Trauma & Transference: mapping their interaction therapeutically – 4 X 2hr meetings with Steve Potter

4 x 2 hours meeting weekly in November 2017

This series of four meetings (audience in one room and Steve Potter via live web) offers a framework for developing skills in consultative and therapeutic mapping as an aid to working with the relational dynamics of trauma and their re-enactment in the therapy, consulting or helping relationship.

It offers templates and a conceptual understanding of the methods and benefits of mapping side by side with a client as an aid to a reparative relational experience.  The art of therapeutic mapping is one which enables a ‘shimmering and hovering’ (Ryle referred to shaking the transference tree) between past and present, self and other, perspective and detail.  Skills will be taught in mapping the story and mapping the telling or sharing of the story.

Such work can fit within and enhance the framework of typical CAT practice but is not a replacement for a reformulation letter or diagram or the conventional rules of CAT.  Such work can also fit within the wider ideas of CAT informed relational work, contextual work and working with different therapeutic methods and modalities where a relational awareness of trauma and transference dynamics is helpful.

The seminars will review a relational understanding of trauma, dissociation and damage to self-development and identity drawing upon the work of Ryle, Leiman, Howell, Bromberg, Mitchell, Van Der Kolk among others. In that its focus is on the use of word maps (and writing from word maps) to re-word, re-voice and re-tell of troubled and broken experience there will be reference to writers who have made links between individual and collective trauma and fiction whether through novels, theatre and poetry (Kearney).

Particularly, the seminars look at the contrast on the one hand between: healthy, creative and expressive self-development of secure (intimate and social) attachment, working/workable identities and narcissistic solutions and on the other hand between harmful anxious or dismissed and disorganised attachment solutions, tight and dissociated social identity solutions and idealised patterns of narcissistic engagement with accompanying contempt.

Whilst there are a range of ways of working with trauma these seminars will focus on the way CAT mapping as a process can offer a scaffolding effect and a relational awareness that can overview and work with other types of intervention.

There will be a work book of skills of concepts for working Trauma and Transference and the process of mapping them therapeutically.

Use will be made of tried and tested mapping templates (hopes and fears, process maps for supervision and reciprocal role maps). There will be demonstrations of the use of mapping to help link the content of a clinical story with the process of how it is being shared and explored.

Participants should go away with new concepts and skills in the therapeutic micro-mapping of the transference patterns of self-association (this is me) and self-dissociation (this is not me) as part of the life-long management of an identity shaped by trauma.

Participants will be expected to do some individual self-reflective mapping practice of ‘therapy paralleling’ thoughts and feelings and to try out mapping as a co-creative process with clients or in supervision.

The course will use live interactive video material, demonstrations of therapeutic mapping and there will a web based work book to help consolidate skills.   Participants will number from six to eight  and will not go ahead if there are not enough participants.

Participants will need to sign up for and commit to the whole course and the fee per participant is $330 (inc GST) which needs to be paid before the course starts. Please note that the cost may change depending on participants.

The Presenter: Steve Potter is based in London and is co-director of the Jersey CAT practitioner training.  He is widely involved in teaching reflective practice and supporting and supervising various applications of CAT both in the UK and internationally.  He is a UKCP registered psychotherapist and supervisor. Steve has presented this workshop recently in London, Dublin, Finland, Spain, Gloucester, Birmingham, Jersey, Brighton and through a series of web based seminars for therapists in New Zealand.

To book a place/express your interest please use the contact form on In Dialogue website.