Jenny Pillar will speak on "Loss, Loyalty and Love: Navigating the Hidden Complexities of Working with Adoption." Until recently, the law in the UK prohibited counsellors from working with clients where their presenting issue was adoption (whether their own or someone in their family). Now that the law has changed to allow counsellors to work […]

Gillie Ruscombe-King, group analyst and psychodrama psychotherapist will present some psychoanalytic and group analytic perspectives on play and creativity, and promote a discussion as to how these very important features of everyday life can enhance our clinical practice. Gillie has worked in the NHS and in private practice for nearly fifty years. She worked for […]

“When is it appropriate for a therapist to think about family work?” Systemic family thinking as a perspective, rather than a modality. Is it all about family? The importance of the broader social landscape: social graces, intersectionality and the importance of self-biography when working with families and clients. The importance of understanding the therapist’s positioning […]

Tom Tomaszewski is a UKCP-accredited psychoanalytic psychotherapist and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) Consultant working in private practice in Oxford and London, England. He specialises in supporting individuals struggling with addiction, dependency, and the effects of oppression. He recently spoke ‘On No’ at the 2025 Neuropsychoanalysis Association congress in New York. His paper, ‘Be somebody […]

This workshop is an opportunity to think about how as therapists we relate to our client’s bodies and the feelings that are evoked about our own. I will share the results and discussion of a research project which was part of my master’s dissertation looking into the lived experience of therapists working with clients with […]

Arguably, the ability to feel comfortable around the subject of death is one of the great gifts of life. As a human, you will face your own death and likely the deaths of loved ones. As a therapist, you will often hear about death in relation to your clients too. This brief talk will include a look at some of the findings from […]

Complex/multiple traumatisation and complex loss can cause people fleeing war to become highly dysregulated, lose trust in life and sense of self, be unable to relax, sleep or engage in life, due to powerful flashbacks and intrusive bad memories, and get physically ill from the impact of extreme overwhelm and loss. How do we work […]

In this talk Forensic Psychotherapist Anna Motz explores the taboo of female violence, and its denial, describing how the idealisation of women renders invisible their potential for aggression and re-enactment of trauma. This is particularly true for mothers, who are especially idealised and romanticised. The difficulty of seeing women, in their complexity, agency and capacity […]

In this presentation, I will introduce the story of my work with William Smith and the book, A Guilty Victim (Karnac, March 2025), that grew out of it. A Guilty Victim tells the true story of a man’s recovery from grooming and sexual abuse at a Catholic boarding school in Ireland in the 1970s. It is an […]