Conjecture: When You Don’t Know What You Think You Know

£9.99

An experiential CPD workshop exploring how therapeutic assumptions, interpretations and unconscious meaning-making can shape client work. This course helps practitioners distinguish what is known, observed, inferred and assumed, supporting more ethical, reflective and trauma-informed practice.

Course Overview
Conjecture: When You Don’t Know What You Think You Know

This experiential CPD workshop explores the assumptions, interpretations and unconscious meaning-making that can shape therapeutic practice. In client work, practitioners are often required to make sense of partial stories, fragmented disclosures, emotional cues and relational patterns. While clinical intuition and formulation are valuable, they can also lead us to become certain too quickly.

This course invites practitioners to slow down and examine the difference between what is known, what is observed, what is inferred and what may simply be assumed. Through reflective exercises, discussion and practice-based exploration, participants are encouraged to consider how conjecture operates in the therapy room and how it can affect assessment, formulation, note-taking, supervision and the therapeutic relationship.

The workshop supports a more ethical, curious and trauma-informed stance, helping practitioners hold their clinical understanding lightly while remaining responsive to the client’s own meaning, pace and lived experience.

Course Content

During the workshop, participants will explore:

Understanding Conjecture in Practice

An introduction to conjecture as opinion, interpretation, assumption or conclusion formed without complete evidence. Participants will consider how conjecture naturally appears in therapeutic work and why it needs to be handled with care.

Fact, Observation, Inference and Assumption

A practical exploration of the differences between what a client has directly shared, what the practitioner has noticed, what has been clinically inferred and what may have been assumed. This section helps practitioners strengthen reflective awareness and reduce premature certainty.

The Speed of Meaning-Making

Participants will examine how quickly therapists can begin to form ideas about clients, especially when patterns feel familiar. The workshop considers how theory, experience, intuition and personal bias may all influence interpretation.

Working with the Unknown

The course explores the reality that clients may not disclose everything, may not yet have language for their experience, or may protect certain material until safety and readiness have developed. Participants will reflect on how to tolerate uncertainty without rushing the process.

Mapping What Is Known and Unknown

Using reflective tools such as “I know,” “I think I know,” “I suspect” and “I have never asked,” participants will identify where their understanding of a client may be solid, tentative or unexplored.

Ethical Curiosity

The workshop considers how to ask thoughtful, consent-based questions without becoming intrusive. Participants will reflect on timing, power, safety, shame, trauma, culture, identity and professional boundaries.

Formulation as a Provisional Process

Participants will explore how to keep formulations open, collaborative and revisable. This includes using careful language in supervision, case notes and therapeutic conversations.

Application to Client Work and Supervision

The course supports practitioners to bring greater clarity into supervision, review assumptions in client work, and develop a more reflective relationship with uncertainty.

Who This Course Is For

This course is suitable for counsellors, psychotherapists, trainees, supervisors and other helping professionals who want to deepen their reflective practice and strengthen the ethical use of clinical judgement.

It will be particularly relevant for practitioners who:

Work therapeutically with complex client material
Use formulation, assessment or reflective case discussion
Want to become more aware of assumptions and bias in practice
Are interested in trauma-informed and culturally sensitive ways of working
Want to improve the quality of their supervision reflections
Sometimes feel pressure to “know” or make sense of a client too quickly
Are developing confidence in working with uncertainty
Want practical tools for distinguishing fact, observation, inference and assumption

The course is especially useful for professionals in counselling, psychotherapy, coaching, social work, mental health, education, safeguarding, supervision and relational support roles.

No advanced theoretical knowledge is required, but participants should be willing to reflect honestly on their own practice, assumptions and clinical decision-making.