INTEGRA CPD - Michael Soth

One place now becoming available in monthly 2-hour Supervision Group for Experienced Therapists (monthly Tuesdays 11.25 - 13.25 UK time (Zoom))

From September 2024 a new group could form (15.45-17.45 UK time ), if there is sufficient interest.

Integrative, experiential monthly supervision groups with Michael Soth:

These small supervision groups run on a regular monthly basis (Tuesdays) online on Zoom. For the last 12 years there have been 3 groups with 4 participants each during each Tuesday (11.25-13.25; 13.30-15.30; 15.45-17.45). The third group is now coming to an end, so from September a new group could form, if there is sufficient interest.

Maximum group size is 4, to allow for regular supervision space and intense learning.

The CPD online workshop "Beyond Words: Integrating BodyMind and Relational Therapies" on 29 & 30 June is now open for bookings:

Workshop with Michael Soth Beyond Words: Integrating BodyMind and Relational Therapies

Online CPD workshop for practising psychotherapists from across the therapeutic approaches

BEYOND WORDS: INTEGRATING BODYMIND AND RELATIONAL THERAPIES

CPD Zoom Weekend Sat & Sun, 29 & 30 June 2024, 15.00 – 21.00 EET
with Michael Soth
in English (with expert simultaneous Greek translation)

Organisation & Booking: Greece: Dimitris Tzachanis - [email protected]
Organisation & Booking: rest of the planet: Michael Soth - [email protected]

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beyond-words-integrating-bodymind-relational-therapies-michael-soth-sblke/

Workshop with Michael Soth Embodied Relational Ways of Working with Psychosomatic Symptoms & Dis-ease in Psychotherapy

We are in the process of organising the next weekend workshop, entitled "Beyond Words: Integrating BodyMind and Relational Therapies". Keep the dates free: CPD Zoom Weekend Sat & Sun, 29 & 30 June 2024, 15.00 – 21.00 EET
with Michael Soth

CPD Zoom Weekend with Michael Soth: “Psychosomatic Illness & Dis-ease in Psychotherapy” - 13 & 14 April 2024:

The website for booking has now been completed, and is ready for you to visit: https://upliftingevent.com/

Please email me: [email protected], and I'll send all the details (workshop description and accompanying introduction, including information about the format, scope and learning objectives for this CPD event).

The main language for the event will be English, but there will be simultaneous translation into Greek. The times will be 15.00 to 21.00 Greek time (Eastern European Time - Athens), which is two hours ahead of UK time. If you are in a different time zone, please use the world clock to clarify how time zones and time differences will affect the timings for your location.

We will take a couple of short breaks (around 20 minutes) during the 6 hours, but we are not planning to have a long break. Please take that into account when planning your day in terms of lunch or dinner.

If you have any doubt whether the event is suitable for your level of experience, please email me. Generally speaking, we stipulate that you are a practising therapist of some sort, that definitely includes counsellors, coaches and other psychological therapists. As mentioned in the workshop description, I will think about how to turn the different levels of experience between participants into a feature, rather than a problem. The course will be more experiential than academic, although a good grasp of therapeutic theory across different approaches and traditions will be helpful. As an integrative therapist and teacher, I will combine, juxtapose and interweave models and concepts from different traditions.

Workshop with Michael Soth Embodied Relational Ways of Working with Psychosomatic Symptoms & Dis-ease in Psychotherapy

EMBODIED & RELATIONAL WAYS OF WORKING WITH PSYCHOSOMATIC ILLNESS & DIS-EASE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY

The booking website for this CPD workshop is now available: https://upliftingevent.com .
I have also updated the workshop description, and there is a transcript of a preparatory interview, as well as a short video (filmed in terrible low-light conditions in my container in the rainforest):
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michaelsoth_activity-7153555113809231872-8taz

Bookings and enrolments are coming in (from Greece, the UK and Pakistan, but also other countries), and there are 3 tiers of fees, with early booking before 10 March attracting the lowest fees.

