Skills for Relational Practice
Workshop Series 2025
Relate and Reflect are excited to offer a series of training modules to grow your relational skills and enhance therapeutic practice. The therapeutic relationship has been established as essential for engagement and effective interventions. By deepening and broadening relational formulation and intervention skills, helping professionals can work more accountably and compassionately with a range of people and presenting issues, supporting connection and change.
Workshop 3: 28th & 29th July, 2025
Working Relationally with Complexity & Trauma
Cognitive Analytic Therapies’ (CAT) unique integration of theories allows for a multi-dimensional and dynamic conceptualisation of human experience and mental health. This module focus’ on how and why disruptive developmental and traumatic experiences can influence relational patterns. When we are more attuned to the co-constructed nature of relational experiences, we can work with greater relational accountability and complexity. This module will explore frameworks and techniques for connection and awareness amidst “landmines” in practice relationships and contexts. It will teach containing ways to share awareness of our own, and others contexts and influences in the helping process. Resourcing ourselves and the people we work with to have empathic conversations about experiences, hope and fears, leads to more trauma-informed, authentic and connecting working alliances. This builds engagement and scaffolds pathways for relationally reparative and trauma specific interventions.
You will learn:​
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A relational reflective mapping technique for identifying, understanding and responding to complex trauma presentations
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Integrated relational, cognitive, dialogic and social construction theories for understanding the complexity of experiences and responses that can emerge in the context of developmental disruption and trauma
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Cognitive Analytic Therapy informed techniques to build, scaffold and utilise the therapeutic relationship as an “envelope” for the delivery of reparative and trauma specific interventions
Workshop 2: 12th & 13th May, 2025
Working with "stuckness" in the therapeutic relationship
When we engage people in a working alliance, we need tools and skills to support the maintenance and functioning of the therapeutic relationship. As a container for intervention and vehicle for change, the therapeutic relationship requires tracking and acknowledgement as an enabling or blocking factor in practice. Utilising Cognitive Analytic Therapy tools, this workshop focuses on attuning and responding to dynamic relational patterns in day to day practice. We can all experience moments of “stuckness” where avoidance, drift, disengagement, rupture and repair occurs. This workshop brings these moments into focus, emphasising and practicing skills for compassionate curiosity, shared understanding, and collaborative discussion of transference and counter-transference for therapeutic progress and change.
You will learn:​
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Relational approaches from Cognitive Analytic Therapy to understand and address transference and counter-transference
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Skills to reflect on, and co-create a visual map in sessions with people you work with to discuss challenges and “reparative exits” in the therapeutic relationship
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Skills for working collaboratively and actively with “stuckness” in the therapeutic relationship: exploring the use of self and relational reformulation as well as working relationally in the "middle" of an episode of care.
Workshop 1: 24th & 25th Feb, 2025
Enhancing Relational Awareness & Skills in Practice
When we understand ‘the self’ as a relational, multi-dimensional being, we build capacity to see ourselves and others more fully. Cognitive Analytic Therapy offers frameworks and tools to identify relational patterns and reflect on our interactions. It brings into awareness the role of past relationships and how to visualise the impact and influence of these in the present. This workshop introduces participants to these key ideas and accessible methods to enrich relational practice and reflection skills. By building relational awareness we gain more insight and options to respond, rather than just react or repeat unhelpful patterns in practice.
You will learn:
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integrated theories of development and relational formulation from Cognitive Analytic Therapy
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skills to identify and reflect on relational patterns emerging in practice
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a mapping technique to visually explore relational experiences, and how these can influence or highlight presenting problems, practices and solutions.