Trauma & Attachment in Practice: Embodied Healing Conference 2026

Join us for a full day of immersive learning, reflection, and community at the Trauma & Attachment in Practice: Embodied Healing Conference 2026.

This conference stands apart for its focus on the application of trauma and attachment theory in everyday therapeutic practice. Our presenters are all active therapists, supervisors, and tutors who work directly with clients, students, and supervisees. They bring a depth of wisdom shaped by lived experience in the therapy room — work that is continually informed by theory, research, and reflective practice.

Across the day, you’ll experience a rich mix of experiential workshops, creative exploration, and embodied practice. Each session offers concrete, trauma-informed skills and tools you can integrate safely into your client work — while also deepening your connection to your own body, regulation, and wellbeing.

Workshops Will Explore

• The body’s language in attachment and repair
• Safe and effective trauma skills including pendulation and titration
• The role of sound, movement, and breathwork in trauma recovery
• Creative arts for reawakening connection and energy
• The use of metaphor in trauma recovery
• Somatic approaches to boundaries, supervision, and vicarious trauma
• Healing trauma bonds and codependency through embodied awareness

Our presenters — Kate Williams, Anita Duke, Jacqueline Harmitt, Mike Carrington, Charlotte Carroll, Preeti Bath, Dr. Sunni Patel, Fiona Breaker-Rolfe & Ros O’Hanlon, Ali Oliver, Emma Dowrick, Honorata Chorazy-Przybysz, Kelly Lane, Phiona Hutton, Pete Hayward and Claire Humphries — will guide you through engaging, trauma-informed sessions designed to inspire new ways of working and support your personal and professional growth.

Whether you are a counsellor, psychotherapist, supervisor, or helping professional, this conference offers a space to translate learning into practice — to renew your connection with self, deepen your understanding of trauma and attachment, and gather practical, embodied tools to take forward into your work and community.

Discover how embodiment, creativity, and compassion can transform trauma — and open the way to healing, integration, and authentic connection.

WORKSHOPS

From Noise to Nervous System HRV‑Informed Sound Practices for Regulation - Dr. Sunni Patel

Discover how immersive sound‑bath experiences can offer a gentle, embodied pathway to relational regulation and trauma‑informed care. This session explores the emerging science—HRV and EEG markers of relaxation, mood and attachment benefits—and how to integrate sound interventions into trauma‑sensitive therapeutic frameworks. Expect a blend of evidence‑based theory, live sound demonstration, guided reflection, and somatic relational exercises.

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From Limbic Cues to Secure Bonds The Origins of Body Language in Attachment - Emma Dowrick

In this workshop, participants will explore the origins of body language and the links between non‑verbal communication and the limbic system, and how these shape human behaviour. The session considers the role of non‑verbal communication in reparative processes and secure attachment.

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Vicarious Trauma in Supervision Recognising Risk & Building Protection - Ali Oliver

As supervisors, we strive to be trusted containers for supervisees’ most challenging material to support their processing and wellbeing. This workshop invites reflective dialogue on the supervisor’s unique vulnerability to vicarious trauma and practical ways to manage risk while continuing to meet supervisees’ needs.

Aims:

• Raise awareness of vicarious trauma in supervision
• Consider individual susceptibility and protective factors
• Share strategies to sustain the supervisory role and personal wellbeing

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From Polyvagal Theory to Play Art‑Based Tools for Soothing & Regulation - Honorata Chorazy-Przybysz

Based on a polyvagal approach to self‑soothing, this workshop provides simple yet effective ways to use the creative arts as tools for self‑regulation. While children learn self‑regulation through co‑regulation, this capacity can be disrupted by broken or insufficient secure attachment, leaving many adults with prolonged dysregulation and anxiety.

Creative arts techniques offer an alternative route to re‑learn regulation by shifting out of sympathetic activation using the senses, colour, line drawing and pattern repetition. Participants will need paper, coloured art materials, textured objects, and a small piece of clay for this theory‑plus‑practice session.

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From Numb to Noticing Art‑Based Steps out of Dorsal Vagal States - Honorata Chorazy-Przybysz

This session provides gentle creative arts ideas to use colour, doodling and more physically engaged art processes to gradually build energy and move out of dorsal vagal dysregulation. Low mood, depression, dissociation and apathy are manifestations of a nervous system withdrawing from connection. How can creativity help re‑create connection and bring energy up?

This workshop demonstrates why the process must be gradual and gentle, and how arts can offer safe opportunities to reconnect with the world, others, and Self. Materials include drawing pens, pencils, paint and oil pastels.

Transforming the Shame Cycle & Self-Attacking Beliefs - Ros O'Hanlon

Shame is often woven into the very fabric of a person’s identity when they have experience ongoing and unspoken trauma. Shame keeps a trauma survivor silent, deepening the secret of the trauma yet living out its impact. Within shame reside the self-attacking beliefs that perpetuate shame disconnect a survivor from others, the world and, most heartbreakingly, from themselves.

Shame and it’s self-attacking beliefs shapes a person’s way of being in the world, the way they cope and relate to others. This can lead to burnout, addiction, trauma bonding and much more. In this workshop Ros will guide you through experiential exercises to break the cycle and transform shame into self-compassion.