Michael Soth on LinkedIn: Embodied & Relational Ways of Working with Psychosomatic Illness &… Embodied & Relational Ways of Working with Psychosomatic Illness & Dis-ease in Psychotherapy

Places becoming available: Ongoing Supervision & Professional Development Group (bi-monthly Tuesdays 10.00 - 16.30 (Zoom))

There is only one place now left available from March 2024 in this ongoing small group which has been meeting since 2019 for 6 days per academic year. Always connected with practice through the supervision element and parallel process, the CPD learning has been building from session to session, through the group discussion and Michael's input, occasionally in the form of hand-outs and other learning materials. Most current participants are humanistic-integrative in orientation, some more psychodynamic, so there is rich and significant diversity. Maximum group size is 8, to allow for intense learning and sufficient time for all participants to take space for regular supervision.

Dates for 2024: 19 Mar 2024, 21 May 2024, 16 Jul 2024

One place becoming available in monthly 2-hour Supervision Group for Experienced, Senior Therapists (monthly Tuesdays 15.45 - 17.45 (Zoom))

One place is now becoming available from February 2024 in this ongoing small group which has been meeting since 2012. Maximum group size is 4, to allow for regular supervision space and intense learning. This group has been restricted to senior therapists, and the current three participants (all humanistic in orientation) would like to continue the wide-ranging, personal-professional process which the group has co-created and its dynamic, reflective atmosphere.

Dates for 2024: 20 Feb 2024, 12 Mar 2024, 16 Apr 2024, 14 May 2024, 11 Jun 2024, 9 Jul 2024

Embodied & Relational Ways of Working with Psychosomatic Illness & Dis-ease in Psychotherapy

CPD Zoom Weekend for Practising Therapists with Michael Soth

Sat & Sun, 13 & 14 April 2024, 15.00 – 21.00 EET

in English (with expert simultaneous Greek translation)

Organisation & Booking for therapists from Greece: Dimitris Tzachanis - [email protected]

Booking & Payment for therapists from UK, US and elsewhere: Michael Soth - [email protected]

The therapist’s position: “I'm not a doctor.”

Even though counsellors and psychotherapists are traditionally expected to focus predominantly on emotional, mental and verbal communications, many clients invariably do bring their physical and psychosomatic symptoms into the therapeutic space.

After all, being ill and suffering symptoms and bodily pain very quickly goes beyond the physical and becomes an emotional issue, too. Illness makes us regress and we tend to feel helpless, scared or out of control, and most of us become more needy of emotional support. As therapists, we have, of course, no hesitation to offer that support, and that in itself is fairly straightforward.

When symptoms, illness and disease come into the therapy room

However, this workshop addresses those situations where the work goes beyond pure emotional support, and the therapist gets drawn into the tricky territory of the psycho-somatic and body-mind connection. Often, the recognition becomes unavoidable that the psychological and the somatic cannot remain neatly distinguished, but are in a constant mutually co-creative reciprocal feedback loop, in both illness and health. The psyche is embodied, and illness is a bodymind process: emotional conflict creates muscular tension and physiological stress; trauma creates intense neuro-biological activation affecting our hormonal and immune systems down into the microbiology of every cell. Our mental states are manifest and mapped into our bodies, and the state of our body in turn shapes and conditions our capacity for feeling and thought. It is now well established that developmental trauma early in life can create a life-long internal bodymind atmosphere that is detrimental to physical health and a predictor of chronic illness and psychosomatic symptoms later in life.

Because emotional and mental well-being are so interconnected with physical health, maybe the client has a point when they are bringing their illness, physical symptoms and bodily suffering to the therapist?

The minefield of the psychosomatic connection

So how can the field of therapy keep its task and focus only on the psychological processes as entirely separate from the body and its tendencies to manifest the emotional and mental subjective realities? How can the therapist turn a blind eye to the element of emotional suffering inherent in psychosomatic symptoms and illness?

As many practitioners know, this can become a minefield: on the one hand the client easily feels accused and shamed, as if the message is that they have created their own symptom and are responsible for it. In reaction against this common guilt and shame, many clients feel relieved by the idea that their illness is a purely organic, genetic, random physical affliction that can happen to anybody and has no emotional correspondence at all. The first category of clients feels totally responsible for their own symptom in an exaggerated irrational way, the second category refuses all connection and accountability in an exaggerated irrational way.

