## The Seven-Eyed Model of Supervision

This on-demand workshop introduces the Seven-Eyed Model of Supervision, developed by Peter Hawkins and Robin Shohet. It offers a practical map for looking at supervision from several different perspectives rather than becoming fixed on one version of the work.

The workshop explores the model’s theoretical roots, including humanistic psychology, systemic thinking, psychodynamic theory, reflective practice and attachment theory. It then works through each of the seven “eyes”, focusing on the client, therapeutic interventions, the client–therapist relationship, the supervisee’s internal process, the supervisory relationship, the supervisor’s own responses and the wider systemic context.

Throughout the session, the model is presented as a way of creating supervision that can both support and challenge. It encourages supervisors and supervisees to slow down, notice what is happening in the room and consider the relationships, feelings, patterns and systems that may be shaping the work.

### Key clinical themes

**Seeing the client more clearly**
Bringing the client vividly into supervision before moving too quickly into analysis or problem-solving.

**Moving beyond advice-giving**
Exploring what the therapist is doing, why they are doing it and what other options may be available, while supporting reflection rather than dependency.

**Working with relationship dynamics**
Paying attention to the relationship between client and therapist, including transference, unconscious interaction and repeated relational patterns.

**Using internal responses as information**
Exploring the supervisee’s feelings, thoughts and countertransference, as well as the supervisor’s own sensations and intuitive responses.

**Noticing parallel process**
Looking at how dynamics from the therapeutic relationship may be appearing within the supervisory relationship.

**Holding the wider context in mind**
Considering ethical frameworks, organisational culture, support systems, social pressures and other stakeholders that may affect therapy and supervision.

**Applying an attachment lens**
Understanding supervision as a secure base for exploration, vulnerability and reflective thinking, while noticing how care-giving and attachment patterns may be activated.

The workshop also considers the strengths and limitations of the model across counselling, healthcare, organisations, education, systemic work and short-term practice. It invites participants to think of the Seven-Eyed Model as a flexible map that can support deeper reflection, multiple perspectives and more transformative learning.

### Learning outcomes

By the end of the recording, you will have explored:

* The history, origins and theoretical roots of the Seven-Eyed Model
* The purpose of each of the seven perspectives
* Practical supervisory questions and interventions
* The model’s relational, systemic and attachment-based dimensions
* Its strengths, limitations and possible applications in practice

In this Optima Presents event, attachment-based psychotherapist, supervisor, trainer and author Linda Cundy explores the themes from her edited collection, *Narratives of Attachment, Danger and Survival*.

The conversation considers how attachment can be both a source of safety and a force that keeps people connected to relationships, communities, identities and coping strategies that may also be harmful. Drawing on stories relating to coercive relationships, cults, addiction, gangs, displacement and trauma, Linda reflects on the complex psychological and emotional processes involved in leaving, surviving and rebuilding a sense of self.

The event explores why leaving is rarely a simple or immediate act, and how grief, hope, belonging, identity and fear can shape a person’s choices. It also considers the importance of actual safety, affect regulation, mourning and supportive relationships in recovery.

Practitioners are invited to reflect on how attachment-informed thinking can deepen understanding of clients who remain in, return to or struggle to recover from unsafe situations, while maintaining a clear focus on accountability, safeguarding, cultural context and professional boundaries.

This event is relevant to counsellors, psychotherapists, coaches, mental health practitioners, social workers and other helping professionals interested in attachment, trauma, coercive control, recovery and relational practice.

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.

Course Overview and Description

When Motherhood Changes Everything: Attachment and Matrescence explores the profound psychological, emotional, relational and identity transition that can take place during pregnancy, birth and early motherhood. Rather than viewing this period only through the language of postnatal adjustment or perinatal mental health, the course introduces matrescence as a process of “mother-becoming”: a significant developmental transition that can reshape a woman’s sense of self, body, relationships, needs and vulnerabilities.

