Webinars
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I'll be offering a number of morning online webinars in Spring, Summer and early Autumn 2024. I'm exploring the territory where wildness, embodiment, relationship and social justice intersect. Any of the webinars would serve as useful tasters for the Playing with Fire online training, which I'll be running for the fourth time from October.
I'm interested in offering training from my modality Embodied-Relational and Wild Therapy that supports practitioners to bring their vitality and presence into their work. The groups will be kept to a relatively small size to support contact to be made between participants. I'm interested in finding ways to offer accessible online training that still supports connection, embodiment and relationship.
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Embodied Relating Webinar
Allison Priestman
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Fri, 19 April 2024, 10:00 – 13:00
£50, £35 concession
"Our body bathes in and soaks up the embodied presence of the client; we catch fire from her; we breathe her in and metabolise her; our ground state reverberates to her rhythms, and our own rhythms shift to meet them." (Totton, Embodied Relating, 2015)
On this webinar we will study the complex and subtle skills of connecting to and utilising our embodiment as a relational resource. The starting place for working relationally, is being with our own experience in the moment. Working in this way requires us to develop a practice of moment to moment awareness of our multi-channelled experiences. Paying attention to our emotions, internal sensations, thoughts, dreams and fantasies as information about the unfolding process between us and our clients.
In therapy we have the double task of allowing ourselves to fall into the soup with our clients, to be immersed in the relational dynamics, and also to be able to witness, and have a meta position on what’s unfolding.
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We will explore the power dynamics within the therapy room. How does any systemic oppression a client may experience emerge in the therapy relationship? How can we keep alive to our normative assumptions, and how they may impact our embodied relating?
This webinar is drawn from my work with and immersion in Nick Totton’s teaching; particularly his book Embodied Relating. My aim is to introduce theory in an open, accessible way, and to have a collaborative dialogue with the group about how to strengthen your embodied relating. Combining discussion and experiential exercises in small groups.
The group will be kept to a maximum of 14 people. There are a small number of concessionary places available at £35, please email me if you wish to book one.
To watch a video of Allison talking about Embodied Relating
This morning webinar would serve as a useful taster for my Playing with Fire training starting October 2024
Stepping into our Ecological Consciousness
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Online Friday May 17th. 10am-1pm
£50, (£35 Concessions)
Please book on Event-bright.
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Drawing from Wild Therapy and Ecopsychology, this webinar explores how to bring richness and depth to our client work- whether we’re working outside or inside.
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Exploring the wider context to our work -'How might Wild Mind, our Ecological Consciousness be part of a new story, offering hope in times of inequality, ecological and climate crises?'
Wild Mind is a way of being, an active meditation. It is a way of listening to all sources of information, that may be relevant to the work with our clients; the rational and liminal, embodied and theoretical.
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When in Wild Mind, we are connected to our spontaneity, embodiment, dreaming, our animal selves and the breathing world around us.
Wild Mind is the centre. It’s the ground of all the work I do -whether with clients, supervisees or as a trainer. In Wild Mind, I am listening to the aliveness of the embodied, ensouled beings who share this place, wherever I work from. The dancing plants outside my window, the guttering that sings in the rain, as well as being present to my client.
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Wild Mind can assist us to access our Ecological Consciousness. The part of us, which is bigger, wider and able to listen to the other-than-human and more-than -human voices.
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When working from Wild Mind we centre our practice on a wild, indigenous, local, ‘gatherer’ consciousness. How can we respect indigenous people’s culture and lived reality, and reconnect, listen to our local knowledge, inherent to the places that we call home? I’m wanting to acknowledge the deep wisdom and leadership present in many indigenous traditions, while also being awake to the current and centuries long abuse of indigenous people.
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On this webinar we’ll explore how practising Wild Mind can hold open the possibility of a different paradigm of what it means to be helpful and human. Recognising the interdependence, mutuality, and reciprocity of all beings of this world.
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Suitable for counsellors, psychotherapist, and allied practitioners. Especially those who wish to deepen and support their client's relationship with the wild, the other-than-human and more-than-human.
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We will combine experiential exercises with easily accessible theory and group explorations. I hope that this will be an enlivening, thought-provoking morning.
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Please contact me if you wish to have a concession at £35.
This would act as a useful taster for the Playing with Fire nine-month online training starting in October 2024.
Non-visible disability and long-term health conditions.
Drawing from Embodied- Relational Therapy to explore disability, illness, ableism, embodiment, and care.
Online £50, concessions £35.
Friday 21st June 2024. 10am-1pm
Facilitated by Allison Priestman
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What is the lived reality of people with hidden disability and long-term health conditions? How might we offer appropriate, empowering therapy? How can we be allies to our clients living with these experiences?
