Eric Berne wrote “The attainment of autonomy is manifested by the release or recovery of three capacities: awareness, spontaneity and intimacy”. This is the definition which those of us who have studied TA know. He described them as if they are equal capacities. Have we reflected about this? My view is that they are not equal but rather that the capacity for awareness precedes and is fundamental to the other capacities. In this workshop I will be leading an exploration, through experience and discussion, of awareness. What do we understand that to be? How do we experience our capacity for awareness? How does it relate to autonomy?

Lis Heath has been in the field of TA psychotherapy, supervision and training for over 35 years. Having enjoyed a career working both in the UK and abroad, she is now enjoying being semi retired.

Group work can begin with each person bringing their own history, interests, and frame of reference to a shared symbol, story, or theme — and the group implicitly contracts, often unspoken, around whose version becomes the accepted group script. In the therapeutic encounter, voicing a meaning that diverges from this takes trust and a felt sense of safety. Working with groups in therapy and supervision, this workshop uses cocreated symbolic work and experimenting with role play to make that process visible in real time. Together, we build a story from one shared starting point, then turn reflexively toward what happened — whose sense of it led, whose was lost, and what that reveals about our own patterns in groups.

Claire Bowers, MSc, is a Certified Transactional Analyst (psychotherapy) and Provisional Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst, working in private practice in Liverpool and as Academic Tutor for the Psychotherapy Institute in Bolton. Claire works creatively, using play, symbol, and role play to deepen therapeutic contact and relational understanding.

In this workshop, I will invite you to apply ‘reflexivity’ to your own view of your body, while I present an ‘OK’ description of the human body and how it is animated. With a talk, guided exercises, demonstration and commentary I would like us to review of our attitude to physicality, body awareness and touch in TA psychotherapy. There is a long standing fascination with ‘the body’ in TA but also confusion and hesitation about how to bring clarity to healthy body-mind unity. Doubts and cautions occur around issues of power, control and sexuality, and risk. I would like to present a systematic framework in which the TA concepts of OK-ness, Autonomy and relationship can be applied to physicality, and invite a vision of an OK-body.

Jamie McDowell has an original training in bodywork (Alexander Technique) then a training in TA psychotherapy. He collaborated with TA colleagues in organising a CPD programme in a variety of Body Psychotherapy approaches in Kendal, Cumbria. He is interested in the principle of body-mind unity and how this can be experienced and how the lack of it can be addressed.

There is a chair in every supervision that no one sits in. The client is spoken about, thought about, formulated, and not there to say otherwise.
This workshop puts that chair in the middle of the room and asks a question that turns out not to be simple: what would your client bring to supervision about you?
Reflexivity invites us to notice how our background, biases and feelings shape our practice. Here we follow that noticing one step further, into the models and frames we carry in with us, and what they may be doing while we are busy being self-aware. A supervisor can be exquisitely self-aware and still be working with a map that describes a person by their distance from a norm.
We will work with two stories, cotton wool and a language not accounted for, two illustrations and conversation. You are invited to bring one concept you use, and to put a question to it.
There are two of us and we differ. We will stay with our differences rather than resolve them, and with the differences each person brings. Some of us talk to build a pattern, some of us talk to reach a point, and some of us do not talk. There is room for all of it.
There is no framework to take away. No one will be asked to speak from the chair. A place to be you and impacted by what unfolds in the conversation.
Open to practitioners at any stage who are currently in supervision. Bring something unfinished.

Lyn Wall is an autistic ADHDer, psychotherapist and supervisor. Her practice and her advocacy are with adults and neurodivergent young people harmed by family systems and wider systems meant to protect them. She writes on radically inclusive practice and neuroqueering, and would rather be in dialogue than be agreed with.

Kate Jones is a psychotherapist, consultant, trainer and illustrator working at the intersection of neurodivergence and mental health. She is Chief Communication Officer at NeuroClastic, where her activism centres on communication rights, autonomy and the inclusion of nonspeaking people. She illustrated Weavers and Concluders, which sits at the heart of this workshop.

It’s 21 years since my article Being White (co-written with Keith Tudor) appeared in the TAJ. At that point I’d been working as a teacher, then a counsellor in inner-city schools for over 20 years. The subjects of ‘race’/ power / entitlement had always played a part in how I – a middle-class white woman of working-class Irish heritage – understood relational dynamics, and I wrote my CTA case study about one of my global majority clients. As we contemplate reflexivity and the current geopolitical landscape, what, if anything, has changed in the last two decades?
In this workshop I invite participants to reflect upon who they are – both in the counselling room and in the wider world – as I revisit the article and the theoretical ideas which informed it. Pete Shotton, my husband of 40 years, who is an enthusiastic advocate for my work in this area, has agreed to co-facilitate this workshop with me.

