully integrated, deeply human way. Perfect for counsellors and therapists who want to enrich their practice with approaches that bring clarity, presence, creativity, and confidence.
Today’s training will describe and demonstrate 5 different ways of using artwork to help clients get in touch with their emotions and explore different situations.
Using picture cards
Using symbols
Working with parts of self
Using Fairy Tales
A guided visualisation
Participants will follow Pauline’s guidance to create their own artwork, sharing in small groups, and maybe with the bigger group, witnessing the variety of different reactions there can be to simple interventions. The training will also include how to introduce interventions, and how/whether to work with a highly resistant client, and those who plead, “I can’t draw!”.
Today’s training offers some new interventions for working with the Inner Child. You will be invited to explore how these might work in the counselling room by experiencing the activities for yourselves, sharing in small groups and perhaps in the larger group.
The most common presenting mental health issues in a doctor’s surgery are Anxiety, Depression, PTSD/Trauma and Personality Disorders. But what does a clinical diagnosis actually mean for the counsellor?
Today’s session will focus on how we can support clients who have been given a mental health diagnosis, without feeling out of our depth. Dr Chris will explore both the benefits and limitations of a condition being given a ‘name’, and what might present in the room. He will address what helps and what doesn’t, including common misunderstandings.
Research tells us that Burnout is increasingly present in life, not simply as exhaustion, but as a deeper signal that something in a person’s way of living, relating, or being has become unsustainable.
Why use nesting dolls in counselling? How many sets do you need to get started? How do you introduce them to clients? These questions and many more will be explored in this practical, back-to-basics training designed to help you use nesting dolls confidently and creatively in your therapeutic work.
What happens before we can remember?
The first 1,000 days of life - from conception to around a child's second birthday - are now recognised as a remarkably important period in human development. During this time, the foundations of attachment, emotional regulation, resilience and relationship are being laid.