Getting involved with the body-mind problem in health and illness

As therapists we get caught and involved in these dualisms which are part and parcel of the client’s inner world. We cannot refuse to get entangled with these dichotomies, without the client feeling that we have removed ourselves to a comfortably safe, disengaged position, where we restrict ourselves to dealing with the psyche and leave the medical profession to deal with the body. The client will feel that this is an artificial distinction that fails to engage with the body-mind-psyche wholeness of their experience. They can only feel held by our care if we actively relate to the totality of their reality, and what matters to them. Physical pain and symptoms, psychosomatic disease and illness constitute a significant part of human suffering, and our clients need us to engage profoundly and competently.

The validity of the psychosomatic connection

With some illnesses - like hypertension, chest and heart problems, digestive illnesses, symptoms of the immune system - it is scientifically established that emotional stress contributes to their origin. With many other psychosomatic problems, like all kinds of pain, tinnitus, insomnia, chronic fatigue and many other unexplained symptoms, it is known that the intensity of the suffering can be ameliorated through psychological therapy that addresses the regulation and expression of emotion and de-stresses the mind.

Stress is the catchall phrase that supposedly explains the influence of our psychological body-emotion-mind state on illness. However, what is less well understood, is how our bodymind does not just respond to stresses in our current situation and lifestyle, but carries accumulated stress from the past, reaching all the way back to childhood. A holistic and bio-social-psychological understanding of stress needs to include lifelong patterns of the bodymind including developmental injury and trauma (what Wilhelm Reich originally called character structures).

Sometimes clients bring psychosomatic illness as a presenting issue to the therapy, sometimes these symptoms actually evolve in direct response to the unfolding therapeutic process, and the therapist gets implicated in them, e.g. “After last session I had a headache for three days!”

Direct links to body sensations and symptoms as well as body image come up as part of our work in sessions every day, in so many ways: tangible pains, tensions, trembling and shaking, breathing difficulties (hyperventilation, asthma), the physical side of unbearable feelings like panic, rage, dread or terror. There are obvious somatic aspects to presenting issues such as eating disorders or addictions. And then there are the psychological implications of actual, sometimes terminal, illnesses and psychosomatic symptoms and dis-ease.

The integration of embodied and relational ways of working

How do we work with these issues and symptoms in psychotherapy? What experiential ways of working are available to us, to include the client’s ‘felt sense’, their embodied self states, their body awareness and sensations, their physiological experience in our interaction with them?

Through including body-oriented ways of working into the talking therapies, we can learn to work with many of these symptoms more directly, more deeply and more effectively (as well as learning to recognise situations where the hope of ‘curing’ illness through psychology is an unreasonable idealisation).

This CPD workshop is designed to expand your understanding of the bodymind connection as well as offering a wide range of creative and body-oriented techniques to include in your practice.

It will give you a framework for thinking about the role of the body as it is relevant in your own style of therapeutic work, based upon the different ways in which clients as well as therapists relate to ‘the symptom’. Throughout the workshop, we will use roleplay of actual issues and dilemmas brought up by your clients. We will also identify and practice ways in which you can explore the emotional function and 'meaning' of your client's physical symptom or illness.

The 10 ways of relating to the (psychosomatic) symptom

Michael has been working with the psychological and bodymind connection of illness and psychosomatic symptoms for many years. In the 1990s he initiated a project called 'Soul in Illness', offering an integrative psychotherapeutic perspective, drawing on the wisdom which the different therapeutic approaches have accumulated regarding illness, both in terms of theoretical understanding and practical ways of working. He has run CPD workshops for therapists on ‘Working with Illness’ many times, and has developed a relational and embodied way of engaging with the client’s bodymind. In 2005 he presented for the first time his model of ‘10 ways of relating to the symptom’, which addresses the client’s own relationship to their symptom, as well as giving an overview of the different stances taken by therapists in the various therapeutic approaches that correspond to each of the ways of relating to the symptom. These ten ways of relating to the symptom, including the corresponding theoretical understandings as well as methods and techniques for intervention, will form the underlying framework for this workshop.

