Birkbeck Training Series 2024-2025
Starts:
Finishes:
Venue:
Online
The Student Counselling Service at Birkbeck, University of London launched The Birkbeck Training Series in September 2018 in response to need for specialist short-term HE specific training and a space for counsellors in the sector to meet and think together about the challenges of our work. This year we enter our seventh year in bringing the series to you.
The theme of this year’s series is the Psychodynamics of the body: When the body talks, how do we listen?
The body has traditionally been treated as a biological object. We experience it as a vehicle that carts our head around and we don’t notice (or ignore) it when the check engine light comes on. Others of us live on the surface our body, experiencing a shallow interface between our body and the environment. But it is through the body that we relate to other people and the world around us.
However, most of us live in our heads, which is why often we see a significant split between the treatment of the mind versus that of the body. It is for the same reason that we can find that much of the work we do with our clients can become a cerebral exercise, leaving out a crucial aspect of their lived experience and the impact that the countertransference can have on us.
So how then do we understand and help clients who come to us struggling with physical pain/ailments, dysregulation, those who have experienced trauma or attachment wounding and have developed defences to cut off contact with their bodies or are struggling to put into words the source of their emotional distress and are overridden with physical symptoms?
In a world of screens where people are becoming more disconnected from their bodies and more influenced in terms of how they should feel about themselves, therapy becomes a grounding space to bring attention back to two bodies in a room, the importance of understanding that how we feel begins in our bodies and re-establishing the link between mind and body.
The aim of this series is to focus on the embodied experience of our clients, to help them understand their body narratives in relation to their experiences, to develop a deeper understanding of the psychodynamics of body presentation in our work and to remind us of the impact and work our bodies do while working with our clients.
With that in mind we would like to invite you to join us for our 2024-25 Training Series.
TRAINING 1: The Psychodynamics of Self-Harm by Dr. Rachel Gibbons
Wednesday 29th January 2025, 9.00am-1.00pm
About the Workshop
This workshop will explore the complex psychodynamics of self-harm, focusing on its unconscious motivations, theoretical underpinnings, and the challenges faced by clinicians in its management.
Drawing from contemporary psychoanalytic and trauma-informed perspectives, the session will highlight how self-harm acts as a means to communicate unprocessed emotions, regulate overwhelming feelings, and provide temporary relief from traumatic memories.
Participants will delve into the role of early attachment disruptions, the symbolic meaning of self-harm methods, and the importance of understanding transference and countertransference dynamics in clinical practice. Through case studies, the workshop aims to enhance participants' empathy, improve their confidence in assessment and formulation, and offer strategies for therapeutic intervention.
This session will provide mental health professionals with practical tools to navigate the complexities of self-harm and foster compassionate, effective care.
About the Speaker
DR. RACHEL GIBBONS has worked in the NHS over the past 20 years in various psychiatric settings as a consultant psychiatrist and consultant medical psychotherapist.
She is a psychoanalyst and group analyst and current Chair of the Working Group on the Effect of Suicide and Homicide on Psychiatrists and Vice-Chair of the Psychotherapy Faculty, at the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
She was the clinical lead for the Halliwick Personality disorder in Haringey for 4 years. She is a national expert on the nature of suicide and the impact on the bereaved. She writes about self-harm, suicide and mourning.
TRAINING 2: Working with Disordered Eating by Linda Cundy
Wednesday 26th February 2025, 1:00pm-5:00pm
About the Workshop
According to the charity BEAT, approximately 1.25 million people in the UK have a diagnosable eating disorder with one quarter of these being male. There are many more whose relationship with food is “disordered”.
This half-day workshop will focus on these subclinical manifestations and explore parallels between patterns of attachment and self-feeding. While insecure attachment to food may not be the presenting issue nor immediately evident, it is symptomatic of more pervasive difficulties with self-care, personal boundaries, agency and mood that are often highlighted when a person is separated from their familiar others and environment.
Under-eating, over-eating, mismanagement of diabetes and digestive disorders, obsessive preoccupation with ‘healthy’ diet, and links between neurodivergence and eating are fairly commonplace. We will consider what the client’s body and body size might communicate about attachment and defences, linking this with Bick’s notion of psychic skin, and reflect on how this may be addressed in online or in-person counselling. Ethical considerations when working with individuals at risk of developing major Eating Disorders will be addressed.
