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CAT East Presents
EMBODIMENT AND THE THERAPEUTIC SPACE
A One-Day Workshop
With Dr Tim Sheard
The Dereham Room, Post Graduate Centre, Hellesdon Hospital
NR6 5NB
On Monday 24th October 2011 10am-4pm
(registration 9.45am)
Tim Sheard qualified as a CAT psychotherapist in 1997, has a background in
medicine, and has trained in body psychotherapy, transpersonal and
constellations work. His previous CAT teaching work has focused on working
with borderline issues, in particular self monitoring counter-transference and its
use in rapid reformulation. He co-ordinated the Bristol deliberate self harm
project in which a three session CAT model was developed around the use of
new ‘tools’: a set of diagrams and a counter-transference therapist self
monitoring file.
Limited spaces available – please book early
Light lunch included
I would like a place on The Embodiment and the Therapeutic Space workshop
*I enclose a cheque for £35, I am not employed by NWMHP
*I enclose a cheque for £25, I am employed by NWMHP
Please make cheques payable to: Norfolk & Waveney Mental Health Partnership NHS
Foundation Trust.
Name……………………………………………………………………………………..
Work setting……………………………………………………….
Contact No…………………………………………………………
Please return form to Alicia Garcia, Oak Tree Centre, Northgate Hospital, Northgate
Street, Great Yarmouth NR30 1BJ
Embodiment and Therapeutic Space
An exploration of how therapeutic space may be created and lost focused around how we
may consciously and creatively use our embodied sense of ourselves as a new resource
to free up stuck therapeutic process.
This workshop aims to hold a collaborative exploration of subtle but powerful questions about
how we as therapists open, maintain and relate to a therapeutic space. Therapeutic space is
most obviously challenged in our work with more borderline clients but the creative space in
which therapeutic work can occur can be more subtly, and perhaps insidiously lost with other
clients. This workshop will focus on the possibilities inherent in the conscious use of our physical
sense of ourselves, of our presence as a crucial resource in loosening stuck over-identifications.
As CAT therapists we are very aware of how diagrams can be creatively used in sessions to open
a powerful therapeutic space of joint reflection on enactments. This CAT specific therapeutic
space greatly enhances the capacity of both therapist and client to self reflect ‘live’ on very
charged situations . But despite this crucial resource we can still feel stuck or in some way
disabled or overwhelmed as therapists.
Counter-transference, and the pressure to collusively reciprocate, are very often experienced
through our bodies. Clients can quite literally ‘get under our skin’. We may feel passive in this,
worn down, somehow paralysed, or not be particularly aware of the burden in our bodies until
later in the day. This bodily burdening of the therapist, unwelcome in itself, also indicates a
corresponding loss of therapeutic space. Such unrecognised identifications become lost to
awareness and acted out in our bodies. Simple skills will be introduced with the aim of enabling
therapists to move away from a perhaps passive ‘posture’ in relation to such pressures towards a
more active engagement with embodied process. This may be achieved through using increased
attention to our own bodily awareness and simple techniques to increase our bodily sense of
poised presence.
These skills may broaden and deepen our awareness of our own embodied presence and the
degree of conscious responsiveness we can offer to the client. This can be seen as a form of
embodied mindfulness of ourselves when working with a client.
How we open therapeutic space, how we set ourselves up before a session, and how we attend
to ourselves and consciously maintain our therapeutic presence within
sessions seems to be addressed relatively little. Yet it has profound implications for our own
health and well-being and for the nature and versatility of the kind of presence we offer our clients
to engage with. Much is said about the failings in how the NHS holds therapists but the focus
here is on how we ourselves consciously hold and position ourselves in sessions with clients.
This workshop seeks to open up and develop new dimensions of resource within ourselves as
therapists. The skills presented can be used as a way of creatively addressing the challenges of
working with more dissociated, traumatised or difficult-to-reach clients. This work is also an
essential foundation for engaging psychotherapeutically with clients’ embodied processes.
In the first part of the workshop we will collaboratively explore how we prepare ourselves before
the client enters the room and how we experience ourselves in sessions with clients: what we
attend to in ourselves, how we are in our bodies and the modalities in which we experience
counter-transference. We will look at this subtle but profound concept and explore our
experience of therapeutic space. We can learn from each other in this enquiry and we will use
the discussion to build on and refine our existing skills and understandings.
We will then move on to the introduction of specific skills that focus on the therapist’s sense of her
presence and her being in her body. These skills will be demonstrated and there will be an
opportunity to practise and experiment with them. The particular practises taught will depend
upon the main themes which emerged in the earlier discussion but will focus on skills to enhance
the therapist’s embodiment. They may include grounding, physical poise, centre-ing, breath-work
and attention to the felt sense of different parts of the body and of the energetic or therapeutic
field.
This workshop is designed for qualified CAT practitioners and CAT psychotherapists but could
also be a useful learning opportunity for CAT trainees and those trained in other models.