Working With The Helper’s Shadow – Workshop Content
An Exploration Of The Unknown Depths In Therapists & Practitioners
What It Means To Work With The Helper’s Shadow
Explore Blind Spots, Dumb Spots, and Hard Spots
Grow into the Complexity & Paradox Of Being Human
Practice Yielding Into ‘WHAT IS’
This workshop centers around the practitioner’s ability to be rooted in their own embodied presence, capable of setting aside a helping or a ‘fixing’ agenda, and learning to withstand the unknown as a doorway to a richer and more meaningful life.
We will cultivate an ‘active witnessing’ function, and strengthen our capacity to simply but profoundly accompanying another.
This is challenging but rewarding work: looking into own shadow’s in service of supporting the client’s ability to develop by facing their dilemmas, tolerating uncertainty and complexity, and accepting and entering the troubles they must inevitably face.
Examples of Practitioner Content
Embodied Presence
Relating To Wholeness
An introduction to the work of Marks-Terlow in Pscyhe’s Veil, we gain an appreciation for the importance of ‘nonlinear processes’ in our work.
Practitioner’s Mind
Learn about the function, the trouble, and transformative potential of Projection & Projective Identification in depth processes.
The Unconscious Self
Counter-Transference
Containing & understanding our own reactions to the inevitable and important emotional enactments and transferences clients have with us.
Deepening Into Processes
Learning how to 1) Join with the trouble 2) allow the trouble to unfold; 3) Hold the trouble in mind body; 3) Move beyond the fixed & familiar pattern.
Workshop Content
Working With Breakdown vs Breakthrough
in Transformative Processes
These are events imbued with profound personal significances. The unconscious purpose of breakdown is to present the self to the other for transformative understanding; to have its core distress met and understood directly – so that breakdown can become a breakthrough.
Working With The Dynamics of Overwhelm
Overwhelm is what happens when escalating excitations are pushed to the limit. This can bring about a radical unbinding of the ego, for better or for worse. It can unravel us, undoing old paradigms in order to make room for new ones. We will also look at the role sexuality plays in this profound inner state of being.
Understanding How To Work Effectively With Character Styles & Defenses
Our client’s character provides a powerful and unconscious form of communication, leaving its traces upon our interior lives as their practitioners. Their character is a nonverbal, ego-syntonic and powerful shaper of interpersonal space as well – through action as well as inaction. In depth work, character needs the ‘other’ in order to come into life, to make its mark, and to find its meaning.
Our Workshop Format
Reading Preparation
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Small Group Work
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Reflection & Consultation
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