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Talking It Better - From Insight to Change in the Therapy Room workshop with Matthew Elton

Talking It Better - From Insight to Change in the Therapy Room workshop with Matthew Elton

When: Tuesday, 16th March 2021, 1:00 pm

Where: ONLINE with Onlinevents

Ticket price: The self-select fee is a radical inclusion policy to open learning for all colleagues. The guide price for this event is £20.00

Clients – as well as therapists – often hope that gaining insight will smooth the path to making significant change. But all too often, even though gaining insight provides some relief, the therapeutic process remains stuck. This workshop will look closely at this type of therapeutic block, offer some ways of explaining it, and provide practical ideas for how to overcome it.

In particular, we will explore an analogy between achieving psychological change and acquiring complex practical skills, such as driving, sight-reading music, or playing tennis. In all these cases we recognize that just knowing the theory – the equivalent of insight – is not enough. To develop skills also requires practice. Usually, we have to attempt to exercise these skills “badly” before we’re able to exercise them “well”. Sometimes, as with tennis, to gain the skill we also need to practice with another person. I will make the case that the analogy has much to offer practitioners and their clients and, further, that therapeutic work can fruitfully borrow lessons from music, sport, and the learning of other complex skills.

In the workshop we will:

- share experiences of work where the gap between insight and change has arisen in the therapy room

- look at and discuss some case studies where the practical skill analogy has helped both practitioner and client make sense of and overcome stuckness

- learn about some specific techniques inspired by this way of thinking about insight, change, and stuckness

- reflect on some of the potential advantages as well as limitations of this approach.This workshop will be hosted on the Zoom meeting platform where we will use our camera and microphones to interact with each other as a group.

Matthew Elton, DPhil, PG Dip (TA Counselling), BACP Registered

Matthew Elton is a psychotherapist based in Edinburgh and has been in private practice since 2005 (www.extra-help.org.uk). He works with a wide range of clients and has a special interest in writers and artists. His formative training was in Transactional Analysis and he has since developed a strong interest in Narrative Therapy. Matthew regularly delivers talks and workshops in Scotland and across the UK on therapy practice and related matters. He has just published Talking It Better: From Insight to Change in the Therapy Room (PCCS, 2021) in which some of the themes and techniques covered in this workshop are explored in depth through stories of client work. Before becoming fulltime as a practitioner, Matthew was an academic working on the philosophy of mind at the University of Stirling, then a manager in the charity sector. He is the author of a well-received volume on the philosopher Daniel Dennett for Polity’s Key Contemporary Thinkers series, published in 2003.

To support practitioners in this time of extraordinary circumstances we are offering access to this group for a self-select fee.The self-select fee is a radical inclusion policy to open learning for all colleagues. The guide price for this event is £20.00, however, we appreciate that income varies greatly in different locations and circumstances. Please contribute what you can to help us maintain inclusive professional training.