This framework is now almost 30 years old, and has stood the test of time. It is based on the principle that all ten different ways of relating to the symptom are therapeutically valid, but all of them are also limited and partial, and they all can be used defensively and therefore become misleading and dangerous in degrees. It is only their comprehensive integration which brings out the full potential of each, in concert with all the other - very different, sometimes contradictory but equally valid - ways of relating to the symptom. Over the weekend, we will clarify what these ten different relationships are, how to be sensitive to all of them as well as fluid between them.

This requires an appreciation of all the different techniques and ideas which different psychotherapeutic approaches have developed over the last 100 years in relation to illness. Drawing on a wide range of humanistic and psychoanalytic approaches (including Body Psychotherapy, Process-oriented Psychology, various schools of psychoanalysis and Jungian perspectives) as well as the holistic paradigm underpinning most complementary therapies, we will weave together an interdisciplinary bodymind approach which is applicable within the therapeutic relationship as we know it in counselling and psychotherapy.

Format, learning environment and scope of the weekend

This will be an online Zoom weekend, organised in Greece for Greek therapists, but taking place in English with simultaneous Greek translation, therefore all English-speaking therapists from across the planet are invited. Michael's work and workshops are integrative, therefore suitable and of interest for therapists from across the diverse therapeutic approaches and traditions. It will be most likely the participants will bring very different levels of experience to the workshop - we will try to do justice to this and attempt to try and turn that problem into a productive feature of our work together.

Although we will be online, communicating via computer screens, Michael's teaching and workshops aim to be as experiential as possible within these limitations. Over the course of the weekend, Michael will invite participants to volunteer examples from their work for supervision demonstrations in the middle of the group. Some of the work will take place in small groups. Experiential work and theoretical input and discussions as well as group process and skills practice will interweave in response to the emerging needs and priorities of the group and its participants. We want to be especially mindful of confidentiality, and commit to a shared undertaking that nothing from the workshop will be indiscreetly shared with others, other than your very own personal-professional responses to the workshop. Based on that understanding, we are proposing to record the workshop, so the recording can be shared amongst participants for future reference.

Watch introductory video: https://youtu.be/2acDXwk_lYc

Read more: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:linkedInArticle:7153552997468291072/

RESERVE THESE DATES in 2024:

Following on from the recent weekend on 'The potential and the problems of the erotic in therapy', we are currently working on possible dates for further Zoom CPD events, with the same timings (13.00 to 19.00 UK time) and logistics (in English, with simultaneous Greek translation) - we haven't set the topics and themes yet, but we have a sequence of dates, if you want to keep them free:

2 Mar 2024
3 Mar 2024

11 May 2024
12 May 2024

20 Jul 2024
21 Jul 2024

28 Sep 2024
29 Sep 2024

7 Dec 2024
8 Dec 2024

Here is the list I brainstormed for possible topics - feel free to give feedback and express your preferences:

• The Therapeutic Power of the Somatic Approaches, their Relational Complications and how to Resolve them [for your advertising friend]
• The Impossible Profession - why therapy cannot work the way you were taught it - the Inescapable Paradoxes Inherent in Psychotherapy
• Character Formation - an essential concept for all therapy - Reichian Theory updated for the 21st century
• Creative Therapeutic Approaches for Helping Clients Access and Express Feelings
• Practising Therapy at the Intimate Edge
• Expanding into Couple Work - developing an integrative approach to working with couples
• Working with Psychosomatic Symptoms and Illness - the 8 ways of relating to the psychosomatic symptom
• Narcissus Calls for Depth - how to work with individuals trapped in a collective epidemic of grandiosity versus nothingness
• When Ghosts Destroy Human Meeting and Intimacy - therapeutic & experiential use of the idea of ghosts from the past
• Between Mindfulness and Mindlessness - inviting BodyMind Fullness
• Integrating the Diverse Techniques and Traditions of Breathwork
• Your Wounded Healer Journey towards and beyond Therapy
• Applying Archetypal Psychology in Practice - an experiential, integrative, embodied perspective

Places becoming available in Ongoing Online Groups:

Ongoing Supervision & Professional Development Group (bi-monthly Tuesdays 10.00 - 16.30 (Zoom))

maximum 9 participants - currently maximum 3 places available from January 2024

23 Jan 2024
19 Mar 2024
21 May 2024
16 Jul 2024

https://integra-cpd.co.uk/cpd-workshops-events/bi-monthly-supervision-personal-professional-development-group-online-zoom/

Are you human?

