ONLINE: Working with Challenges in the Therapeutic Relationship

Timings and Registration‍

This workshop will be 14 hours towards your CPD, and you will receive a certificate of attendance shortly after the workshop via email. There will be no formal registration. You will be placed in a waiting room once you click on the link and the CMF Team will add you to the meeting.

This workshop is priced at a flat rate of £239.00. For those in difficult financial circumstances, who may struggle to afford this price, please contact hello@compassionatemind.co.uk

Dates

20th & 21st November 2025

09:30 - 16:30 each day - All timings are according to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)

Level: Intermediate

About this Course

The therapeutic relationship is unlike many other forms of relationship we experience in everyday lives. We discuss pain, and are sometimes privy to experiences seldom, if ever, discussed elsewhere. While therapists are trained in this relationship, there can inevitably be many challenges. We may have an idea of what therapy may, or should, be, but often our work brings out the unexpected, and is sensitive to the individual nature of ourselves and our clients.

In this workshop, we’ll explore some of the common challenges we can face in our psychotherapeutic work, and how we can use compassionate wisdom to help us. It will draw on a compassion focused therapy approach, include both theory and practice, evidence base insights and personal reflection and exploration.

In this workshop, we’ll explore the nature of the therapeutic relationship itself, and how it is sensitive to particular kinds of challenges. Using an understanding of transference and countertransference, we’ll look at how we can recognise where and how it might arise, what it might be communicating, how it relates to attachment, and how we can work with – rather than against it – in and between our sessions. We’ll consider how compassion can help us to connect with all of our clients, even those we may find challenging or feel challenged by, and how we can utilise compassionate curiosity as a way of supporting our practice and remaining open to our clients. We will explore personal self-criticism and anxieties about our work as therapists to cultivate a more compassionate relationship with ourselves, and how the compassionate self can help us to avoid becoming blocked by self-criticism. We will also explore the role of fears, blocks and resistances, and the importance of rupture and repair in deepening our engagement with our clients.

This is a workshop designed for those who have some experience of working with clients, and with some knowledge of the foundations of CFT.

Workshop Leader:

Dr Hannah Gilbert is a compassion focused psychotherapist and trainer who also works as Community and Strategic Development Manager at the Compassionate Mind Foundation. Originally training in the social sciences, she has a BA in Anthropology and a PhD in Sociology, as well as an MSc in Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy. She has worked in a psychiatric inpatient unit, and until recently was a lecturer in Integrative Psychotherapy and Counselling at the University of Roehampton, London. Her research interests are in the therapeutic relationship, and in the anthropology of belief and mental health. She is a co-author of Mental Health, Spirituality and Wellbeing: A Handbook for Health and Social Care Professionals, Service Users and Carers.