Gentle body-oriented and attachment-focused interventions can help stabilize the nervous system and create a sense of safety during the first steps of processing the experience.

Participants will learn how co-regulating bodywork can help prevent dissociation while revisiting a stressful situation. The workshop will introduce simple principles from attachment-oriented body psychotherapy and Emotional First Aid that support grounding, self-relationship, and emotional regulation.

The session will include a short presentation with slides, selected video material from clinical work, and a guided body exercise that allows participants to experience how shock-release work can support regulation and recovery.

Thomas Harms is a psychologist and body psychotherapist and the director of the Center for Primary Prevention and Body Psychotherapy (ZePP) as well as the Crying Baby Clinic in Bremen, Germany. He is the founder of Emotional First Aid (EFA), a body- and attachment-oriented approach to crisis intervention and acute parent–baby therapy, and of Attachment-Oriented Body Psychotherapy for therapeutic work with adults. Harms works internationally as a trainer and supervisor and is the author and editor of several books.

From the perspective of Functional Psychotherapy, these polarities are not opposites to be resolved but dynamic processes that support healthy development. The fuller one polarity is experienced, the more fully its complementary polarity can also develop.

Difficulties arise when this natural movement becomes rigid, when the family or social environment hinders, blocks or distorts one of the two polarities, leading to dysfunctional patterns that may affect emotional regulation, relationships and the person’s developmental process.

This experiential workshop introduces Functional Psychotherapy through the Theory of Polarities, developed and described over many years in numerous publications.

Participants will discover how these polarities are expressed through the person’s overall functioning—body, emotions, thinking and relationships—and how therapeutic intervention can help restore the full expression of compromised polarities, thereby promoting integration and self-regulation.

Combining brief theoretical presentations, experiential exercises, clinical demonstrations and group discussion, the workshop is designed to be accessible to therapists who are new to Functional Psychotherapy.

Participants will have the opportunity to:

• Understand the role of polarities in human development.
• Recognise when a polarity has become rigid or interrupted in children and adolescents.
• Experience how therapeutic intervention can help restore these polarities, supporting the recovery of capacities and the development of new potential.
• Discover selected clinical tools from Functional Psychotherapy.
• Reflect on how this therapeutic model can enrich their clinical work with children and adolescents.

The workshop will also introduce the concept of the Basic Experiences of the Self (BES), another original contribution of Functional Psychotherapy, offering a framework for understanding developmental needs and guiding therapeutic intervention.

This workshop is intended for psychotherapists, psychologists and mental health professionals working with children and adolescents who wish to deepen their practice through an integrative, experiential and developmental perspective.

Anna Pouget is Director of the French School of Functional Psychotherapy (EFPF), a trainer and psychotherapist working with children, adolescents and adults. A former professional dancer, she brings an embodied understanding of the body as lived experience. Her clinical work, teaching and research are based on the Functional Psychotherapy model, where psychological change emerges through restoring the organism’s functional coherence across bodily, emotional, cognitive and relational dimensions.

It’s a powerful form of body-based empathic listening that requires a deep sensitivity, receptiveness and capacity for attunement. It can also bring with it many challenges and questions.

How do we sort out what’s ‘ours’ and what’s ‘theirs’? How do we open ourselves up to be touched by our client’s innermost experiences, while maintaining healthy self-boundaries and proper self care? How do we resource ourselves when encountering potentially overwhelming fragments of client experience? And how do we ‘offer back’ what we are picking up in ways that are digestible for the client?

In this experiential workshop we will come together to explore what it means to tune in deeply to ourselves as a means to tuning in to the other – making embodied explorations individually, in pairs and as a group.

We will also explore and discuss how to translate the information we receive into therapeutically useful interventions, and briefly clarify distinctions between different forms of non-verbal communication in therapy: transference, countertransference, projective identification and somatic resonance.

Robert Harper is a Body Psychotherapist, Martial Artist and Shamanic Practitioner. He’s completed a six year Integrative Body Psychotherapy training at the Cambridge BP Centre, UK, and works in private practice. Creativity, aliveness, presence and curiosity are the threads that unite his work, aiming to support his clients to address their conflicts at a core, existential level – integrating mind, body, heart and soul.