Places becoming available in Ongoing Online Groups:

Ongoing Supervision & Professional Development Group (bi-monthly Tuesdays 10.00 - 16.30 (Zoom))

maximum 9 participants - currently maximum 3 places available from January 2024

23 Jan 2024
19 Mar 2024
21 May 2024
16 Jul 2024

Bi-monthly Supervision & Personal-Professional Development Group (online Zoom) meeting bi-monthly on Tuesdays on Zoom (10.00 – 16.30) maximum 9 participants - currently maximum 3 places available from January 2024 Purpose and scope of group This ongoing integrative group for counsellors and psychotherapists from different therapeutic approaches, orientations and trainings, m...

The potential and the problems of the erotic in therapy

CPD Zoom Weekend for Practising Therapists 18 & 19 November 2023
with Michael Soth

Organisation & Booking: Dimitris Tzachanis - [email protected]

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/potential-problems-erotic-therapy-michael-soth/

THE DIVERSITY OF RELATIONAL POSITIONS WHICH THERAPISTS UNDERSTAND AND OCCUPY AS THERAPEUTIC AND HEALING

A free Zoom presentation with Michael Soth followed by time for Q&A and discussion May 9, 18.30 - 20.00 GMT (UK time)

Many people, including many of our clients, assume that they are coming to us for treatment: in the same way they consult a specialist doctor for illnesses of the body, they assume that psychotherapists are doctors for the feelings and the mind. They assume they are paying us for our expert knowledge of psychological theories and techniques, which we will use to treat illnesses of the psyche.
However, over the last hundred years of modern psychology, a variety of eminent psychotherapists have challenged the medical model as fundamentally inappropriate, unhelpful and countertherapeutic for the work of therapy. They claim that, unlike in medicine, it is not the role of the objective expert that has a healing effect, but the quality of the person-to-person relationship between client and therapist, as two humans relating to each other in an (inter-)subjective encounter.
So that leaves us with a fundamental clash of paradigms and assumptions regarding the relational position, which a therapist might construct and inhabit for the maximum benefit of their clients’ process: should we take the position of an expert doctor, delivering an objective treatment? Or should we take a fellow human position that brings our subjectivity into an authentic meeting?

What relational space and position is truly therapeutic? And are there relational spaces, positions and assumptions which are detrimental?
There doesn't seem to be a compromise or integration of these contradictory paradigms. Over recent decades, the field of psychotherapy has remained split and polarised over these apparently mutually exclusive and irreconcilable positions.

However, as Michael will try to indicate in this brief presentation followed by a time for questions and answers as well as discussion, on deeper investigation we find that there are not just these two positions (medical treatment versus authentic relating), but that the field is even more fragmented, into a variety of distinguishable and qualitatively different relational positions, cutting across the more obvious divisions between the ever-expanding multitude of therapeutic approaches. Michael will invite us to wonder about whether this fragmentation beyond the two obvious polarities is a curse, or potentially a blessing that can lead us beyond the either-or paralysis?

Our hope is that within the fragmentation we may be able to find a pluralistic understanding of psychology that - rather than borrowing the assumptions of other associated disciplines like medicine - does justice to the essence of our discipline: the human psyche.

WHAT DO WE MAN BY ‘RELATIONAL'?

DATE CHANGED TO ONE WEEK LATER, DUE TO GREEK ELECTIONS:

Online CPD Weekend, now changed to May 27 & 28, with simultaneous translation into Greek, organised by:
Dimitris Tzachanis: [email protected]
Κιν. 6974789554
Email: [email protected]
Site: gestaltsynthesis.gr

Over the last 20 years or so, being ‘relational’ as a therapist has become not just accepted, but fashionable. Relational perspectives have had a significant impact across the field of psychotherapy. However, the wider its increasing influence has spread, the less clear it has become what we actually mean by ‘relational’.
The default common denominator would be the recognition that in therapy it's the relationship between client and therapist that matters, and that the quality of that relationship is a significant indicator of outcome.
However, whilst there is quite a lot of agreement that the therapeutic relationship and its ‘quality’ matters, this apparent consensus breaks down at the first hurdle: there is no such level of agreement as to what actually constitutes ‘quality of relationship’. On the contrary: there is a tendency for the traditional approaches to define ‘therapeutic relating’ predominantly within their own frame of reference, taking their own paradigm of relating for granted.

