22nd Annual ACAT Conference
26th June 2015 to 27th June 2015


This event is Fully Booked.

WARNING! This event has passed.

Keeping CAT Fit: Working with Embodiment in CAT Practice and New Integrations for CAT

Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street WC1 E7HX


Cost: Whole Event £195 ACAT Member (Online) / £225 Non-ACAT (Online) 

Booking deadline: Friday, 19th June 2015

*After the deadline, please contact the ACAT office for availability before booking online.  The office will be open during normal office hours until 5.00 pm Wednesday, 24th June 2015*

Please note that the Early Bird booking options have now closed


In CAT we work constantly with the idea of the relationship with the self and how that translates into self-care or self-neglect, healthy habits or dangerous risk taking, self-soothing or self-harm.  This creates an immediate link with the body and with the person’s physical health, so that information from the body can be helpful in understanding the person’s reciprocal role procedures, and working on changing those procedures can lead to changes in the body and in physical health.

At this year’s ACAT Conference, we are interested in exploring these links from as many different angles as possible.  

We would like to explore CAT as a model for working at the junction of psychological and physical health, and the ways that CAT consultancy can offer insights into the way medical and mental health teams can find themselves replicating the problematic relationship problems of the patients who present to them needing help. 

We would also like to explore the health of CAT itself.  How well are we taking care of ourselves and our shared model?  In the environment that we are working in, how do we want to adapt our model and influence the field to ensure that we are in the best possible shape?


Call for Papers 

Please note that the Call for Papers has now closed.

The workshops will take place on the afternoon of Friday, 26th June 2015.  

Concessions offered to presenters

•    ACAT Member: lead presenter only - £50 off the conference fee (this total amount may be split between co-presenters with the agreement of the lead presenter)
•    Invited Non-ACAT: free attendance on the day of the presentation; travel negotiable; one night’s accommodation may also be offered

Where a concession is offered, please be aware that it will not be possible to book online.  Please email Maria in the first instance: maria.cross@acat.me.uk


Provisional Programme (subject to change)

Friday, 26th June 2015
09:00 - 09:30     Registration
09:30 – 09:45     Welcome and Housekeeping
09:45 – 10:45     Opening Plenary: Susie Orbach - “There is no such thing as a body” - please see below for further details
10:45 – 11:30     CAT Discussion - Ruth Carson and Caroline Dower
11:30 – 12:00     Tea and coffee
12:00 – 13:00     Research Presentation: Stephen Kellett and Melanie Simmonds-Buckley - Treating sexual compulsive behaviour with CAT; a time series analysis of key relational markers - please see below for further details
13:00 – 14:00     Lunch 
14:00 – 15:30     Workshops (subject to change) - please refer to the downloadable document (below) for further details. Booking into the workshop of your choice is possible once you have booked your place at the Conference:

  1. Helen Jellicoe & Mark Walker - Listening to Embodied Relationships
  2. Stephanie Singham - The Age In Between: Using CAT contextually to support medical teams working with resistance and ambivalence in adolescents and young adults with chronic health conditions
  3. Vicky Petratou - What is an exit and how do we get there?
  4. Meherzin Das - A CAT group for Fibromyalgia: swallowing anger, exploding with pain
  5. Tim Sheard - The therapist’s body:  dumping ground, willing donkey…. or extraordinary resource?  A taster session of working with embodiment in CAT
  6. Rose Hughes – Physical Object Use in CAT
  7. Claire Tanner - The Starving Body

15:30 – 16:00     Tea and coffee
16:00 – 17:00     ACAT Annual General Meeting
17:00 – 18:00     Plenary: Steve Potter - Words that Touch: The Embodied Experience of Language when Mapping and Writing - please see below for further details
18:00 – 18:15     Closing thoughts 

Conference dinner from 7.30pm at the Hotel Russell (within a short walking distance of Birkbeck).  Please note, dinner is an optional extra and will incur an additional charge - the cost is not included in the conference delegate fee.