I will offer an intersectional, disability lens, to explore some of the lived reality of hidden impairments - unpacking our own internalised ableism, the ableism of the therapy world and of embodied, somatic practices. Exploring if and how a disability lens may be helpful for us and our clients.
Embodied-Relational Therapy has grown from an ablest, Body Psychotherapy tradition. It also has much to offer the exploration of what it is to be an embodied being. ERT offers a framework for understanding the complexity of being a body/mind/spirit. How conflicts within aspects of ourselves, our family system, and our wider culture can manifest in our embodiment.
How can we support our clients to find resources within their embodied experience, when our bodies might be experienced as painful, problematic, and untrustworthy? Our bodies are also the site of difference, potential internalised shame and of being othered.
I am not claiming to be an expert- I have my lived experience of hidden disability, for the past sixteen years, some understanding of the complexity and demands of day-to-day living. As well as over twenty years experience of working as a relational body psychotherapist.
I will offer an open exploratory space for us as a group to explore some of the complexity, and challenges for both clients and therapists of working with this material.
This webinar is for anyone who is curious and drawn. Any practitioner who experiences hidden disability and/or long-term health conditions is especially welcome. It’s mostly aimed at counsellors, psychotherapist and allied practitioners who are working with clients with a disability and/or long-term health conditions.
Concessionary places available, please email me to enquire, £35 .
This webinar would also serve as a great taster for my online nine month long, Playing with Fire training, starting October 2024.
Please be in touch if you have any questions or access needs.
Warmly, Allison.
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When the erotic enters the therapy room, we can be swept by strong emotions arousal, disgust, enchantment, love, hate. This is complex, often subtle work, demanding integrity, and rigour.
I have been running workshops and webinars for the past 12 years on the theme of erotic charge. There is often a mix of excitement, nervousness, and keen interest; an aliveness that feels ultimately life affirming.
I will be offering a theoretical framework to make sense of the embodied, relational complexity that can often unfold when the erotic emerges. I will be aiming to normalise the experience and support you to draw from your existing skill base.
I’m interested in raising awareness of assumptions and biases around sex, gender, and relationship diversity. Holding a space of enquiry, around how differences in these areas, may play out within the erotic charge.
The morning webinar will combine theoretical input, group discussion, explorations in breakout rooms and supervision. The workshop will be limited to 15 participants. This webinar would serve as a usefull 'taster' for the Playing with Fire online nine month training starting Oct 2024. Playing with Fire explores - how working in an embodied, relational and wild way can support the decolonisation of your practise.
To view a video I made of my approach to working with the erotic.
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A few concessionary places are available at £35, please contact me if you wish to book one.
I hope you can join me Allison
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How to Be a Bad Therapist
Allison Priestman
Online with Bramham Therapy
Saturday 18th March, 10am-4pm.
£95 (early bird before 18th Feb 2023) £105
Deconstructing the ‘rules’ of our profession, re-imagining how to work with integrity and creativity.
Are the injunctions that we are taught on our trainings fit for practice? How do we sift through the ‘rules’ of the Therapy World to ensure that we are not working from fear or defensiveness?
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On this workshop we hope:-
“to bring some fresh air into the discourse about what makes a good or bad therapist and to offer some re-definitions of therapy. We suggest that therapy isn’t an expert knowledge system, open to being standardised and manualised, but is more akin to local, indigenous, embodied and relational forms of knowledge…. We are interested in questioning: who sets the rules? Are the rules and expectations of how to be a good therapist the most helpful ones? In the search for high standards and protection of the client, has something been lost?”
– (From How to be a Bad Therapist, by Nick Totton and Allison Priestman 2021.)
Therapy can be a messy, awkward and unknowable process, and we will explore how best to prepare ourselves for the reality of working in a demanding and unpredictable profession. Allison Priestman will offer a relational model of working, exploring how to embrace our embodied responses to our clients, as an integral part of the therapeutic process. This will be an interactive and experiential day-long workshop. Practitioners will be supported to work with integrity and creativity through group discussion, experiential exercises and supervision space. This workshop has grown out of both the ‘How to be a Bad Therapist’ webinar series, and the book, that Allison co-led and then co-wrote with Nick Totton.
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Attention will be given to:
• How to question rather than be cowed by our internalised therapy police.
• How to utilise our embodied responses to our clients.
• Supporting courageous self-reflection, for those times when we need to act contrary to the dictates of ‘Therapy World’.
• Creating a community of practitioners on the workshop.