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Felt‑Sense Boundaries - Somatic Skills for Clients with Attachment Wounds - Fiona Breaker-Rolfe & Ros O'Hanlon

Clients who have experienced attachment ruptures, particularly in early life, often carry attachment wounds, poor self‑concept and low self‑esteem, and struggle with boundaries in many areas of life. Developing strong boundaries cannot be done through insight and willpower alone. Boundaries are an embodied experience and require a relationship with the body’s felt sense to enable choice.

Relational trauma sits in procedural memory, creating habits that can work for or against the person over time (for example, persistent difficulty saying no, guilt after asserting needs, limiting expression, or pushing others away).

In this workshop you will learn:

• How to help clients safely contact their felt sense so the body becomes a guide

• How attachment ruptures and wounds can manifest as under‑ or over‑boundaried ways of relating

• Somatic boundary exercises to strengthen boundaries safely while maintaining flexibility

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The Use of Metaphor in Trauma Recovery - Fiona Breaker-Rolfe

Due to traumatic experiences being intense, complex and often difficult to describe, or too overwhelming to describe using literal language, metaphor can be a safer language to use, often expressing the core of the experience in a way that words can’t.

With her experience as an NLP practitioner and clinical trauma therapist Fiona will explore with the group how working with metaphor can transform a person’s experience within their inner world. In this 45 minute workshop Fiona will provide a demonstration using clean language to bring a resolution through the use of metaphor.

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Tracing the Threads A Clinical Guide to Transgenerational Trauma - Preeti Bath

This 90-minute workshop offers a clinically grounded and culturally sensitive exploration of transgenerational trauma. Designed for therapists, the session will explore how inherited emotional patterns, family roles, and unspoken narratives shape nervous system regulation and relational dynamics across generations.

Combining theory, reflective practice, and experiential elements, participants will be invited to deepen their understanding of legacy trauma — with an emphasis on practitioner self-awareness, embodied insight, and the importance of cultural context. The workshop also considers how therapists can hold space for inherited pain while supporting healing, agency, and systemic transformation in client work.

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Humming, Breath and Ground: Building a Somatic Toolkit via the Vagus Nerve - Preeti Bath

Join Preeti for a deeply embodied 45‑minute exploration of the vagus nerve — a vital gateway to healing and regulation. Through a gentle blend of psychoeducation and guided somatic practice, this experiential session supports participants to connect with their nervous system in new and empowering ways.

Participants will be introduced to the role of the vagus nerve in trauma, safety and emotional wellbeing, and invited to feel their way into regulation via practices such as orienting, breathwork, humming, body tapping and grounding movements. Ideal for therapists, coaches and healing practitioners seeking to build their own somatic toolkit and experience first‑hand the shifts that arise when we soften into safety. No prior experience required.

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How Internal Parts Configure to Shape Attachment Behaviour After Sexual Abuse - Kate Williams

Through the lens of Internal Family Systems Therapy Kate will explore with you how a person’s internal parts can configure after sexual abuse to help them navigate a threatening world.

Clients of sexual abuse often carry a lot of shame and self-loathing, not only towards their inner ‘victim’ but they hate how their ongoing relational behaviour reduces joy, connection and intimacy. After such a boundary violation protective parts emerge carry highly sophisticated and strategic ways of being to, for example, keep a client alert through hypervigilant, safe through avoidance, or vulnerable and small through intrusive thoughts.

In this workshop you’ll develop knowledge and understanding to:

• Help your clients identify the parts at play that protect them

• Discover the vulnerability they are protecting

• Creative methods to explore protectors and the exiled wounded child / part

• Skills for developing self-compassion to promote choice within current day relationships.

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From Survival Patterns to Choice - From Survival Patterns to Choice - Kate Williams

Habits that are unhelpful, sabotaging and even dangerous are often part of a trauma survivor’s strategies for staying alive. Trauma can persist in the body with an “as if” quality—as if the threat is still present—driving procedural patterns reinforced by shame around perceived lack of willpower.

This workshop offers techniques to help clients change their relationship with habits and move beyond them. Activating the parasympathetic nervous system is a powerful way to interrupt unhealthy patterns and restore balance. Working within the window of tolerance, participants will learn mindfulness and somatic skills to support a bottom‑up approach to change.

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RECORDING

This conference will be recorded. This will be useful for colleagues who are not able to attend the event live and also for those who attend the event live and want to watch it again.

CONFERENCE ADMISSION

Choose your ticket price. Each ticket provides access to the LIVE event on Zoom AND Recording, along with your CPD certificate. Choose the fee that works for you: £25.00, £50.00, or £75.00.

ZOOM

This conference will be hosted on the Zoom meeting platform where we will use our cameras and microphones to interact with each other as a group.

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At Onlinevents, we and the presenters we collaborate with are committed to working in a way that aligns with the ethical codes and frameworks of our respective professional organisations. We expect all colleagues attending our events to uphold the ethical principles of their professional membership.

If you are not a member of a professional organisation, we ask that you participate in a way that is both authentic and respectful, fostering a space of mutual learning and professional engagement.

By registering for this event, you agree to be present and interact in a manner that reflects these principles.