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Workshops & Short courses
on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy

To supplement its Certificated courses, the Centre also presents standalone half-day or one-day workshops and other short courses for helping professionals.

While there are no special advance requirements for workshops, participants will benefit from doing some reading beforehand - for suggestions, please see the reading list in the section for the Primary Certificate Course. On registration, enrollees will be sent a detailed introductory article on CBT.

For workshop fees and registration, go to the Registration page.

Training events are open to all helping professionals, including psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, occupational therapists, counsellors and psychotherapists, and people working in the area of human resources.

Short Workshops for 2011

Easing Distress in a Mindful Way:
An introduction to the theory and practice of mindfulness

(Kirsty Freeman)

Mindfulness has been around for centuries in the East, but has only recently been incorporated into mainstream psychological treatments in the West. It is attracting increasing popularity due to a developing evidence base demonstrating its efficacy as a way of easing distress and enhancing well-being, with a broad range of applications to many common forms of psychological difficulty encountered by our clients and indeed ourselves!

Mindfulness is the process of bringing attention to the unfolding moments of our lives by purposefully paying attention in a non-judgmental way to what is going on in body, mind and the world around us. In this experiential way we shift from the automatic pilot of 'doing' to simply 'being' active participants in our experience. This allows us to develop a different attitude and approach to our experience and more effectively manage distress. This one-day workshop will provide an introduction to mindfulness that will be both knowledge-based and experiential. Topics will include:

  • The theoretical bases of mindfulness-based approaches.

  • How mindfulness is incorporated into modern day therapies: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy.

  • The psychological mechanisms underlying mindfulness and the process by which it facilitates effective distress management.

Participants will have the opportunity to experience some formal and informal mindfulness practices that are offered to a wide range of clients, including those with depression, anxiety and physical conditions. Experiencing these practices will enable participants to reflect on their relevance to personal and professional uses of mindfulness, including how it might be used in the therapeutic alliance.

At this introductory level, the workshop is not designed to equip participants to explicitly teach mindfulness to their clients. It is very important that those who wish to effectively teach mindfulness-based approaches first experience and establish a personal mindfulness meditation practice as a foundation. This workshop will, though, give participants a taste of how to develop mindfulness for themselves, cultivate a more mindful presence in therapy and build up a theoretical frame of reference derived from the mindfulness literature and research.

Enrollees will receive a small mindfulness task to be carried out beforehand, so that they can bring some reflective material to work with during the workshop.

This workshop was highly rated on all aspects by participants attending the previous presentation in Dunedin. Among participants' comments: 'very practical / a good balance of practice-theory / presenter had a lovely presentation style, very clear, articulate'

Using CBT with Children & their Families

(Shane Stevenson)

This workshop will review a number of tools and techniques for adapting and utilising CBT for children; from, in particular, the work of March and Mulle, Kendall, Friedberg and McClure, Stallard; and Sanders, Ralph and Church. It will emphasise a behavioural focus more relevant to children, including reinforcement schedules, behaviour charts, behavioural rehearsal, exposure tasks and response prevention; but will also explore cognitive techniques such as thought restructuring and stopping. Some time will be spent focusing on anxiety issues.

The workshop will provide an opportunity for the presenter to share some of his learning and experiences in order to generate discussion and learning for participants, who will have the opportunity to both familiarise themselves with the resources available and practise some of the techniques.

The workshop is aimed mainly at practitioners who are either new or relatively new to working with children using CBT, but who have some therapeutic understanding and training.

This workshop has been very well received when previously presented, with participants regarding the presenter's style as engaging and highly congruent to working with children. A prectical 'hands-on' training experience, impressive for the amount of material covered in one day.

Helping Clients who are Reacting to Traumatic Events

(Wayne Froggatt)

Stress is to some degree a normal part of life. We generally cope with day-to-day stressors, taking them in our stride. Occasionally, events or circumstances that are out of the ordinary may temporarily overwhelm our coping resources. For some people, the stressful feelings do not subside and may develop into a clinical condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

This workshop will show how Cognitive Behaviour Therapy can be used to help clients who have developed ongoing traumatic reactions in response to natural disasters, assault, prolonged abuse and other unusually-stressful events.

Participants will learn how to:

  • recognise PTSD and distinguish it from functional short-term stress reactions

  • assess the appropriateness of intervention (does the client need therapy or just support?)

  • identify predisposing factors that may keep an individual at risk

  • collaboratively develop a treatment plan designed to treat the existing condition

  • help the client to preventively develop skills to avoid a recurrence

  • implement the plan using a range of cognitive-behavioural techniques

  • know when to  terminate treatment.

A variety of CBT techniques will be covered, including thought-recording, analysis of predisposing beliefs, reframing, graduated exposure (imagery & in-vivo) and others. Cognitive factors commonly involved in traumatic reactions will be addressed, including safe-world beliefs, vulnerability, self-blame & competence, trust, the search for meaning, 'needs' for fairness and order, acceptance of reality and so on.

Participants will receive a comprehensive book of readings.

Cognitive-Behavioural Strategies for Chronic & Resistant Depression

(Wayne Froggatt)

Although depression can be a serious and disabling problem, treatment is usually straightforward using standard cognitive-behavioural strategies. Unfortunately, for some clients depression becomes a chronic, repetitive condition which is resistant to treatment.

This workshop will provide a refresher on the basics of using CBT to treat depression (e.g. behavioural activation, increasing motivation, problem-solving, daily thought records), then show how the standard techniques can be enhanced to break through the blocks to their use with more difficult depressions. Topics to be addressed include motivation, negative expectations of therapy, secondary gains for remaining unwell, dysthymia, homework compliance, problems with the therapeutic relationship, discomfort disturbance, secondary emotional disturbance, avoidance behaviour, thoughts resistant to change and so on.

Participants will receive a book of readings that will include forms and client handouts for reproduction.

Links to other training pages

►   Instructions & notes on registering

►   Registration form

►   Primary Certificate in Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy

►   Subscribe to the free CBT Newsletter

►   Rational Analysis Training Simulator

►   Multimedia Learning Tool
Information on this page is subject to change without notice.