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Workshops are listed below and are now opening for booking.

Mapping ‘love addiction’ and its narcissistic impact on voicing gender and desire for self and others

Presenters:  Jax Beatty and Steve Potter

Abstract:

This workshop will offer a CAT framework for mapping varieties of love addiction as reciprocal procedures that orchestrate and restrict our experience of gender, desire and a ‘conversational’ sense of self with others.  We will draw on the literature relating to love addiction and see it as a narcissistic solution that confuses excitement with ideal care and carries the dynamics of abuse into intimate adult relationships. 

We will give examples and demonstrate the importance of combining voice work with mapping and writing to help reconnect and heal broken and disorganised links between interpersonal feelings, desires and cognition and personal ideology. 

Participants will go away with a template for working with the overlap between love addiction, narcissistic disturbance and voicing gender and desire. 

 

I get a kick out of you: BDSM – bondage & discipline; domination & submission; sadism & masochism.  Harmless Fun, or needing reformulation?

Presenter: Jane Clarke

Abstract:

Acknowledging outdated concepts of ‘perversion’, and how diversity in gender identity, relationships, and sexual preference is something to be welcomed and celebrated, onscreen presentation of literature and case material will illustrate how, for one individual, the masochistic role performed a defensive procedure which served to trap him in powerless states of aloneness and abuse.  It will also reference those who believe that sexual masochism, rather than being framed in sexual terms, should be classed as a severe level of substance dependency.

Intended outcomes:

That CAT therapists will …

•             feel inspired to be curious about the meanings of these practices for clients

•             experience improved confidence in talking about this aspect of sexuality with clients

•             develop better understandings of terminology, to foster discussion with clients

•             have a potential template for mapping the masochistic role

•             have improved confidence in acknowledging counter-transferences arising

Biography:

Jane qualified as a CAT practitioner in 2007, whilst working in an eating disorder service in Devon.  She completed IRRAPT in 2019, qualifying as a CAT psychotherapist, and took up registration with UKCP at that point.  Working for Somerset NHS Foundation trust since February 2020, she is a full time CAT psychotherapist and trainee CAT supervisor.  Her knowledge in the subject area arises from her IRRAPT dissertation, the content of which her markers noted should be made more widely available to the CAT community.

 

Using CAT in dialogue with gender diverse people

Presenter: Anna Laws

Lots of therapists want to offer affirming and positive experiences of CAT to gender diverse people but worry about saying something wrong, or not being able to offer challenge and support appropriately. We will watch some short videos of gender diverse people in dialogue with the presenter and reflect on our practice, using CAT and developing confidence in dialogue with gender diverse people.

Methods:

Watching video/powerpoint

Discussion,

mapping on paper/flip chart

Biography:

I am a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and sex and gender specialist in the Northern Region Gender Dysphoria Service, which offers psychologically informed medical transition for people with gender dysphoria.

My clinical work involves supporting the people who have the most difficulty with their path through medical transition, because of factors such as complex co-morbidities of physical and mental health, intense social deprivation and neurodiversity. I spend a lot of time face to face with trans and non-binary people thinking and talking about their experiences, often over a significant period of time. I am particularly committed to educating healthcare professionals in gender affirming healthcare in the wider NHS. In my spare time I craft things while sitting in a pile of cats.

 

Treating sexual orientation obsessive compulsive disorder (SO-OCD) with 8-session CAT – a single case experimental design

Presenter: Stephen Kellett

Sexual orientation obsessive compulsive disorder (SO-OCD) is a poorly understood, poorly researched, but common clinical issue. 

This workshop will offer:

•             A better understanding of what SO-OCD is and how it presents clinically. 

•             A summary of the theoretical and empirical evidence bases.

•             A case example of CAT for male patient with SO-OCD who had been unresponsive to CBT.  

•             A presentation of the A/B with follow-up single case experimental design to demonstrate the impact of exits over time on key TPPs.     

Participants will go away with a better understanding of how to identify and work with SO-OCD using a CAT model.    

Biography

Stephen Kellett is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and CAT psychotherapist, trainer and supervisor.  He works full time in Rotherham, Doncaster and South Humber NHS Trust on the inpatient pathways and also as a Clinical Director of Research in the Trust.  He has been practicing CAT now for many years and still retains a keen research interest in how CAT works, what for and how much.

