About the Group
Explore, Understand, Connect
This workshop invites mental health practitioners to conceptualise client issues such as anxiety, depression, and self-injury through a psychodynamic lens, focusing on paranoid-schizoid and depressive states. You’ll explore how early experiences, relational patterns, and unconscious dynamics shape these emotional states, and how they can manifest in therapeutic work.
What You’ll Learn:
Core psychodynamic concepts, including paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and their relevance to client presentations
How early relational experiences influence current emotional functioning and self-injurious behaviour
Recognising and managing transference and countertransference in complex client dynamics
Strategies to support clients through emotional fragmentation, fear, grief, and self-directed anger
Techniques to foster insight, containment, and connection within therapy
Who Is This Workshop For:Counsellors, therapists, and mental health professionals seeking to deepen their understanding of psychodynamic conceptualisation and enhance their capacity to work with complex emotional states, including self-injury.
Why Attend:
Gain practical tools to recognise and work with paranoid-schizoid and depressive dynamics
Improve conceptualisation and therapeutic strategies for anxiety, depression, and self-injury
Strengthen therapeutic presence, attunement, and reflective practice
Engage with peers in experiential and reflective learning
Your Group Facilitators
Dr Joanna Naxton
Dr Joanna Naxton, is a Doctor of Counselling Philosophy with extensive experience in counselling, psychotherapy, and mental health research. She specialises in working with complex emotional presentations, including anxiety, depression, and self-injury. Joanna lectures with Sunderland University and East Durham College on a range of counselling and psychology modules.