Through an attachment-informed lens, the course considers how becoming a mother may activate existing attachment patterns and defences. Participants are invited to look beneath surface presentations such as anxiety, overwhelm, reassurance-seeking, emotional withdrawal, shame, hypervigilance or difficulty asking for help, and to consider the deeper attachment needs and protective strategies that may be present.

The course uses the case example of Emma, a first-time mother experiencing anxiety, self-doubt, sleep difficulties, body shame and fear of being alone with her baby. Her presentation is explored not simply as a set of symptoms, but as a meaningful response to an activated attachment system during a period of intense change.

Key areas include the nervous system, co-regulation, mentalisation, shame, grief and loss, the wider relational system, intergenerational stories of motherhood, and the therapist’s own countertransference. The course also considers how cultural expectations of the “good mother” can intensify shame when a mother’s lived experience does not match idealised narratives of natural confidence, bonding or enjoyment.

By the end of the course, participants will have a richer understanding of matrescence as an attachment transition and will be encouraged to apply this learning in assessment, formulation, therapeutic pacing, supervision and reflective practice. The course is particularly relevant for counsellors, psychotherapists and helping professionals working with pregnancy, birth, early motherhood, maternal mental health, fertility, baby loss, attachment and identity transitions.

Couples Therapy Through an Attachment Lens: Patterns, Safety and Repair is a reflective CPD workshop for counsellors, psychotherapists, supervisors and practitioners who want to understand couple dynamics through an attachment-informed lens.

This workshop explores the important shift from seeing one partner as “the problem” to understanding the relationship as the client. Rather than focusing on blame, participants are invited to become curious about the recurring patterns that keep couples stuck, including pursuing, withdrawing, escalation, shutdown, emotional distance and repeated conflict.

Through an attachment lens, the workshop looks beneath the presenting issues couples bring to therapy, such as conflict, betrayal, lack of intimacy, fertility challenges, grief, parenting difficulties, family pressures or separation decisions. It helps practitioners listen for the deeper attachment questions often sitting underneath: Can I trust you? Will you be there for me? Do I matter? Are we safe together?

Participants will explore adult attachment patterns, common couple cycles, rupture and repair, and the role of emotional safety in helping partners move from defensiveness towards greater vulnerability and connection. The workshop also introduces key couples therapy models, including EFT, Gottman Method, Imago and PACT, considering how each approach supports repair, co-regulation, attunement and secure relating.

The course also places strong emphasis on ethical, safe and anti-oppressive practice. It considers multi-partiality, confidentiality, safeguarding, coercive control, power imbalance, culture, identity and neurodiversity, recognising that attachment never develops in isolation and that couples work requires careful clinical judgement, specialist awareness and appropriate supervision.

This workshop offers a thoughtful introduction to couples therapy through an attachment lens, supporting therapists to move beyond surface-level communication difficulties and towards a deeper understanding of the emotional meaning beneath couple conflict, disconnection and repair.

Clients rarely arrive in therapy as one neat, unified self. More often, they bring a whole inner cast: protective parts, wounded younger parts, fears around closeness or distance, internal conflict, shame, anger, withdrawal, people-pleasing, self-criticism, and longings for connection that may feel both vital and frightening.

This reflective CPD workshop explores how Internal Family Systems (IFS) and attachment theory can be brought together to deepen therapeutic understanding and practice. Attachment theory offers a powerful lens for understanding relational survival strategies, while IFS gives us a compassionate language for how those strategies become organised internally as “parts”.

Rather than viewing client behaviours as resistance, avoidance, neediness, manipulation or defiance, this workshop invites practitioners to ask a more compassionate and clinically useful question: what is this part trying to protect?

Participants will explore how different attachment organisations may present through IFS-informed protector strategies, including dismissing, preoccupied and disorganised patterns. The session also considers the role of exiles, attachment wounds, therapist parts, countertransference, rupture and repair, and the therapist’s capacity to remain grounded in Self-energy.

