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 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:

integrated theories of development and relational formulation from Cognitive Analytic Therapy
skills to identify and reflect on relational patterns emerging in practice
a mapping technique to visually explore relational experiences, and how these can influence or highlight presenting problems, practices and solutions.

This Training Includes: 

2 hours of pre workshop on demand video and learning materials
2 days of live workshop sessions. In-person attendance at: 208 Sydney Road, Brunswick, 3056, or online attendance via Zoom link. Workshops emphasise experiential learning activities and discussion. 9am to 5pm, 24th-25th February, 2025.

Who Should Attend:

helping professionals in direct practice with adolescents and adults interested and ready to enhance reflective relational skills
If you have attended “Relate and Reflect introductory training”, the material presented in this module will be familiar to you

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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:

Relational approaches from Cognitive Analytic Therapy to understand and address transference and counter-transference
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
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.

This Training Includes: 

2-3 hours of pre workshop on demand video and learning materials
2 days of live workshop sessions. 9am to 5pm, 12th-13th May, 2025.
In-person attendance at: 208 Sydney Road, Brunswick, 3056, or online attendance via Zoom link.

Who Should Attend:

helping professionals in direct practice with adolescents and adults interested and ready to enhance reflective relational skills
Workshops emphasise case learning activities and discussion, which involves reflecting on relational experiences in practice.

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Workshop 3: 28th & 29th July, 2025

Working Relationally with Complexity & Trauma

Cognitive Analytic Therapies’ (CAT) unique integration of theories allows for a multi-faceted, dimensional and dynamic conceptualisation of human experience and mental health. This module focus’ on how and why disruptive developmental or trauma experiences can influence relational patterns. When we are more attuned to our own, and others contexts and influences in the helping process, as well as 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 complex dynamics and “landmines” in the practice relationship and context. Resourcing ourselves and the people we work with to have accountable conversations about experiences and needs, leads to more trauma-informed, authentic and connecting experiences. This enhances engagement and scaffolds pathways for relationally reparative and trauma specific interventions.

You will learn:

identifying, formulating and responding in relationally and contextually aware ways to complex trauma presentations
Cognitive Analytic Therapy informed integration of dialogic and social construction theory and skills into relational practice
techniques to share relational awareness within a trauma informed framework and to intervene therapeutically – using the therapeutic relationship as an “envelope” for the treatment and delivery of reparative and trauma specific interventions.

This Training Includes: 

2-3 hours of pre workshop on demand video and learning materials
2 days of live workshop sessions. 9am to 5pm, 28th & 29th July, 2025.
In-person attendance at: 208 Sydney Road, Brunswick, 3056; or online attendance via Zoom link

Who Should Attend:

helping professionals in direct practice with adolescents and adults interested and ready to enhance reflective relational skills
Workshops emphasise experiential learning activities, reflection and discussion. Prior attendance in other Relate and Reflect training will be beneficial but not essential to attend this workshop. Contact us if you would like to further discuss suitability.

Register Now