Workshop Themes
- Disordered eating (rather than Eating Disorders); what this might look like and who may be affected
- The relationship with food as a portal into the client’s attachment history, coping strategies/defences
- The body as an attachment communication
- Working with these issues with a time-limited model online or face-to-face.
About the Speaker
LINDA CUNDY is an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist, clinical supervisor and independent trainer. She has twenty-five years’ experience of teaching, providing training, conference papers and presentations, and is the Attachment Consultant to the Bowlby Centre.
She is also an author who has curated and four books including:
Love in the Age of the Internet: Attachment in the Digital Era (2015, Karnac), Anxiously Attached: Understanding and Working with Preoccupied Attachment (2017) Attachment and the Defence Against Intimacy: Understanding and Working with Avoidant Attachment, Self-Hatred and Shame (2018), and Attachment, Relationships and Food: From Cradle to Kitchen (2021).
She has written a number of articles for professional journals and continues to be involved in training on a freelance basis and plans to spend more time writing.
TRAINING 3: Working with the Body in Mind by Sarah Benamer
Wednesday 26th March 2025 ,9.00am-1.00pm
About the Workshop
Much of what clients come to our rooms to process has happened to, or been perpetrated upon their bodies, and in turn shaped their minds. We are also not disembodied in delivering our services. However, therapeutically it can seem as if bodies are optional, and the inclusion of embodiment as an ordinary part of the therapeutic frame has been relegated. As practitioners confident in the verbal, we may feel less equipped in this ‘messy’ territory. Sometimes naming and exploring facets of embodied experience and identity can feel risky or taboo, and yet in not doing so we may unwittingly gatekeep what it is possible for clients to explore. The body-to-body relationship between the therapist and client, as individuals sharing intimate space over time is interesting terrain; a felt sense of each other that has been impacted by the new normal of online work.
This training will seek to explore the way in which holding in mind all the bodies in the therapy room can support the therapeutic process and include:
- Historical underpinnings - The body mind split that persists. The ‘danger’ of bodies in our profession.
- Developmentally how we ‘get a body’ - Attachment and body narrative.
- The Therapists’ body as the felt secure base for the work - Countertransference and regulation.
- Real bodies through the lifecycle - illness, aging, menopause, pregnancy
- Dysregulated and traumatised bodies - The body as consistent object, a means of communication and connection. The window of tolerance for therapeutic change.
- The Proximity Dilemma - Exploring the different quality to online work and face to face therapy.
- Clinical vignettes to illuminate what being curious about body narratives in the room may contribute to therapy.
- Knots that emerge in the embodied terrain - The therapist gatekeeping by omission. Boundary transgressions, Talking about sex, Naming difference etc. Recognition of our own growing edge.
About the Speaker
SARAH BENAMER (UKCP, MBACP, SEP) is a relational attachment based psychoanalytic psychotherapist and supervisor who works with individuals and couples. She originally qualified as a psychotherapist at The Bowlby Centre and has subsequently trained as a psychosexual and couples’ therapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. Prior to becoming a psychotherapist Sarah was a community worker, advocating for those in crisis within the NHS psychiatric system, and supporting individuals living with chronic pain, long-term illness, and severe physical disabilities. In addition to therapeutic trainings, she has an MA in Applied Anthropology, a grounding that informs her ‘participant observer’ approach to clinical practice. Sarah has a particular interest in the many roles of the body in our emotional and relational worlds. In her clinical and written work, she seeks to integrate psychoanalytic and attachment understandings with an appreciation of individual body narrative. Sarah is deeply committed to anti discriminatory practice, the accessibility of therapy, and theory that is relevant in the clients’ world.
Publications & Talks: Telling Stories’ Attachment Based Approaches to the Treatment of Psychosis (Ed), Trauma and Attachment (Edited with Kate White), Killing Me Softly; A Relational Understanding of Attachment to Pain in ATTACHMENT Journal, Not So Hysterical Now’ Psychotherapy, Menopause, and Hysterectomy in ATTACHMENT Journal, Skintimacy’, The Co-creation of a Therapeutic Skin (2021), Minding The Menopause: From Misogyny to Therapeutic Meaning Making (TRtogether 2024), ‘Embodied Intimacies’ in Expanding Psychoanalysis: The Contributions of Susie Orbach (2024).
Contact name:
Aditi Dhar