Saturday, 27th June 2015
08:30 – 09:00      Registration for new delegates
09:00 – 09:15      Welcome and Housekeeping
09:15 – 10:15      Plenary: Liz Hall - Working with complex trauma and dissociation, insights from sensorimotor therapy - please see below for further details
10:15 – 10:45      Presentation of CAT case of complex trauma - discussion - Alison Jenaway 
10:45 – 11:15      Tea and coffee
11:15 – 12:15      Plenary: Annie Nehmad - Neuro insights - integrations and implications for our model - please see below for further details
12:15 – 13:15      Research Presentation - Stephen Kellett, Kate Freshwater, Katie Ackroyd and Melanie Simmonds-Buckley - Cognitive Analytic Consultancy: Developing the evidence base - please see below for further details
13:15 – 13:30      Closing Remarks

Conference closes at 13:30


Keynote Speakers (subject to change)

Plenary Presentations:

Friday, 26th June 2015 | 09:45 – 10:45 | Susie Orbach - 'There is no such thing as a body'

Bodies aren’t given.  Like minds and the self, the way we acquire a body and how we feel about and within our bodies emerges out of the contact and experience of the bodies as we grow up.  These body-to-body relationships always exist within specific familial, gendered, class and cultural settings which form the emotional and developmental template for the taking up of a bodily sense of self.

Susie Orbach is a psychoanalyst, writer, activist and social commentator.  Her interests include the construction of femininity and gender, globalization & body image, emotional literacy and psychoanalysis and the public sphere.  She co-founded The Women’s Therapy Centre in London in 1976 and The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute, New York, in 1981.  Her numerous books – which present new theory on women, on the body, on the relationship between couples - include Fat is a Feminist Issue, Hunger Strike, What Do Women Want (with Luise Eichenbaum), The Impossibility of Sex and her latest book Bodies, and last year co-edited Fifty Shades of Feminism

Susie has been a consultant to the World Bank, the NHS and Unilever, and is a founder member of Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility, convenor of Endangered Bodies (www.london.endangeredbodies.org) - the organisation campaigning against body hatred.  She is an expert member of the steering group of the British Government’s Campaign for Body Confidence, and is the co-author of commissioned papers on the body.  She has a practice seeing individuals and couples.

These familial, gendered, class and cultural settings form the emotional and developmental template for the taking up of a bodily sense of self.  We will explore these themes in our CAT practice, with presentations on eating disorders, compulsive sexual behaviour, and how our CAT model integrates words and bodies in the embodied practices of mapping and writing.

Friday, 26th June 2015 | 17:00 – 18:00 | Steve Potter  'Touching Words’ - The sensory experience of reformulation

“When my hands touched the word sad on the map I cried.  Sad on paper, allowed sadness inside me without fearing it would overwhelm me.”    
This talk will demonstrate and explore the sensory experience of simultaneously touching, seeing, hearing and voicing the words we use to make our therapy maps and write and read out-loud our therapy letters together.  It will offer a multi-disciplinary understanding of what we are doing with each other in mind, brain and body when we re-tell, re-write, re-think, re-voice, re-word our feelings in the process of reformulation.  Every word, every gesture is like a little neuro-relational map.  Our process of mapping and writing in CAT is an analogue of what we naturally do in using language to orchestrate understanding.  Finding the right words is bodywork as much as cultural work.  Focusing on the sensory process of reformulation takes us to the heart of the mechanisms of healing and change in mind, body and relatedness.  There will be short videos of the power of ‘touching and voicing’ the words that touch us emotionally.  We will finish by looking at a ‘to do’ list of the implications for the practice of CAT and therapy in general.

Steve Potter trains and supervises people in doing and using CAT.  He co-leads the Jersey Practitioner Training in the Channel Islands.  He directs a number of projects around the UK and internationally focused on developing reflective mapping and reflective capacity for teams under the banners of ‘map and talk’ and ‘shared thinking time’.  He is Chair of the International Cognitive Analytic Therapy Association (ICATA), and has also been centrally involved in the CAT inspired website http://www.dearhomeland.com

Saturday, 27th June 2015 | 09:15 – 10:15 | Plenary - Liz Halltitle tbc

Liz Hall has been a clinical psychologist since 1974, working initially in the NHS and, more recently, in private practice.  She has over 30 years’ experience of working with clients presenting with complex trauma and dissociative states and co-authored the book ‘Surviving Child Sexual Abuse’ (with Siobhan Lloyd 1989, revised 1993).  Liz is an Advanced Practitioner in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and is the UK training organiser for the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute.

Liz will present the new understanding of the neurobiological substrates of trauma reactions, particularly early traumatic experiences.  She will also introduce the way a Sensorimotor Psychotherapist would work with this client group, based on this knowledge.

Our CAT model needs to come into contact with other bodies of theory and practice to remain in good health.  We will have contributions from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, trauma theory and neuroscience to look at how we might integrate these models and insights helpfully into our CAT frame.

