11 & 12 June 2026
This workshop presents the theory and experiential approach to integrating body-focused techniques to enhance schema therapy practice in a time-limited manner. These strategies are particularly useful for clients who present with complex needs and have histories of severe childhood neglect or trauma, and who have difficulties engaging with traditional schema therapy techniques.
This highly interactive and experiential workshop is designed for psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. Attendees should have an understanding of schema therapy model who wish to expand their repertoire for working with trauma and the body by incorporating simple but powerful somatically-focused interventions.
Topics covered at the workshop
- Building detailed mode awareness – exploring patterns of emotion, sensation, movement and impulses associated with specific modes
- Attunement, resonance and listening to the stories of the body – learning to read the non-verbal language of modes
- Creative use of breathwork as a foundation of somatic work
- Working with coping and critic modes somatically – building a somatic sense of safety when it does not feel safe enough to go in the body
- Tuning into dissociative parts of self – when there is too much or too little feeling in the body
- Limited parenting of the youngest parts – adding somatic tools to enhance work with Child Modes
- Working with modes that are particularly entrenched and stuck
- Creative ways of adding movement to enhance somatic work
- Therapeutic use of touch – how to use it safely and with client’s consent
Literature
Briedis, J. & Startup, H. (2020). Somatic perspective in Schema Therapy: The role of the body in the awareness and transformation of modes and schemas. In Heath, G. & Startup, H. (Eds). Creative methods in schema therapy: Advances and innovations in schema therapy. Abington: Routledge.
Your trainer is…
Janis Briedis is a Consultant Psychologist, advanced level Schema Therapist, Supervisor and Trainer with many years of clinical experience in the NHS and private practice. He teaches regularly schema therapy, CBT and trauma-focused approaches in a variety of NHS and academic settings. Janis has worked in primary care, drug and alcohol, LGBT services, community mental health teams and specialist psychology services and has a wide range of clinical experience working particularly with complex trauma, dissociation, personality disorders and relationship difficulties. Janis is a co-director at Schema Therapy School UK.
Über den Workshop:
Der Workshop wird in Englisch durchgeführt!
(Teilnehmer sollten die englische Präsentation verstehen können; Fragen, Anmerkungen, Übungen können auch auf Deutsch/Französisch/Spanisch gestellt bzw. gemacht werden)