 

Exploring homophobia and internalized homophobia through a CAT lens

Lived experience of growing up as a gay man in the 1960s, 70s and 80s and the emergence of AIDS

Presenter: Jason Hepple

Abstract:

Jason will use his lived experience of growing up as a gay man in a working-class background in south-west England, his experience of state and Catholic education and the emergence of AIDS in the mid-1980s, while he was at medical school in Oxford. He is particularly interested in how homophobic reciprocal role play can be turned against the self and the impact of AIDS as the ‘gay plague’ on attitudes to LGBTQ people.

Jason will read from his fictional biography of Jim Singleton or ‘Queer Jim’ to bring humour, sadness and hope to this exploration.

Participants will learn about:

The historical experience of gay men in the AIDS era in the UK that may be pertinent to clients they may see for therapy.

The ways that other-to-self reciprocal roles may be proceduralised into self-to-self survival strategies.

Related experiences that other participants may wish to share in the open discussion.

Biography:

Jason Hepple is an ACAT / UKCP psychotherapist, supervisor and trainer and a former Chair of ACAT.

In the 1980s he was training officer for the Oxford Friend (Registered Charity No.299903) LGBTQ helpline and befriending service and one of the first organizers of the ‘Promoting our Health’ LGBT conferences at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. He is proud to have been acknowledged in Carl Miller’s ‘The AIDS Handbook’, published by Penguin in 1990; one of the first books about AIDS addressed to a general audience.

He is married and lives in the south-west and has continued to contribute to Somerset Foundation NHS Trust since his retirement.

 

Parts of me, echoes of you: Gender identity, neurodivergence, dissociated selves and societal states

Presenter:  James Randall

Abstract:

State work within CAT invites us to consider complex webs of self-states, inexplicitly and relationally threaded to social context. CAT work can help individuals to recognise and name their pluralities: parts of themselves, echoes of others, some dissociated, some enmeshed, others well integrated, yet characterised by a rigidity of sorts. For some, CAT can be helpful to investigate ‘the switch’, the mechanisms in which these parts are elicited and emerge, how they are called upon, or how they intrude and impose themselves onto us.

Within this workshop, I will present a number of reflections from my CAT work with predominantly neurodivergent, gender non-conforming young people and adults who present with complex mental health problems. There will be rich clinical material from various clients to demonstrate the potential from CAT within these contexts, but also to open up some new thinking about the use of the Multiple-Self States Model – to much more readily appreciate and incorporate top-heavy, societal reciprocal roles, and varying degrees of dissociation, for example. 

Key interactive exercise

This workshop’s key interactive exercise will involve the invitation to engage in creatively drawing one’s own self-state and to build on this through dialogue with another CAT in attendance. I have sought a young person’s consent to use their materials to illustrate this idea through clinical material prior. Thereafter and through an emerging process, I will bring together conference attendees’ selves, if agreeable, to build on a collection of alters and plurals together. The facilitator will explore connections and disconnections within this collection and invite others to do so. Playfully, we will mirror the processes within a creative CAT therapy with someone who experiences themselves as pluralised in these ways. 

Content and themes

Information: it will be important to set the scene with defining neurodivergence, gender identity, intersectionality, and interfaces of difference in social context.

Overview of my work in this area: Assessment, consideration of goals in State work (e.g. integration? Harmony? Perspective? Control?), tools to aid the processes (e.g. the Gender Unicorn), and the selves of the therapist to consider.

Reflections and patterns: I will present through a CAT lens, material and reflections around ‘getting it wrong’. For example, misgendering clients in session or supervision, our assumptions about gendered experience (& the conflations and collusions this may bring). I would like to try and do this along the lines of a Helper’s dance list, or my own traps, dilemmas, etc. in order to support audience participation and engagement. I’ll playfully, yet seriously invite the audience to pull together to think about how we are or could be ‘getting it right’ in the end.

Processes: Exploring helpful threads within this work, such as ‘curiosity not voyeur’, affirmation, collaborative constructive dithering, belief, and reflexively embracing your clumsiness.

Biography:

James Randall is a vegan, tattooed clinical psychologist, skirting on the edge of CAT Practitioner status – but not quite there yet (i.e. trainee). He works with children and young people within the NHS and social services (looked after context). His specialist interests professionally include complex and developmental trauma, neurodiversity, and social context. James is editor of the book Surviving Clinical Psychology: Navigating Personal, Professional and Political Selves on the Journey to Qualification (2020).

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