Skills for Relational Practice

Workshop Training Calendar

Relate and Reflect are excited to offer a series of training workshop 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.

In-person Live Workshop: 16th & 17th March, 2026

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 live workshop sessions in Brunswick, Victoria, Australia. Workshop emphasises experiential learning activities and discussion. 9am to 5pm, 16th & 17th March, 2026.

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

On line Live Workshop & Consultation: 15th & 25th May, 2026

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: 

3 hours of pre workshop on demand video and learning materials
1 1/2 days of live, online workshop sessions. 9am to 5pm, 15th May and, 9:30am to 12:30pm 25th May, 2026.

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.

2 Half Day Online Live Workshop Sessions: 20th & 27th July, 2026

An Introduction to Relational Reflection

Interested in learning about relational reflection for helping roles? Want to dip your toe into Cognitive Analytic Therapy theory and approaches that bring relational experiences into awareness and conversation? These two consecutive, live and online half day, sessions give you an overview and taste for the key theories and techniques we teach at Relate and Reflect. Led by Cognitive Analytic Therapy Trainer and Supervisor, Lee Crothers, you will learn relational theory and how to apply this for reflecting on your own practice in a working alliance, supporting you in your helping role and professional development.

You will learn:

integrated theories of development and relational patterns from Cognitive Analytic Therapy
a mapping technique to visually explore relational experiences that helps to reflect on and identify repeating patterns in practice interactions

This Training Includes: 

2 hours of pre workshop on demand video and learning materials
2 half day, online live sessions, 9:30am to 12:30pm on Friday 17th and Friday 24th October, 2026. Sessions include didactic teaching, learning activities and group discussion.

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

Hybrid Online & In Person Live Workshop: 7th & 8th September, 2026

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:

A relational reflective mapping technique for identifying, understanding and responding to complex trauma presentations
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
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

This Training Includes: 

2 hours of pre workshop on demand video and learning materials
2 Day live workshop, 9am to 5pm, Monday 12th and Tuesday 13th October, 2026. Hybrid attendance available - online or in-person in Brunswick Victoria, Australia

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.

Hybrid Online & In Person Live Workshop: 9th & 10th November, 2026

Relational Reflection for Supervision and Consultation

Supporting other helping professionals through supervision and consultation to reflect on and grow awareness of relational patterns and approaches to practice can be enriching and a powerful method of professional development. This training teaches participants some core skills for providing clinical supervision and consultation with a focus on relational reflection. By integrating the relate and reflect model into the supervision and consultation approach, participants are provided with accessible techniques to introduce reflection on relational experiences and complexity in practice. The overarching aims of including a relational reflective practice approach is to enhance supervises understanding and use of the therapeutic relationship in practice, and support greater awareness and accountability when working with complex relational experiences and contexts.

You will learn:

An overview of supervision and consultation frameworks for contracting and delivering supervision in mental health and community care settings.
Techniques for integrating educative, reflective, developmental, supportive and relational approaches to supervision and consultation.
Cognitive Analytic Therapy informed theory and techniques to utilise a mapping technique in supervision and consultation sessions to support and lead supervisees and consultees in relational reflection within individual and group contexts.

This Training Includes: 

2 hours of pre workshop on demand video and learning materials
2 Day live workshop, 9:30am to 5pm, Monday 9th and Tuesday 10th November, 2026. Hybrid attendance available - online or in-person in Brunswick Victoria, Australia

Who Should Attend:

Helping professionals with a minimum of 3 years experience, ready to enhance supervision and consultation skills for relational reflective practice facilitation and leadership
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.