Saturday, 27th June 2015 | 11:15 – 12:15 | Plenary - Annie Nehmad - Keeping Fit and Keeping Up: Why neurobiology is important to CAT

CAT’s strength, from its earliest days, was its incorporation of theory and practice from different models into an integrated whole.  In the last two decades, technological advances have enabled scientists to find out what actually happens in the brain; eg adults who had an emotionally deprived childhood have less “white matter” (connective fibres) in the brain.  But these fibres grow, as the result of effective psychotherapy – an example of neuroplasticity.  A neurobiological understanding can inform the theory and practice of CAT – in fact I would argue that the CAT model itself needs to incorporate these findings.  My presentation draws mainly on Dan Siegel, whose understanding of the mind is profoundly relational, and therefore compatible with CAT. 

Annie Nehmad is a founder member of ACAT.  She was Clinical Lead for CAT at The City & Hackney Psychotherapy Department (East London NHS Foundation Trust) for many years.  Since her redundancy in 2013, Annie has worked in private practice, as therapist, supervisor, and trainer.

Research Presentations:

Friday, 26th June 2015 | 12:00 – 13:00 | Stephen Kellett and Melanie Simmonds-Buckley - Treating sexual compulsive behaviour with CAT; a time series analysis of key relational markers

As the evidence base for treatment of sex addiction is scant, this talk will focus on the effectiveness of a 16-session Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) for chronic compulsive hyper sexuality (sex addiction).  The talk hopes to give a thorough description of the process of completing the therapy, how the therapy was evaluated and also to define the clinical outcomes.  In terms of evaluation, an A/B with extended follow-up single-case experimental design (SCED) was employed - this has not been attempted previously in the literature.  The study will be discussed in terms of the utility of the CAT model for patients with intimacy problems. 

Stephen Kellett lives and works in Sheffield in a split post between the University and the NHS.  He practices CAT in a specialist psychotherapy service and is currently completing the IRRAPT training.

Melanie Simmonds-Buckley lives in Sheffield and works in the Psychology Department at the University of Sheffield on the IAPT courses.  

Saturday, 27th June 2015 | 12:15 – 13:15 | Stephen Kellett, Kate Freshwater, Katie Ackroyd and Melanie Simmonds-Buckley - Cognitive Analytic Consultancy: Developing the evidence base

The use of CAT as a consultancy method has been a major innovation in delivery and approach.  This talk will draw together perspectives and evidence for providing CAT consultancy.  Kate Freshwater will present a qualitative evaluation of CAT consultancy in terms of feedback from workers and clients that have been through the consultancy approach.  This will then be complimented by Katie Ackroyd who will be presenting a range of quantitative service evaluation outcomes.  

Stephen Kellett lives and works in Sheffield in a split post between the University and the NHS.  He practices CAT in a specialist psychotherapy service and is currently completing the IRRAPT training.

Kate Freshwater lives in Leeds and works in Teesside.  She is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist, CAT supervisor, and the Lead for CAT in Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust (TEWV) where there is a network of 30 CAT staff offering CAT as a therapy and as a relational model with staff teams.

Katie Ackroyd is a Clinical Psychologist working in Rotherham in Adult Mental Health.  She works within a CAT model therapeutically and uses CAT in supervision and case management with other professionals.  She has provided psychological input to teams, offering 5-session CAT as a way to facilitate a psychological understanding of complex clients, inform care planning and to help teams work with clients in a more consistent approach.

Melanie Simmonds-Buckley lives in Sheffield and works in the Psychology Department at the University of Sheffield on the IAPT courses.  


Bookstall

Bookmark will once again be providing a bookstall at this year's Conference, available throughout the day on Friday, 26th June.

Diary from the Edge 1940-1944 A wartime adolescenceAnthony Ryle's new book available here with £2 off and free delivery!


Delegate Information

We are offering two booking options: Whole Event* and Individual Items

The Whole Event package includes the full conference programme on Friday, 26th and Saturday, 27th June 2015, with lunch on the Friday, and tea and coffee on both days.  Dinner on the Friday evening is an optional extra.  As this is a non-residential conference, delegates will need to make their own arrangements for overnight accommodation.

