Freeing our voices in therapy: a cognitive analytic and relational approach

This webinar workshop offers CAT tools and methods to free our voices therapeutically.   Our voices are the overlooked but everpresent companions to therapy.  Our voices speak outwardly and inwardly to address our selves and our hopes and fears with others and in society.  Whether as therapists or clients we speak with the voices given to us in childhood and in school and society. We carry the voices of others  as if our own.  Our personal, professional and organisational voices meet with a complex power mix of overvalued, undervalued and devalued voices in our helping and working relationships.  Can we learn to pay attention to micro shifts in the registering and inflexion of our voices and vocalisations in search of moments of narrative freedom?   (see our post on Therapy with the Voice). It is through our voices that we take ownership of unmet needs, untried feeling skills and ways of relating to our selves and others in the world to mitigate hard to manage feelings.    

This half day introductory workshop is repeated for the fifth time due to popular interest. 

It offers CAT informed ways of working with the voice as a therapeutic resource.  CAT is an activity based therapy using mapping, writing and a co creative approach to work side by side with clients to rework the feelings, emotional roles and meanings that shape our lives.  

The voice is the gateway between therapeutic processes and therapy content; between transference driven emotions and authentic communication.  The voice is the agent between the big picture voices between core beliefs and social values and little often fleeting micro moments of voicing feelings and ideas. 

The workshop is led by Steve Potter and Lucy Cutler.  We have been working on a book about CAT as an voice focused therapy for the past few years and have a series of exercises to introduce in working therapeutically with the voice as a way of enhancing pragmatic and relational approaches to therapy using the conceptual tools of reciprocal role procedures, diagrams, process mapping and in session and between session therapeutic writing.  

Participants will go away with guidelines and tools for working more deliberately and co-creatively with their own and the client's voices and the contextual voices that literally and metaphorically inform and surround the shared therapy space and life space of the client.   The focuse should give more power to their work with writing, mapping and talking.

Steve Potter and Lucy Cutler are both Cognitive Analytic Therapists