Marie Naughton was born in Consett and grew up in County Durham and North Yorkshire.
She studied languages at Manchester University She’s had careers as a translator, teacher, lecturer, school counsellor. She is a psychotherapist/supervisor and she facilitates writing workshops. Her poems have been published widely and she’s working on her second collection.

Pete Shotton is an educator, psychotherapist, supervisor, transactional analyst, mentor, learner, reader, writer, husband, father and grandfather; a journeyman and fellow traveller, open to life’s possibilities and dreading life’s one certainty.

This is a workshop for all fields of practice, for anyone who does or is intending to deliver training programmes, workshops or any other format in which teaching, learning and development occurs. You could also be curious about Educational TA- What is it? is enough to come along and engage.
This session will provide you with a reflective space to learn or revisit core educational TA theory and tools to inform your practice as a teacher and trainer of TA at any stage in your development as an educator.
We will mainly work with the Education Continuum (Barrow, 2009), and Learning imagoes (Newton, 2014) and support our exploration with the Nurture Structure Highway (Clarke and Dawson, 1998) to:
• Identify and reflect on your approach to your teaching and training practice and philosophy,
• How this aligns, or not, with the students’ learning needs and what to do if it does not,
• What type of learning contract is needed and
• What the unintended outcomes of these 3 aspects may be for you and the student.

Lisa Paul is an educator incorporating the visual arts, occupational therapy and transactional analysis in her practice supporting and enabling practitioners care for themselves whilst caring for others in their personal and professional lives.
Lisa also offers Transactional Analysts of all fields supervision and training workshops to develop and enhance their teaching practice and to develop and nurture their identity as an educator. Lisa also maintains an occupational therapy practice working with clients who have experienced catastrophic injuries and is Head of Business Support and Customer Relationships at Think Therapy First.

Reflexivity is the ongoing, deliberate examination of how our own beliefs, emotions, experiences, social position, assumptions, and responses shape our work with clients and our collaborations with other professionals.
We will discuss three approaches to the therapeutic process ranging from an instumental approach where the practitioner delivers a fomulaic therapy to working with clients and our own experiences transpersonally.
We will explore with reference to client work and surveys on the effectiveness of practice and the potential for therapeutic harm, how the different approaches might provide inversely proportional levels of safety and experience for the client and the therapist and how the risk of harm and ineffectiveness might be missed.

David holds a diploma in TA Practice and runs Carlisle Psychotherapy, a busy local practice established in 2017, working with individuals and couples. David is a BACP Member and Supervisor, Trained in TA Psychotherapy and Severe and Complex Trauma.

David is passionate about volunteering in the TA Community since 2013, is a former chair of UKATA through the Covid-19 pandemic and a member of the organising committee for this conference.

Carmen holds a Diploma in Psychotherapeutic Counselling, and a Diploma in Integrative Psychotherapy and is registered with the UKCP. She has run a busy private practice based locally and online since 2018.

Carmen is also a qualified Physiotherapist and enjoys working in an embodied way both reflexively and with clients.

Post qualification Carmen has trained extensively in Attachment and Intergenerational Trauma and is currently working with parents and infants directly. Carmen’s passions are embodied living and embracing neurodiversity.

An experiential workshop with a dash of theory—some novel, some neglected—bringing familiar TA concepts of Autonomy, OKness, Discounting and Accounting into dialogue with Taoist practice through the Three Treasures of Body, Breath and Presence. We will revisit Berne’s Physis, the energy of growth and expansion, and pair it with “Gravitas”, a complementary downward force supporting structure, nurture and grounding. Through simple practices designed to strengthen Protection, Permission, Potency and transformative Presence, participants will explore reflexivity not only as a cognitive process, but as a dynamic, embodied and multilayered experience that can enrich practice in any field.

Michael, a conference presenter over five decades, has 60+ years working in all four fields -headteacher, consultant, psychotherapist, supervisor, blending TA with somatic and trauma work, informed by eastern philosophy and practice.
Now in Erickson’s final life stage [Integrity versus Despair, seeking Wisdom] he focuses on the practice of Presence.

Few conversations expose a therapist’s own history, biases and unspoken fears as sharply as death, suicide, and ambiguous loss. This workshop is a practice in reflexivity: examining how our cultural background, personal losses, and instinctive urge to reassure or resolve shape, and sometimes distort, our presence with bereaved clients. Rather than offering techniques to “manage” these conversations, we will use discussion, reflective exercises, and shared experience to surface our own beliefs, thoughts, feelings and possible avoidance patterns. Participants will leave with a clearer sense of how self-awareness, supervision, and personal reflection sustain the capacity to sit with what cannot be fixed.