The emphasis is not on becoming an IFS practitioner in one session — no one needs that kind of pressure on a Tuesday afternoon — but on developing an attachment-informed, parts-aware stance that can enrich relational work, supervision and clinical reflection.

What the Course Covers

This CPD session explores:

• How attachment theory and IFS complement one another in therapeutic practice
• The client’s “inner family”: managers, firefighters, exiles and Self-energy
• Protector strategies within dismissing, preoccupied and disorganised attachment patterns
• Why protectors need to be respected before approaching vulnerability
• How exiles often carry shame, grief, loneliness, abandonment pain and unmet attachment needs
• The therapist as a secure base, both relationally and internally
• Therapist parts, countertransference and the IFS “U-turn”
• Rupture and repair as opportunities for attachment healing
• How Self-energy can support therapeutic presence, pacing and earned secure attachment

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this CPD session, participants will be able to:

1. Describe how IFS and attachment theory can be integrated as complementary frameworks for understanding clients’ internal and relational worlds.
2. Recognise common protector strategies associated with dismissing, preoccupied and disorganised attachment patterns.
3. Reframe behaviours often labelled as resistance as protective adaptations shaped by attachment experience.
4. Understand the importance of respecting protectors before moving toward exile material or deeper vulnerability.
5. Reflect on therapist parts, countertransference and the use of the IFS U-turn in clinical practice.
6. Identify how rupture and repair in the therapeutic relationship can support attachment healing and movement towards earned security.

Who Is This Course For?

This course is suitable for qualified and trainee counsellors, psychotherapists, supervisors and mental health practitioners who are interested in attachment, trauma, relational therapy, Internal Family Systems, parts work, and the therapeutic relationship.

It will be particularly relevant for practitioners working with clients who experience shame, emotional dysregulation, relational trauma, avoidance, dependency fears, internal conflict, difficulties with trust, or intense push-pull dynamics in relationships.

Teaching and Learning Methods

The session includes teaching input, clinical reflection, attachment-informed parts formulation, reflective prompts, and an optional experiential exercise focused on accessing Self-energy. Participants are encouraged to reflect on both client parts and therapist parts, making the learning directly applicable to clinical practice and supervision.

Key Takeaway

At the heart of this workshop is a compassionate shift in therapeutic stance: from “What is wrong with this client?” to “What has this part been trying so hard to protect?”

When attachment theory and IFS are brought together, they offer a deeply humane way of understanding survival strategies, relational wounds and the possibility of earned security — both within the therapeutic relationship and within the client’s own internal system.

Josh Fletcher explores anxiety in the modern world, looking at panic, avoidance, reassurance-seeking, safety behaviours and the embodied experience of fear. The session frames anxiety as a protective alarm system rather than a personal failure, and considers how modern life can heighten threat perception. Through an attachment-informed lens, the event invites practitioners to think about anxiety as both a nervous-system response and a relational strategy, while reflecting on how therapists can offer steadiness, psychoeducation, careful pacing and relational safety without becoming part of the reassurance cycle.

Please be aware that the recording contains some explicit language. We would also like to clarify that any views expressed by Joshua during the session were his own personal opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of Optima. At Optima, we remain committed to creating respectful, ethical, attachment-informed and professionally reflective learning spaces. This conversation offered much to think about, and we value opportunities for learning that are held with care, curiosity and professional integrity.

Course overview

Holding Minds in Mind: Attachment and Mentalisation in the Therapy Room explores how clients’ early attachment experiences can shape their capacity to understand their own and others’ minds. The course introduces mentalisation as the ability to stay curious about thoughts, feelings, intentions, and relational dynamics, especially when emotions are high or relationships feel under threat.

Participants are invited to consider how mentalisation can become harder during shame, fear, rupture, or attachment activation, and how this may show up in therapeutic work through withdrawal, certainty, emotional flooding, intellectualisation, or difficulty trusting the therapist’s mind.

