Presentations
2024 Conference
Dr Karen Dyer – EXISTENTIAL ART THERAPY
In this interactive workshop the audience is invited to experience existential art therapy in action.
Karen believes that everyone deserves a ‘Quilt of Comfort’, one that can be metaphorically wrapped around them to hold on to hope while sitting in despair.
The experiential exercise introduces a simple art directive that can be used to help individuals identify the things that sustain them when they feel most vulnerable. Workshop participants will use art materials and collage to explore what holds personal meaning, value and support, using symbols and images rather than language. This tool can be used with individual clients, in groups and for therapist self-care.
River Heisler – EXISTENTIAL THERAPY AND NON-BINARY GENDER IDENTITIES
River’s session will explore non-binary gender and its potential to enrich existential therapy.
The aim of their workshop is to initiate a discussion about non-binary gender and how thinking deeply about non-binary gender can benefit therapy.
River’s assertion is that the experiences of non-binary individuals can provide insight into the workings of gender and the gender binary. This highlights the need for the advent and growth of non-binary phenomenology, which proposes to reveal how non-binary subjectivities arise and both create and find meaning within a constitutionally binary gendered world. We will discuss how we might foster non-binary phenomenologising within therapy. In particular, we will discuss how we might conceptualise non-binary gender in the context of the fundamental existential givens, and what this context may offer for deepening the work of psychotherapy.
Mabel Verstraaten-Bortier – EXISTENTIAL THERAPY ACROSS CULTURES
In her session, Mabel will guide participants through a poetic exploration of suicide therapy in Ghana.
Participants will be taken on a poetic tour of what psychotherapy with suicidal clients in Ghana looks like. Mabel will share word portraits of two of he former suicidal clients. Another poem, amongst a few more, will touch on the experience of working under the anti-suicide law. Though it has now been repealed, Mabel’s poem is still important to reflect on especially since Ghana has recently put in place an anti-LGBTQ+ law. The poem, The Law & I, therefore speaks to how therapists might feel having to work under such laws.
Shivani Kundapur & Dr Stephanie Yin – EXISTENTIAL THERAPY IN THE HOSPITAL SETTING
This session invites participants to consider how we facilitate therapy when a client is unable to speak, acutely ill, or deeply distressed? What happens when the therapy room itself is cold and clinical – white walls, wipe-down chairs, no windows or poor soundproofing – perhaps evoking anxiety, pain and trauma?
Shivanmi and Stephanie will explores the profound experience of co-creating therapy over just eight sessions, where both client and therapist walk a fragile tightrope between despair and hope, life and death. As existential therapists in an NHS cancer hospital, they invite you to step beyond the closed door – or perhaps the blue curtain – into the intimate space where we witness the extreme fragility and strength of humanity. Together, we will reflect on the delicate balance of addressing a client’s emotional needs while navigating their cancer journey within the constraints of the NHS.
Simon Wharne – EXISTENTIAL THERAPY AND POETICS
Simon’s workshop will delve into the lingering impact of a client’s words after therapy sessions.
He will discuss how we might close the door, but our client’s words still resonate. Connecting with loose threads in our thinking, they shift our mood, at the fringe of awareness. When our client feels suicidal, powerless, driven into risky behaviours, their words are left behind. Simon’s research is driven by left-behind-words. He has interviewed healthcare practitioners, exploring concerns about the death of clients. In this workshop, he will read a found poem, constructed from participant transcripts, and will thereby try to be the agent in relation to words and their meanings. Words and the stories that they convey have no respect for closed doors or session endings. You are welcome to read your own favourite short poem, or your own creation, time permitting.