  • 'Early Bird' whole event - ACAT Member £175 / Non-member £205 (online) - please note this Early Bird booking option has closed
  • Full fee whole event - ACAT Member £195 / Non-member £225 (online from 12th February 2015)

The option of Individual Items is for those who are unable to attend on both days, ie Friday only or Saturday only, and for those who wish to book dinner on the Friday evening.  Attendance on Friday includes lunch, but dinner is an optional extra as noted above.  Saturday's programme will end at 13:30 (subject to change) and so lunch is not included on that day. 

  • 'Early Bird' Friday - ACAT Member £130 / Non-member £150 (online) - please note this Early Bird booking option has closed
  • Full fee Friday - ACAT Member £140 / Non-member £160 (online from 12th February 2015)
  • 'Early Bird' Saturday - ACAT Member £70 / Non-member £80 (online) - please note this Early Bird booking option has closed
  • Full fee Saturday - ACAT Member £80 / Non-member £90 (online from 12th February 2015)

Dinner on the Friday evening (no 'Early Bird' rate): ACAT Member £40 / Non-member £55 (online)

*Overnight accommodation is not included and delegates are required to make their own arrangements.

An administration charge of £15 is to be added to each booking where payment is by cheque or invoicing is requested.

'Early Bird' 

Please note that the Early Bird booking options have now closed - the full Conference fee for both whole event and individual items will apply

  • Online payment using a personal credit or debit card:  this booking option will close at the end of the day on Wednesday, 11th February 2015. 
  • Cheque payment:  please complete the form below and send this with your cheque to ACAT, PO Box 6793, Dorchester, Dorset DT1 9DL, ensuring that it reaches the ACAT office by Wednesday, 11th February 2015.
  • Invoiced booking: the deadline for receipt of bookings where invoicing is requested was Wednesday, 14th January 2015.  Please note that the full fee now applies to invoiced bookings.

Please note, for the 'Early Bird' rates to apply bookings must be received by the deadlines specified above (according to method of payment).  For bookings received after the deadlines the full fees will apply.  

With all 'Early Bird' booking options full payment must be received by Wednesday, 11th February 2015.

Ways to book 

  • Online: book and pay online instantly using a personal credit or debit card via this webpage
  • Cheque: use the downloadable booking form (at the end of this page) to pay by cheque and send to Maria Cross, ACAT, PO Box 6793, Dorchester DT1 9DL - please note that this attracts an additional administration charge of £15 
  • Invoice: use the downloadable booking form (at the end of this page) to request that your employer be invoiced, and email to maria.cross@acat.me.uk or post as for a cheque payment above - please note that this attracts an additional administration charge of £15 

Enquiries

Please email Maria maria.cross@acat.me.uk or telephone 0844 800 9496


Bursaries

Please note bursary applications have now closed

ACAT is pleased to be able to offer a small number of bursaries again this year to assist those in financial need to attend the Conference. Bursaries are awarded towards the cost of the conference only and not towards additional costs such as travel.  If you would like to be considered please download and complete the bursary application form (at the end of this page) and email, in confidence, to maria.cross@acat.me.uk or post to Maria Cross, ACAT Administrator, ACAT, PO Box 6793, Dorchester, Dorset DT1 9DL.  

Closing date for applications: Friday, 15th May 2015


Terms

Programme changes:  ACAT reserves the right to make changes to the advertised programme

Refund Policy:  A refund, less a £25 administration fee, will be made if cancellations are received, in writing, at least six weeks before the event. We regret that any cancellation after this time cannot be refunded and refunds for failure to attend the event cannot be made

Data Protection:  For the purposes of the Data Protection Act 1998, the data controller in respect of your personal data is the Association for Cognitive Analytic Therapy.  Your data will be used to administer the event to which you have subscribed


Petition to NHS England - The Case for Funding Training in the NHS 2021 Alert!
ACAT's online payment system has been updated - click for more information

Details and Booking Information

26th June 2015 to 27th June 2015

Please put these dates in your diaries!

The website will be updated as details are confirmed

Whole Event online: £195 (ACAT members) / £225 (non-members)

Booking deadline: Friday, 19th June 2015

'Early Bird' has closed

 

 

You can book this event online if you are registered or logged into this site. Click here to register or log in using the boxes at the top of this page.

maria.cross@acat.me.uk

Our Next 1 ACAT Annual Conferences

18th July 2024
ACAT National Conference 2024

Help

This site has recently been updated to be Mobile Friendly. We are working through the pages to check everything is working properly. If you spot a problem please email support@acat.me.uk and we'll look into it. Thank you.