• Offering thoughtful alternative models and definitions of therapy.
• Encouraging you, if you wish, to step into being a ‘bad’ therapist.
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Open to psychological therapists (including trainees) from all modalities and health professionals. CPD certificates supplied.
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Therapy as Play
Resourcing ourselves to work in turbulent times
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Allison Priestman
Friday, 11th March 2022, 10:am -1pm
£35, please book on Eventbrite
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Is our work as counsellors and psychotherapist about to become more complex and demanding? It’s unknown how the turbulence from Covid-19, an approaching economic depression, the climate and biodiversity crisis etc will impact ourselves, our client’s, and our culture. This webinar seeks to resource practitioners in their work; specifically exploring how we might relax into our demanding role.
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Play is fundamental to our development as babies and children. This workshop will explore the idea that it is also fundamental to the therapeutic process. The interaction between therapist and client is a way of creating and exploring reality. Through play we try on and experiment with different aspects and parts of ourselves. Through play the paradox that therapy is both real and pretend can be held.
Re-conceptualising therapy as play, offers the possibility of relaxing and being lighter with the demands of our role. It also gives us theoretical ground to support more-than-rational and non-expert approaches.
On this experiential workshop we will explore ways that you may currently play in your work and ways to develop and expand playing as a resource. Getting curious about the play of words, sensations, movement's, images, fantasies and contact.
This webinar would be a useful taster for the Embodied -Relational Therapy training starting in April 2022. Places are limited to 12, there are a limited number of concessions at £25. Please contact Allison to book one.
My experience as an Embodied-Relational Therapist, supervisor and trainer is that it is possible to enjoy our work, to feel creative and to play. I hope that you will join me.
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To watch a video of Allison talking about Therapy as Play
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Embodiment & Body Psychotherapy
Allison Priestman
25 March, 10-1pm,
£35 Please book on Event-bright
“We do not have bodies we are bodies.… I do not own it or inhabit it, from it, I arise.” Intelligence in the Flesh, Guy Claxton
On this webinar we will explore- what is embodiment? How can we support a meaningful integration of embodiment into our practice? How do we support and embrace our different bodies?
Embodiment is central to our existence, yet embodiment is not supported by western mainstream culture. To be at home in our bodies we need to start from our present lived experience. We also need to challenge dualistic thinking and unconscious internalised prejudice.
On this webinar I’d like to:-
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Unpack what it means to be an embodied and extended system.
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Find a balance between theoretical and intuitive ways of knowing. Exploring embodied thinking and intelligent movement.
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To begin an exploration of marginalisation. Both how embodiment itself is marginalised and how to work with our own and our clients embodied experiences of marginalisation.
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Suitable for counsellors, psychotherapists and allied practitioners who want to welcome embodiment into your work. It will be a useful taster for the 2022 Embodied-Relational Therapy training starting in April.
Places will be limited to 12. A few concessionary places are available at £25, please contact me if you wish to book one. I hope you can join me.
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Working in the Web Webinar
An online course on eco-systemic psychotherapy
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Nick Totton & Allison Priestman
10 June, 10am-1pm.
£35 Please book on Event-bright
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An ecosystem is a spontaneously self-regulating network of interdependent beings, all of which form the environment for each member of the network. When we meet as therapist and client, each of us comes as part of many literal and metaphorical ecosystems; we can see the situation as a disturbance somewhere in the client’s networks which leads them to seek interaction with the therapist’s networks, including but not only their professional ones. Many different beings are effectively present at the meeting – human and other-than-human, alive and dead, physical and non-physical; all potentially have a role to play.
Experiencing therapy from this larger perspective is enriching, but it’s not immediately clear how to translate this vision into a new form of practice. In the webinar, which is a taster for the longer course starting in September, we will be exploring some possible ways of working ecosystemically through presentations, discussion, and time in pairs or small groups.
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Both of us are deeply impacted by the current three emergencies facing our earth: the crises of climate, biodiversity and equality. We’re offering this course as a small step towards exploring the inter-relationship of these issues, and to offer a model of what a psychotherapy fit for the future might look like.
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Places will be limited to 22. A few concessionary places are available at £25, please contact me if you wish to book one.
Messiness and Mistakes Webinar
Embracing Relational Work
Allison Priestman
and Stephen Tame
Friday November 19, 10am-1pm
£35, please book on Eventbrite
Like in life, therapy relationships can at times be messy - we make mistakes. On this webinar we are interested to explore how we can creatively make use of ourselves as therapists. Can we own and utilise our inevitable clumsiness and mistakes?
The kinds of confusions and misunderstandings that happen between therapist and client can be invaluable, if we remain open and curious.
