In the lives of neurodivergent individuals and families, love is often a battle cry—a fierce refusal to be unseen, unmet, or pathologised. This experiential workshop explores love as resistance through a Transactional Analysis lens, examining the scripts, injunctions, and systemic dynamics that shape neurodivergent experience. Participants will engage in creative practices including writing from Child ego states, mapping love and loss in systems, and reimagining contracts of care. Together, we’ll explore how practitioners can become allies in restoring dignity, voice, and relationship. This workshop invites tenderness, truth-telling, and a radical reorientation toward love in our work.

In a world troubled by isolation and alienation, the “incel” phenomenon represents a devastating fracture in the capacity for loving connection. This workshop uses a TA and psychosexual lens to explore this script. We will analyse the incel worldview as a profound manifestation of the “I’m Not OK, You’re Not OK” life position, driven by a script of entitled victimhood and rigid gender beliefs. We will deconstruct the underlying psychological drivers: the cultural “Masculine Script” of performance and conquest, the deep yearning for intimacy perverted into a demand for sex as a right, and the psychic retreat into rage that protects against the vulnerability of true connection. This workshop will provide practitioners with a compassionate framework to understand this script and consider pathways toward expanding OKness for those trapped in it.

In this workshop we invite you to consider ideas such as what, for you, is welcomed in erotic touch and what is not – and why this might be. How might out TA theory and Humanistic value base block us, or even shame us, contributing to perpetuating normative frameworks around the erotic. Conversely how might our TA theory and Humanistic value base help us to become our fullest, natural self. Let’s play around the edges and see what we find.

This workshop explores how “love matters” through a creative lens, grounded in the principles of Transactional Analysis (TA) and EMDR. We’ll use vision boards to help you identify and challenge your unconscious script messages about love—the limiting beliefs you formed in childhood.

By engaging in a playful process of finding images and words, you’ll create a new, positive future template. This creative act serves as a blueprint for the brain to follow, helping to decontaminate your Adult ego state from old, unhelpful messages. Ultimately, this tool can empower you to choose a new path for love, free from the constraints of your past.

“As an enthusiastic introvert, my work is driven by a commitment to ongoing personal growth and learning. I specialize in offering intimate partner therapy, supporting those experiencing psychosexual issues. I am additionally trained in EMDR therapy. I strive to offer a neurodivergent-aware practice that integrates playfulness, creativity and nature. I have a background in social work, including within mental health and safeguarding roles. I offer both individual and group supervision as well as book clubs, intentionally delivered in small, nurturing and energizing groups.”

The concept is presented as a tool which can enable us to understand ourselves and the world we’re creating around us. By looking objectively at ourselves and our ways of living, we can conceptualise possibilities for change and movement towards health, which can be lost amongst our more limiting narratives. Crucially, these stories apply not only to ourselves, but to all life around us, enabling humanity to live more peacefully, in ways which reflect our interdependence with nature, rather than exploiting the rest of life around us.

This is a workshop about OK relationship, relationship with both self and other(s). What gets in the way of that? The workshop is about about how our narratives about ourselves and our mental busyness can get in the way of our authentic connection with others. We learn impactfully through experience so it is a largely experiential workshop within which I will, for those of you who like theory, present models from TA of ok-ok, authentic relating. The title of the workshop are the words that begin every yoga class I do, which remind us that we may each be different in expression but we are all rooted in the same essence.

The purest form of love is the freedom to give all you wish to and letting it go, and the freedom of the other to choose to receive it or not. Nowhere is that more true than in dance. Using my 40 years’ experience in TA and 20 years’ experience as a salsa teacher I will offer a space for you to learn more about your holding, and you will learn some basic steps in salsa too 🙂 Using the metaphor of the holding in salsa we will explore our capacities to give freedom and safety in relationship. How do you invite someone into relationship? When do you lead, when do you follow? Do you maintain the bridge of communication? How do you use your potency? Alternating reflection, practice and exchange you will get more insight into the need to hold your own space to be able to relate in the dance.

We will begin by welcoming the conference theme of “love” which will be central to our work together. The workshop is focussed on the question of how the likelihood of transformational change can be optimised in a helping relationship. We will explore this through experience of what is evoked in dialogue when the three qualities of vitality, loving intent and presence are adopted as core aims. We will begin with an exploration of vitality and in particular how it is inhibited by ego defences. Laing’s notion of the divided self will be offered as an explanatory model. We will explore ways in which loving intent can be expressed and fostered in a professional context and we will practice Martin Buber’s technique of I-Thou relating. Finally we will practice our capacity for presence in a guided form of dialogue. We will end by thinking together about what we have learned and how we might use it to be helpful to others.

In 2020 the presenters, who come from different cultures, made a conscious decision to set aside time to explore their racial and cultural differences. They created a safe space and agreed there would be no holds barred – nothing was off the agenda, but all discussions would follow TA principles of open communication and mutual OKness. The result was transformative for both of them. In this workshop we propose to use our experience to facilitate others in the process of “dialoguing difference”. Please bring your curiosity, a willingness to truly listen and to self-reflect, an open mind and open heart.

Moments of love are experienced through elevated levels of interpersonal physiological synchrony across multiple domains. In other words: when we are deeply attuned to another being, our bodies and brains tune into each other, and we get ‘in sync’. Domains of our being, such as the endocrine system, cardiovascular system or movement, can be in or out of awareness; our bodies receive and respond to the unconscious signals transmitted by others. When we synchronise across these domains, it can be a profoundly connected experience, and can feel like a moment of love. This workshop will offer research evidence, an experiential exercise, and a practical guide to experiencing these moments of love in therapy.

If we perceive love as more than a feeling, as a bond that you choose, a practice, it exists beyond the moments of “feeling”, beyond life transitions, disruptions & interruptions. Love becomes a choice to make each day in the practice of enacting it. Using the KAWA (river) model from occupational therapy we will map your life course, and apply a TA lens to explore: -How love manifests in the roles and relationships you inhabit such as parent, partner, friend, colleague, sibling, child, community member. -Your past and present experiences of enacting love. -How love is shaped by your own context and that of the other(s). -How do you love yourself? -In what ways do you enact self-love? -What enables and constrains acts of love? -How might you apply the learning in future roles and relationships?

In this workshop we will begin by asking the question; what is love? Through the annals of evolution, developmental and attachment theory we will explore the origins of human loving and its relevance to modern day psychotherapy. I will offer a framework for therapeutic love in the form of ‘Empassion,’ a proactive form of empathy that integrates the practice of compassion and we will explore what it means to be a loving therapist. The workshop will be a mix of didactic and experiential with clinical examples provided throughout followed by a Q&A.