ONLINE: The Compassion Focused approach to Perinatal Distress (Oct 2025)

Registration‍

This workshop will be 21 hours towards your CPD, and you will receive a certificate of attendance upon completion. This workshop will be recorded, and recordings will be available for up to three months after the live broadcast for you to watch in your own time.

This workshop will be hosted via Zoom Meetings and all relevant joining instructions will be sent a week before the workshop.‍

Pricing‍

This workshop is priced at a flat rate of £329. For those in difficult financial circumstances, who may struggle to afford this price, please contact hello@compassionatemind.co.uk‍

Timings

All timings are according to UK BST (GMT+1)

16th, 17th and 23rd October 2025

09:30 - 16.30 each day

About this course

Having a baby can be a time of great joy, but also potentially a time of mixed emotions and difficult experiences. Changes occur within our body, brain, and of course in our lives too. These can be helpful and wonderful but can also make us feel unsteady, sometimes deeply so. The mind we, and others relate to us with, at this time can be particularly important and powerful, both in terms of ourselves as parents, but also for our baby too.

This workshop will look at the complexity of changes that occur when we become pregnant and have a baby and the particular impact of developing our compassionate mind during this important time.

It will give practical experience of how we develop the compassionate mind during the perinatal period with particular reference to some of the most common and challenging experiences. Knowledge of the basics of Compassion Focused Therapy would be useful.

Following this workshop participants are entitled to apply to join the compassion discussion list which is an international list for individuals who are committed to compassion focused therapy. It is not a general list of compassion interests.

Learning Objectives

To come away with some knowledge of:

1. The evolved motivations connecting the parent and child.

2. The changes that occur during the process of pregnancy and parenting

3. Working from a CFT perspective with some of the challenges people may experience in the perinatal period.

4. Practices that can help both the practitioner and their client manage what can be deeply challenging work.

Further Reading

The Compassionate Mind Approach To Postnatal Depression: Using Compassion Focused Therapy to Enhance Mood, Confidence and Bonding by Michelle Cree

The default response to uncertainty and the importance of perceived safety in anxiety and stress: An evolution-theoretical perspective. -https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27259803/

Brosschot JF, Verkuil B, Thayer JF.J Anxiety Disord. 2016 Jun;41:22-34. doi: 10.1016/j.janxdis.2016.04.012. Epub 2016 May 7.

Hoekzema, E., Barba-Müller, E., Pozzobon, C. et al. Pregnancy leads to long-lasting changes in human brain structure. Nat Neurosci 20, 287–296 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4458

Workshop Leaders

Dr Katie Splevins is a Perinatal Clinical Psychologist with experience working in Community Perinatal Mental Health Teams and currently in a Mother Baby Unit. She was also the Strategic Development and Perinatal Mental Health Clinical Lead for NHSE/I (North East and Yorkshire region). Since training in Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) with Paul Gilbert over fifteen years ago, CFT has been integral to her work with clients and organisations both within the NHS and in private practice.

Dr Alexandra Stanbury is a Clinical Psychologist who has been working in the Derbyshire Perinatal Community Mental Health Service for the last five years. Alex has spent the last 10 years using the CFT model with clients, in group work, consultation and staff supervision. She has delivered training to services on CFT for perinatal distress, persistent pain, and psychosis, and to management staff to integrate the compassionate mind ethos into leadership, team working and staff wellbeing.