Stephen and Allison, experienced Embodied-Relational Therapy practitioners and trainers have both made many mistakes. We will introduce an Embodied-Relational Therapy perspective on working relationally. We believe our best resource in this work is our embodiment and a robust theoretical grounding.
Our aim is for this to be a resourcing experience - offering support for you to survive and make good use of turbulent relational times. This webinar would be a useful taster for the Embodied -Relational Therapy training starting in April 2022.
Places are limited to 16, we have a limited number of concessions at £25. Please contact Allison to book one. We hope you’ll join us.
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Power and privilege
Nick Totton & Allison Priestman
Friday 15 Oct 2021, 10.30am-1pm
£25, book on Eventbrite
Second only to money in the embarrassment stakes, power and privilege are not discussed in therapy nearly as much as they should be. In this webinar, the latest in our occasional series 'How To Be A Bad Therapist', we intend to grasp the nettle and explore how silence about these issues can be a strong obstruction to therapy, while discussing them frankly can be a tremendous boost, allowing the client (and us) to revisit painful and taboo material.
The question of power is directly and unavoidably present in the therapy session. Who's in charge? Who picks the topics? Who decides what is real and what is not? As therapists we need to be very clear about our implicit power and all the indirect ways in which we can and often do exercise it. We need to be open to challenge and dethronement as a key part of the work. We also need to be fully aware of how social rank and privilege come into the work, through differences of class, gender, skin colour, sexuality, age and many other factors.
The webinar will use direct presentation, discussion, and exercises to explore these issues. This webinar will be limited to 23 places; please book early if you can.
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Walk in the Wild Webinar
Working with clients outside
Allison Priestman
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Friday, 17th September 2021, 10am -1pm
£35, Book on Eventbrite
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Wild therapy -bringing therapy into the Wild, and the Wild into therapy.
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An opportunity to gain confidence in working with clients outside.
On the workshop my aim is to find our path between:-
The practical – contracting, reconsidering the frame, the scope and possibility of client work outside.
The personal – supporting our own and our clients wildness. Exploring how to develop wild mind, or ecological consciousness.
The political – What hope can eco-systemic thinking offer us and our world at this time of turbulence?
Drawn from Wild Therapy the Ecopsycology approach developed by Nick Totton, that I teach and practice. My aim is to make this accessible, fun and enlivening.
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The group will be kept small to a maximum of 14 people. There are a small number of concessionary places available at £25, please email me if you wish to book one.
This morning webinar would serve as a useful taster for both Playing with Fire and the Embodied-Relational Therapy training starting in April 2022.
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Therapy as a Practice of Truth
Nick Totton and Allison Priestman
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Friday 26th March 2021, 10.30 -1pm,
£25, Book on Eventbrite
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This webinar will present a view of therapy as a practical study of truth and its consequences, untruth and its consequences, and how to distinguish the two. The truth which therapy studies is not just rational but emotional. Exploring it, teaches us that no truth is absolute – that truth is not singular but plural and contingent, and therefore subject to negotiation.
‘Negotiating truth’ is one way of defining what therapy is about. This follows from the basic set-up: there are two people in the space, each with their own views about what is going on between them and what is going on in the client's life, and each with an investment in persuading the other that their own view is correct. What a charged situation! How similar to everyday life!
We will explore a relational model of therapy. Studying how to unpack and make space for the complexity, contradictions and truth of our embodied experiences.
Nick and Allison will give a short presentation around our themes, we will make use of breakout rooms for small group discussion. We are interested in what truth emerges from our collaborative exploration as a diverse group of practitioners.
We hope you can join us.
Bringing Embodiment Online
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ONLINE EVENT,
Friday 22nd January 2021, 10.30 -1pm,
Minimum donation £18, Please book on Eventbrite
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Minimum booking donation £18.
How can we work with embodiment online? How can we maintain good contact, an alive relationship, depth and creativity in the work, while online? Huge cultural trauma, translocation and change is unfolding around us, disembodiment is often part and parcel of such experiences. Consequently, finding ways to support our own and our clients embodiment feel central at this time.
The group will be limited to 20 participants, to support sharing and intimacy. I hope we will talk, think, look, touch, move, breath and explore together. Specifically enquiring into how to root into own bodies as a resource, and how to work with our clients body process online. Exploring:- self touch, movement, images, internal sensations and present sense based experience.
Booking required. Please be generous if you can, to support those who can’t afford to pay much. I hope you’re able to join me for a resourcing workshop.
This webinar would be a useful taster for the ERT workshop in February and/or the ERT training in Devon, starting in June 2021.
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