CPD Credits
4
Event Type
Live Online Event
Location
Zoom & Recording for 365 days
Time
9:30 am - 1:30 pm
Standard
£80.00
Trainee/NHS
£68.00
Friday, March 1, 2024
The Impact of Breaks in Therapy
With Charles Brown, Linda Cundy & Joy Schaverien
This conference will identify and explore the different types of breaks that may occur in the process of a therapy. Breaks might include an unexpected break or a planned holiday, a tech dysfunction or the time between sessions. Each type of break carries its own unique significance and challenge for therapeutic practice.
A key aspect of understanding the impact of breaks is recognizing that client responses to the breaks are deeply influenced by their relational history and core patterns of attachment. Separations in early life and defenses to protect against them play a crucial role in shaping reactions to breaks in therapy from crisis to avoidance. By considering early dynamics, and dynamics in the transference therapists can gain valuable insights into how to effectively navigate and support clients during these periods.
Our speakers will explore how shifts from separation terror and anxiety can move towards a sense of ‘going on being’ and tolerance of breaks and how this can be fostered within the therapeutic alliance. By creating a secure and consistent therapeutic environment, therapists can help support clients to develop object constancy and resilience in the face of separations whether micro or macro and enable the client to use the separation as a positive experience of agency and growth.
We will have three presentations through the day each with a different emphasis and an extended Q&A of one hour to dig deep into the challenges that working through separations can present and the possibilities of deep internal change.
Programme
Programme
09.30 Introductions
09.35 Linda Cundy
The spaces in between: from separation anxiety to security
How clients respond to breaks in therapy encapsulates their core pattern of attachment and defences against separation. While some patients welcome time out, perhaps introducing extra breaks by missing sessions, others protest or collapse in the absence of the therapist. Unexpected breaks due to therapists’ life events are particularly challenging and sometimes catastrophic. But, while the regularity and rhythms of therapy help to create a secure base, the spaces between appointments are essential, holding different meanings at different stages of the work. Drawing on both Attachment Theory and the work of Winnicott, this presentation also considers the aim of psychotherapy and how breaks, including the therapist’s holidays and sabbaticals, provide essential developmental opportunities.
10.20 Q&A
10.30 Break
10.45 Charles Brown
Breaks in online ‘remote’ therapy: Avoidance, intimacy, and loss
This presentation explores challenges regarding the experience of breaks, online therapy practice to traditional in-person therapy. Referring to Freud’s seminal paper, Mourning and Melancholia, the presenter considers both macro breaks such as gaps between sessions, holidays and due to illness as well as micro disruptions and moments of disconnection in online ‘remote’ therapy. Charles will explore the more profound, unconscious ways in which clients and therapists respond to the experience of loss as it emerges through breaks in therapy.
11.30 Q&A
11.45 Break
12.00 Joy Schaverien
Breaks and the Repetition of Trauma: A Hidden Aspect of Boarding School Syndrome
Why is it that some adults, who attended boarding school as small children, may seem impervious to breaks in analysis? Abandoned, Bereaved and Captive, children in boarding school learn to Dissociate. This is the ABCD of Boarding School Syndrome. This is not a single psychological wound but a series of traumas that is repeated every term time and every holiday break. The pain of these broken attachments is such that, unconsciously, children learn not to be aware of their own suffering; they cut off from feeling. Many people are traumatised in childhood; and abandonment, separation anxiety and abuse are not exclusive to ex-boarders. However it is the repetition of these losses that makes adult ex-boarders particularly sensitive or insensitive to breaks in the frame.
12.45 Q&A
13.00 Q&A with all speakers
13.30 End
Charles Brown
Charles Brown is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, supervisor, and United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy Fellow. Charles is Chair of The British Association for Psychodynamic and Psychoanalytic Supervisors (BAPPS). He is also Chair of the Race and Culture Committee at the Council for Psychoanalytic and Jungian Analyst and a member of the College Executive Committee of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP). He works in independent practice in South London
Linda Cundy
Linda Cundy is an Attachment-Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, and author who has contributed to and edited four books to date. She has twenty-five years’ experience of teaching, providing training and presentations, and is the Attachment Consultant to the Bowlby Centre.
Joy Schaverien
Professor Joy Schaverien PhD is a Jungian Psychoanalyst, a Training Analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology (London) and a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology. Many of her publications focus on the links between art and psychoanalysis and the erotic transference and countertransference. Her extensive research on the long-term legacy of the trauma caused by early boarding includes: The Dying Patient in Psychotherapy: Erotic Transference and Boarding School Syndrome (a new edition was published in April 2020) and Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged” Child, (2015) which continues to be a Routledge and Amazon bestseller. Her paper ‘Revisiting Boarding School Syndrome: The Anatomy of Psychological Traumas and Sexual Abuse’ was published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy in November 2021.
- Psychotherapists
- Couple and Family Psychotherapists
- Psychoanalysts
- Psychologists
- Clinical Psychologists
- Psychiatrists
- GPs
- Counsellors
- Social workers
- Teachers/Educators
Linda Cundy
The spaces in between: from separation anxiety to security
Identify clients’ core pattern of attachment through their reactions to gaps between sessions and the therapist’s holidays.
Reflect on how to help clients manage their anxieties during breaks, taking into consideration their core pattern of attachment and phase of the therapy
Demonstrate why breaks apart from the therapist contribute to the development of secure attachment.
Charles Brown
Breaks in online ‘remote’ therapy: Avoidance, intimacy, and loss
Differentiate between breaks in online therapy and those in traditional in-person therapy settings.
Examine the ways in which clients and therapists respond to breaks in therapy, both consciously and unconsciously.
Apply Freud's concepts, particularly those from his seminal paper "Mourning and Melancholia," to analyze and understand the psychological implications of breaks in online therapy.
Joy Schaverien
Breaks and the Repetition of Trauma: A Hidden Aspect of Boarding School Syndrome
To be alert to the suffering and ruptured attachments caused by boarding away from home. This includes children in other situations such as residential care.
To consider breaks in analysis and how those traumatised by early boarding may react or apparently not react.
To consider how the therapist may need to attune to the client but be more active than in other analytic situations.
Standard: £80
Trainee/NHS/Subscriber: £68
Group Rates (for 4 or more): Contact lucysam@trtogether.com for customised pricing.
Trainee discount: To qualify for this offer you need to be taking a course which provides core practitioner training in counselling or psychotherapy that is at least 1 year full time or two years part time and recognised by the BACP or UKCP. TR Together reserve the right to ask to see evidence of training being undertaken.
Alumni: If you are a TR Alumni (TRAPC member) please email anitabruz@tavistockrelationships.org for a discount code to add at checkout
Your CPD certificate will be available to download from your TR Together account 48 hours after the event.