So in this workshop we will enquire into the diverse and contradictory meanings of 'relationality', and ask some clarifying questions:

In what ways can we think of 'being relational’ as essential to making therapy work? But we also hear from dissatisfied clients that apparently it can also ‘destroy’ therapy … how do we make sense of this?

How and why is the client-therapist relationship claimed as crucial to the outcome of therapy?
In what ways can this be considered to be fundamentally valid, and in which ways is it unhelpful or idealising?

When pressed, mostly ‘being relational’ tends to get equated with being ‘authentic’.
But, again, the question is: what kind of authenticity and - in practice: self-disclosure - are we implying, and isn’t it self-evident that if it is powerful enough to ‘make' therapy, it can also ‘break' therapy?

Or it’s assumed that ‘being relational’ is equivalent with being empathically reparative, providing accurate attunement (or interactive regulation of the client's traumatised psycho-neuro-biology) where in the past the client found it lacking. But how can a therapist claim to be repairing something in an all-accepting, all-nurturing way, unless they have previously judiciously identified and diagnosed a pathology or fault or flaw?

What idea of relationship do the different therapeutic traditions have? How do these ideas clash and how do they complement each other? Is there a coherent frame around the contradictions, especially when we are attempting to become integrative?

There is no getting away from the underlying paradox that embracing the therapist's subjectivity as a valid and necessary ingredient in a ‘two-person psychology' therapeutic process is a double-edged sword: if it can heal, then it also must have the capacity to wound, mustn't it?

In this workshop, we will open up the diversity of meanings that have been given to the idea of 'being relational’ throughout the 100-odd year history of modern psychotherapy, and attempt an integration that doesn’t brush over the deep paradigm clashes and contradictions across the field, but uses these towards a deeper understanding of the client’s conflicted psyche.

DEALING WITH COMPASSION FATIGUE IN PRACTICE
Helping you address the five fundamental reasons and triggers for compassion fatigue through detailed and specific supervision with Michael and with each other

Online CPD Weekend March 11 & 12, with simultaneous translation into Greek, organised by:
Dimitris Tzachanis: [email protected]
Κιν. 6974789554
Email: [email protected]
Site: gestaltsynthesis.gr

There are some deep and profound reasons why the practice of therapy may be considered hazardous for the practitioner and their psycho-biological health. Most therapists intend and attempt to work in a way that deeply and profoundly affects their clients' suffering. However, in order to do this, therapists need to open wide the door of empathy. That door does not just have one direction - through it pass the mutual impacts that client and therapist have on each other. By engaging with their clients deeply, therapists enter into and also absorb their clients’ inner world, their conflicts, trauma and emotional pain.
In a simple phrase which Michael has been using in his teaching for many years now: the client’s conflict becomes the therapist’s conflict (or in more psychoanalytic terms: bringing a holistic bodymind understanding to the countertransference, in order to access 'implicit relational knowing' and pre-reflexive intersubjectivity).
Compassion fatigue, vicarious traumatisation, therapist burnout and how to digest and process the psychosomatic load which is necessarily part of our practice - these were the themes of a previous workshop (you can find the workshop description here) and a series of articles written by Michael which were published in the UK some years ago..
Michael brings an embodied-relational perspective to these issues which are pervasive across the talking therapies, but cannot be understood or addressed comprehensively and effectively within a mind-over-body paradigm. Building on the ideas of this previous workshop, and re-visiting them briefly for the benefit of new participants, we will now apply them in some detail to your particular practice and way of working.

Paragraph for previous participants:
This workshop is an opportunity to deepen and experiment with your understanding as you apply your learning to your own practice and that of others. Participants from the previous workshop on the topic and those who are familiar with some of the material and ideas, will be invited to take the roles of observers and supervisors in relation to new group members who are joining for the first time. By challenging yourself to convey your learning to others, you will find yourself deepening your application of theory to practice.