Primrose Hill Lecture Series are delighted to announce we’ll be back this October/November with one of the best line-ups we’ve ever hosted, all delivered digitally with a live audience Q&A.

The Lecture Series will focus on raising money for St. Mary’s Church – a vital base for outreach services to vulnerable local people, including the elderly, the homeless, and young people.

Therefore, participants will be asked to make a modest contribution for admission. “It’s our way of making sure the lecture series stays alive, stays as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, and continues to do its job of raising vital money for the church and its local community”, says Giles Watkins, Chair of the Lecture Series.

The Lecture Series is one of the main sources of income for the church, and has been fundamental in helping St Mary’s provide its highly admired winter homeless shelter, tea rooms for the elderly and free base for ground-breaking outreach programmes such as services for vulnerable youth.

This is an online event

Once you have paid your contribution, you will receive an Eventbrite Order Confirmation to the email address you used at check-out. This will provide you with the links to your Eventbrite E-Ticket, which in turn confirms the link to the event, start time and other details.

You will also receive a reminder email one week in advance. On the day of the event you will be given the final log-in details.

The talk will be followed by a Live Webnair Q&A. We will email you information on how to submit questions for the Q&A a week in advance.

‘How well are we coping with change and uncertainty?’

How do times of change and uncertainty affect us, and how can we best adapt to them?

How do we respond to loss and grief, and how can we process these emotions?

Does change affect us differently at different stages of our lives?

What techniques can we learn to rebalance ourselves when our lives have been knocked off course?

Deftly drawing on countless hours of conversations with their patients, and the latest social and psychological research, psychotherapist and author Julia Samuel will discuss these timely issues with psychoanalyst and writer Stephen Grosz. Join them for an illuminating insight into the way our brains process and respond to change, grief, and uncertainty — and learn how best to approach these challenges as they arise and confront us in our own lives.

Praise for Julia Samuel, and This Too Shall Pass:

‘A bracing, brilliant exploration of how we can adapt and thrive during our most difficult times … Samuel dispenses much wisdom and empathy about the hard times we experience … to help us better navigate the changes we will all face sooner or later’ — The Bookseller

‘Full of compassionate wisdom’ — The Sunday Times

‘A wonderfully important and transforming book — lucid, consoling, and wise’ — William Boyd

Praise for Stephen Grosz, and The Examined Life:

‘A combination of Chekhov and Oliver Sacks’ — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

‘If his writing is a measure of the humanity, compassion, and intelligence he provides in his consulting room then his patients are a fortunate lot … a rare mental health professional who can write like a storyteller — with simplicity, pathos, and suspense’ — Dr Lloyd Sederer, Psychology Today

Julia Samuel MBE is a psychotherapist and author. Her first counselling job was as a volunteer for Westminster Bereavement Service. She has subsequently worked in private practise and with the NHS, and in 1994 she became Founder Patron of Child Bereavement UK. Her acclaimed first book, Grief Works, tackles the topics of death and bereavement with clarity and compassion. Her recently published second book, This Too Shall Pass: Stories of Change, Crisis and Hopeful Beginnings, draws on her long experience of talking to patients to explore how we can learn to cope with and adapt to life’s most challenging milestones: from failing relationships and losing jobs, to parenthood and retirement.

Stephen Grosz is a practising psychoanalyst. Born in Indiana, educated at the University of California, Berkeley and at Oxford, he lives and works in London. Alongside teaching at University College London and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, he has written for the Financial Times, Granta, and Weekend Magazine. In his book The Examined Life: How we lose and find ourselves, he distils over 50,000 hours of clinical work into a series of absorbing, jargon-free stories. Translated into more than thirty languages, adapted for radio and stage, it became an international best seller and a New York Times Book of the Year.