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Workshops 2026
Below are the workshops in chronological order for NETAC 2026. Once you have booked you ticket for the event you will be asked to pick one from the morning and one form the afternoon to attend here. There are a mixture of indoor and outdoor workshops to enjoy!
Morning Workshops
The Transformative Connection of The Unseen and The Seen:
Working with natural disturbance, rootedness, and growth.
Helen Blackburn (PTSTA-P) and Andy Williams (TSTA (P), UKCP, MA, MSc, BACP Snr Accred, BABCP Accred, GPsyC)
About this workshop: This is an outdoor workshop. Above the ground, life reveals itself in movement, colour and form – our public selves, our visible connections. Below the ground, hidden roots and mycelial webs weave a living network of sustenance and exchange. This workshop invites you to step into this ecology of seen and unseen, gently exploring the disturbance that can happen at the edge where they meet, and which echoes our own inner and outer worlds. Through shared experiential exercises and reflection, we will explore rootedness and transformative growth, discovering how the wisdom of the natural world can support and deepen our practice.
Disturbing the peace: What do we risk and what might we gain by confronting family secrets?
Sarah Demaree CTA, PTSTA (P), MSc (TA Psych)
About this workshop: Many of our clients and we ourselves may come from families or groups in which there were secrets -- things that we were not to talk about. That understanding may have been spelled out to us or we may have just picked it from an early age: which questions not to ask, which observations not to make, which ‘truths’ not to challenge. And the meanings we made of that secrecy may still be impacting our attitude toward openness and authenticity today. This workshop will explore our personal beliefs and experiences around breaking the silence and how that may be impacting our work with individuals, groups and organisations.
At the Edge of Eating Body Distress. Risk, Disturbance and Relational Transformation
Debbie Thomson - Transactional Analysis Integrative UKCP Psychotherapist & Imago Relationship Therapist.
About this workshop: THIS WORKSHOP IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE
ADHD & Autism: Different Tempos and Shared Humanity
Nea Clark (she/her), (PTSTA) Neil Keenan (PTSTA)
About this workshop: Exploring disturbance, relational risk, and transformation in neurodivergent experience. This experiential workshop invites participants to step inside the different pacing of ADHD and autistic nervous systems and notice how these rhythms shape everyday life across routines, relationships, work, rest, and recovery. Starting with lived experience rather than diagnosis, we use music, rhythm, humour and metaphor (for example, ADHD as a drum solo and autism as a symphony) to normalise difference and reduce shame.
Short teaching inputs are woven with practical exercises, reflective writing, role plays, and small group conversations to explore time experience, processing styles, conversational and social pacing, and emotional tempo, including overload and shutdown. Participants map their own patterns (waiting, transitions, silence, interruptions, sudden changes) and co create respectful communication guidelines, naming mandatory needs not as preferences but as conditions for regulation and wellbeing. The tone is warm, playful and grounded, with clear structure for autistic comfort, flexibility for ADHD engagement, optional observation roles, and a closing reflection to take shared language back into work, relationships, and communities.
Becoming the abuser: ‘Bad’ object projections – disturbance and transformation
Ben Groves PTSTA, CTA, MSW, UKATAdip, CTF, PEP2, BA(hons)
About this workshop: It is a well-established concept within the psychological fields that we may introject perpetrators of abuse, frightening parental figures, and other powerful aggressors. This process is described in various ways, including the ‘internalisation of a persecutory object’ or the ‘formation of an internal persecutor.’ Engaging with these aspects of our clients can be extremely challenging and, at times, deeply disturbing, particularly when they emerge transferentially and we find ourselves pulled into the emotional position of either the abuser or the survivor. In this gentle yet robust workshop, we will explore how this process is formed, how it may play out in the therapy room, and what we can do in practice to work with it effectively and ethically in the service of our clients. The workshop will draw on a range of TA theories, borrowing heavily from object relations theory and the relational TA work of Hargaden and Sills.
Afternoon Workshops
Stepping off the Cliff: the transformative power of embracing risk.
Barbara Clarkson CTA (P) TSTA(P)
About this workshop: This workshop takes the powerful theme of 'Loss and Discovery' and explores the role that relational group supervision can play in our work with our clients, particularly in the clinical fields. Also known as a 'Balint Group', relational group supervision uses the unconscious associations of the group members to bring to life the unconscious world of the client and the client-therapist relationship. This can become a deeply enriching process of the discovery of what has been lost. Drawing on concepts of intuition, body-mind, and embodied forms of knowing, a relational supervision group can bring new life to areas where you have felt stuck or disconnected. This process of supervision is both structured and facilitated, and in the workshop we will co-facilitate a live demonstration. This will be followed by discussion and exploration of theory and process.
Working with Suicide: Working at the Edge of Ourselves
Lori Hedges – CTA(p) MSc Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy
About this workshop: This is an experiential workshop inviting participants to explore their own internal process, biases, beliefs, systemic scripting, and moral/ethical tensions when working with an individual who is suicidal. Underpinning this workshop is a valuing of relational working as the vehicle of change, and an emphasis on compassionately identifying what lies in the (at times dark and painful) edges of ourselves around suicide.
Encounters with difference, hate and destructiveness. Relating at the edge of risk and disturbance in ourselves and others.
Jo Moores PTSTA and Helen Rowland TSTA
About this workshop: We are living in a world where authoritarianism, nationalism and populism are gaining ground globally to such an extent that some commentators are calling this the fourth wave of fascism ( Cas Mudde 2020). In the time since Wilhelm Reich wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1933, what have we learnt about engaging with ‘fascist states of mind’ ( Bollas 1998) both in and out of the therapy room? In this experiential workshop we will explore our relationship with our own ‘Little Fascist’ ( Berne 1972), developing our capacity for withstanding and standing with, our own states of hate and intolerance and consider our tasks as therapists to hold our minds and stand with our values in times of deep turbulence and provocation.
When Education Wounds: disrupting our learning scripts as a path to transformation.
Cat Cornthwaite - PTSTA, PGCE
About this workshop: Education can interrupt a child’s frame of reference, creating a disturbance that opens space for authentic engagement with the world. Yet rigid systems often turn education into something that leaves a lasting wound, where many internalise the belief that they were never “good enough.” These educational wounds can become normalised and reinforced over time reducing our willingness to take risks that are so vital to the educative process.
This workshop invites participants to examine their personal learning scripts and reflect on how formative disturbances shaped their identity as adult learners. Through guided reflection and dialogue, participants explore internalised beliefs and begin a process of transformation toward having greater agency and self-compassion in the learning process.
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