Cathy is a trainer, supervisor, psychotherapy training consultant and researcher. Her latest book ‘Understanding Bereaved Parents and Siblings’ was published in May 2021. Cathy runs a supervision and consultancy practice in the North-West offering research, clinical and training supervision along with various CPD training courses and workshops.

This workshop puts Lynne Layton’s normative unconscious processes and Erich Fromm’s social character in conversation with Dolly Parton to queer our thinking about cultural Scripts.

Some norms we’ve examined; others we’ve swallowed whole. Layton’s interest is in the second kind — particularly those wearing a veneer of ‘good practice’. Parton (camp, unashamed of her roots, and politically elusive) gives us somewhere to look from and within.

Through Dolly’s music, small-group work and guided reflection, we will explore where we reproduce norms of gender, class and sexuality; what we feel when we notice; and what becomes possible once we do.

Carina Badger (she/her) is a CTA(P), UKCP psychotherapist who works in private practice in Manchester. She is doing a Professional Doctorate at the University of Chester and her current research interests include psychotherapy training, philosophy of the self, queer theory and critical psychotherapy. She tends to leave people with more questions than answers.

A supervision group can evaluate honestly and end well. The evaluation can still teach its members almost nothing that lasts. Experience
alone teaches nothing. Learning comes from experience that is reflected on, conceptualised and tested again in action (Kolb,
1984). In this workshop we treat reflection as a distinct, contracted step in group supervision. It is the seventh step of a
systemic supervision roadmap. We look at reflection as Adult processing of experience. We explore how a group helps
decontaminate it, and why unstroked learning decays. Participants practise the harvest round, a short protocol that ends
every session in a specific, dated action. We close with the limits of learning in group supervision (Ravalier et al., 2022).

Sari van Poelje is Managing Director of Intact Academy and a Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst in the
organisational field. She is an EMCC Master Practitioner, Master Team Coach and Master Supervisor. She has around 40
years of international coaching and supervision experience.Sari has published 34 articles and 5 books on leadership, coaching and organizational change. Her next books on “agile business innovation” and “transformational team coaching” will be published by Routledge in 2027.

Unlock your clinical presence. Join us for an experiential, transformative workshop designed to explore your own internal dialogue when navigating psychosexual material. Moving beyond client diagnostics, we will dive deep into reflexivity—shining a light on how our own introjected Parent taboos, Somatic Child anxieties, and Adult intellectualisations impact the therapeutic relationship. In this collaborative space, you will engage in structural mapping, a reflexive self-inventory, and collective case studies.

We invite you to an immersive workshop where we will map our internal landscape.

Hazel Stilgoe-McCombe is a psychotherapist specialising in Transactional Analysis and Psychosexual therapy. Based in rural Lincolnshire, she runs a private practise working with sexual and relational issues . Hazel is dedicated to fostering deep practitioner reflexivity, helping clinicians bridge the gap between structural TA theory and real-time somatic awareness.

I’ve been reflecting on how neurology can be activated in romantic relationships. How typical interventions we might use as a couples therapist can be counter intuitive and lead to rigidity and stuckness. How we’re bombarded by opinions in social media around what defines a healthy dynamic. Exploring how PDA can be activated and how it can look like a romantic partner is being obtuse and uncaring whilst actually being in dorsal shutdown. How PDA shutdown can mean that any reasonable request for a need change can land as a demand and like you’re asking for character change.

Emma has a private practice in Leeds, she completed her core training at The Transactional Analysis Training organisation. She works exclusively with Neurodivergent Clients. Her practice is made up of young people, individuals and Couples.

This experiential workshop explores the lasting emotional and relational impact of schooling, including the messages we absorbed about intelligence, success, belonging and worth. Drawing on educational thinking, including Kirsten Olson, and Transactional Analysis, participants will explore unconscious beliefs, survival strategies and relational patterns that may continue to influence how we learn, facilitate, lead and connect.

Together, we will examine how educational systems and hierarchies can be unconsciously reproduced, while exploring permission-rich learning environments that foster authenticity, curiosity, safety, connection and possibility for all.

Cat Cornthwaite PTSTA(E) is an Educational Transactional Analyst, trainer and supervisor based in Derbyshire’s High Peak. She has worked in mainstream secondary education for much of her career alongside supporting teacher development in the UK and internationally. Her current work explores relational and transformative education and possibilities for systemic educational change.