All of life arises through the dynamic interplay of opposing forces: expansion and contraction, effort and ease, control and surrender. Together with a wide range of music designed to inspire and motivate, guided movement, breath and focused awareness, we will meet these polarities directly in the body.

Rather than avoiding or transcending them, we practice moving with them and through them, allowing them to transform us. This is an invitation to inhabit the space where opposites coexist and where true presence emerges

Eileen Murray is a Conscious Movement teacher, therapist, and Medical Qigong instructor with over 30 years of experience in mental health and holistic wellbeing across Australia, Sweden, the UK, and Ireland. Originally trained in nursing, she later expanded into Biodynamic bodywork and psychotherapy training with the Institute of Biodynamic Medicine in the early 90’s. She is also trained with Open Floor International and BISO (Body in Soul) in Conscious and Dynamic Movement Facilitation.

Eileen’s work weaves together movement, embodiment, and deep listening to support healing, self-awareness, and authentic human connection. Her approach is grounded, compassionate, and creates safe spaces for people to reconnect with their bodies, their vitality and authentic presence.

This experiential workshop offers participants a practical and embodied introduction to Qi Gong as a form of movement meditation. Rooted in Traditional Chinese Medicine, Qi Gong gently weaves breath, slow mindful movement, and inner awareness to support nervous system regulation, emotional balance, and embodied presence.

The workshop is suitable for therapists, body oriented practitioners, and anyone interested in embodied approaches to wellbeing, regulation, and self awareness. All movements are gentle, accessible, and adaptable for standing or seated practice.

Embodied psychotherapy recognises that healing and regulation occur through the body, not only through cognitive insight. Qi Gong offers a time tested somatic practice that aligns deeply with this understanding.

Through slow rhythmic movement and breath, Qi Gong supports:

• autonomic nervous system regulation
• interoceptive awareness
• grounding and emotional containment
• increased capacity to remain present with sensation

This workshop provides participants with a lived experience of embodiment that can enrich both personal practice and professional therapeutic work.

Joanne Faulkner is a Qi Gong teacher, Shiatsu practitioner, and Traditional Chinese Medicine educator with over twenty years of experience in embodied health practices. Her work bridges Eastern movement meditation with contemporary understandings of nervous system regulation, embodiment, and emotional wellbeing. She facilitates daily Qi Gong practice online and teaches internationally, supporting thousands of people to reconnect with their bodies through gentle, compassionate movement.

Body psychotherapy is being overwhelmed by those offering somatic techniques online that claim to work quickly and resolve whatever the problem is.  Neoliberalism is the driving force.  Will we become redundant? Or perhaps subsumed by psychotherapists “bolting on “ techniques to an existing psychotherapy with no experienced understanding of them? 

Whilst the global situation creates a constant background, and sometimes foreground fear, professionally and personally we are likely to feel scared. Conversations can quickly become polarised as various dynamics are triggered, and past and intergenerational traumas activated. And yet, depth body psychotherapy has the potential to sit in all of this and find wholeness. We can find what is “health” enhancing and what is life depleting as palpable experiences in ourselves. By becoming more whole ourselves, we can spread wholeness simply from the way we are with ourselves and others.

We will explore the anxieties and fears that we all live with and that many of our clients find unbearable. The focus of the workshop will be on finding safety, exploring what is life enhancing and life depleting, contacting essential health and love, and taking this into relationships and the wider environment. Inspiration will be drawn from within body psychotherapy and Buddhist psychology.

Gill Westland, is a UKCP registered Body Psychotherapist, a full member of the European Association for Body Psychotherapy, a trainer, supervisor, consultant, and writer. She is the founding Director of Cambridge Body Psychotherapy Centre (CBPC) and co-editor of the journal Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy.

Gill is the author of ‘Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication in Psychotherapy’ (Norton, 2015), and has contributed chapters to key texts on somatic/body psychotherapy. She has researched key moments of change in body psychotherapy, and most recently she has written on neoliberalism and remote body psychotherapy. She also has an interest in touch in psychotherapy and earlier in the year CBPC hosted a one day conference “Communicating through touch in psychotherapy”, a dialogue between neuroscientists and those using touch clinically.