Embodiment, boundaries and relational space:
Self-embodiment as a relational resource in working with developmental trauma
A two day introductory workshop with Tim Sheard
Friday 10th and Saturday 11th October 2025
Timings: Friday 10am to 5pm, Saturday 9.30am to 4.30pm
To be held in London, venue information will be provided on booking.
Course Fee: £240 (payment online) / £255 (if invoicing requested). If you require an invoice you will need to send a copy of your purchase order via email to alison.marfell@acat.me.uk for your booking to be confirmed please.
Refreshments will be provided. Delegates will need to provide their own lunch.
This workshop focuses on how self-embodiment may enhance our capacity to engage creatively with the relational challenges of working with more dissociated, traumatised, complex or ‘difficult-to-reach’ clients. Simple self-embodiment exercises will be introduced and practised that can then be used in everyday CAT work and directly linked to reciprocal roles. Theory will be woven in from CAT, neuroscience and the newer trauma therapies but the main focus will be experiential, including learning from each other through integrating dialogue in pairs and the group.
CAT is recognised as a good model for working with developmental trauma and this is often a core part of CAT NHS practice. However this work can be very challenging as we are engaging with intense and fractured relational fields in which relational processes may include acting out, rapid state shifts, switching between intensity and absence and the dialogue may be operating simultaneously on explicit (verbal/conscious) and implicit (bodily/unaware) levels. There may be intense pressure to reciprocate collusively, both explicitly and implicitly.
This can lead to a very difficult or stuck relational therapeutic process in which the therapist may feel burdened or exhausted and themselves experience difficult states of being unable to think, feeling overwhelmed, unsafe or experiencing bodily symptoms such as fatigue, heaviness, sleepiness, tension, tightness, even pain and difficulty in breathing. Our usual relational skills can feel somehow diminished or disabled. We can slip into working outside of our ‘window of tolerance’ and begin to become dysregulated ourselves. This can be acute, in a session, or more extended over time. Such a collapse of relational space is clearly unhelpful to the therapy, it can be understood to be a form of collusive reciprocation and presents a danger of accumulated burden and exhaustion for the therapist.
The introduction, practise and exploration of simple self-embodiment exercises that can support CAT therapists in creatively addressing these difficulties and can be put to immediate use in CAT work.
An exploration of how this approach integrates into and broadens CAT theory of reciprocal roles, (embodied) counter-transference, projective identification and the therapeutic relational field.
Specific focus in the workshop will be around self-embodiment as:
Mediating relational affordances such as increased capacity to offer a sufficiently stable, boundaried, empathic and responsive therapeutic presence for the client to engage with.
Supporting therapist self regulation and widening of the therapist’s relational ‘window of tolerance’.
Mediating therapist self to self reciprocal roles and supporting the generation of ‘relational presence’
Increasing our awareness of implicit, body to body, dialogue such that we can actively engage with it rather than perhaps be passive or unaware/dismissive.
Using this increased awareness to expand our capacity to recognise and name core reciprocal roles being enacted on a bodily level within the therapeutic relationship.
Exploring the ways that trauma is carried, remembered and communicated on an implicit bodily level and reflecting on how ‘body to body’ dialogue may be articulated in the strange relational ‘grammar’ of projective identification
Giving insight into ways we may be taking on burdens from our clients and carrying them inside our bodies and providing tools both to work with this creatively and to reduce such burdening.
Beginning to open up perhaps new perspectives on reciprocal roles within an embodied relational field, on therapeutic and relational space within and space between, on containment and how relationship may be mediated through embodied presence
This workshop is introductory but extends over two days in order to ground the new skills and perspective such that it can be introduced straight away into CAT work. It is intended to offer follow up workshops for those who wish further to develop this approach.
Suitable for:
CAT Practitioners, CAT Psychotherapists, and Trainee CAT Practitioners.
CAT Foundation trainees may find this useful, dependent on experience - please email alison.marfell@acat.me.uk for further information.
Course Trainer:
Tim Sheard trained as a CAT psychotherapist in the 1990s, has a background in medicine, and has had training in body psychotherapy, transpersonal and constellations work. He co-ordinated the Bristol deliberate self harm project in which a three session CAT model was developed around the use of new ‘tools’: a set of diagrams and a counter-transference therapist self monitoring file. His teaching and writing focuses on embodiment as a creative resource in mediating important aspects of the therapeutic relationship. For an overview of his approach see Tim’s paper in the International Journal of CAT and Relational Mental Health Vol 4 p90-111
ACAT reserves the right to change programme content and presenters.
Please see ACAT's Event Terms and Conditions