The course offers practical ways to support clients by prioritising regulation, pacing reflective work carefully, responding to rupture with curiosity, and using tentative, boundaried interventions that help clients move from certainty to curiosity, reaction to reflection, and threat to connection.

This course explores how practitioners can understand and create “places of safety” for children, young people, families, clients and supervisees in an increasingly unsafe and anxious world.

It focuses on safety as something relational, embodied and contextual rather than simply physical. Key themes include attachment within wider ecological systems, co-regulation, play, belonging, repair after rupture, emotional availability, and the importance of understanding behaviour as meaningful communication rather than pathology. The course also invites practitioners to think critically about decolonising child mental health, giving voice to silenced or marginalised experiences, and recognising how culture, history, family systems, environment and power shape people’s sense of safety.

A central takeaway is that children and young people rarely struggle in isolation. Practitioners are encouraged to ask what sits behind behaviour, how adults can offer a secure base, and how therapeutic or supervisory relationships can become spaces where difficult feelings are survived, repaired and held — but not carried alone.

The Functional Model Revisited: An Attachment-Informed Approach to Supervision
Tutors: Uruj Anjum and Georgina Sturmer

In this workshop, Uruj Anjum and Georgina Sturmer revisit the Functional Model of supervision and explore what happens when it is viewed through an attachment-informed lens.

The session begins with the three functions of supervision developed by Francesca Inskipp and Brigid Proctor: formative, normative and restorative. Uruj and Georgina explain these as the learning and development function, the ethical and accountability function, and the emotional support and containment function. Rather than treating these as three tidy columns, they explore how the functions often overlap within real supervision sessions.

A key focus of the workshop is the idea that supervision does not land in neutral space. It lands in people, with histories, identities, relationships to authority, and different levels of comfort with being seen, challenged or supported. The tutors explore how supervision can feel stretching, exposing, collaborative, comforting or frustrating – sometimes all at once.

The workshop then brings in attachment theory, considering supervision as both a secure base and a safe haven. Uruj and Georgina look at how supervisees may lean towards different functions depending on their attachment strategies. Avoidant tendencies may lead supervisees to stay in intellectual, formative or normative spaces, while anxious tendencies may seek reassurance through the restorative function. Supervisors also bring their own attachment patterns, which can shape whether they over-support, avoid challenge, move too quickly into teaching, or struggle with restorative work.

The session also explores power, culture and identity in supervision. Uruj and Georgina invite supervisors and supervisees to think not only about difference, but about how power operates in the room: whose voice is centred, whose knowledge is valued, and how accountability can be offered without shame.

Through role plays, and reflection, the workshop brings the model to life with examples of anxious and avoidant patterns in supervision. The emphasis is on using the Functional Model as a structure, while also noticing safety, threat, power and the nervous systems in the room.

Key clinical themes

• The Functional Model of supervision: formative, normative and restorative
• How the three functions overlap in real supervision
• Supervision as more than a case presentation
• Supervision as a secure base and safe haven
• How attachment patterns shape the experience of supervision
• Avoidant strategies: intellectualising, minimising and staying in thinking
• Anxious strategies: reassurance-seeking, self-doubt and fear of getting it wrong
• How supervisors’ own attachment patterns affect the work
• The role of power, culture and identity in supervision
• Accountability without shame
• Difference, hierarchy and the impact of being seen
• Using attunement to move safely between the three functions

This recording is suitable for supervisors, supervisees and therapists who want to think more deeply about supervision as a relational, ethical and attachment-informed space.

PLEASE NOTE: The time of the recording has been adapted from a live session and includes time for reflection!

Understanding and Working With Avoidant Attachment in Adult Relationships
Tutor: Georgina Sturmer

In this workshop, Georgina Sturmer explores how avoidant attachment shows up in adult relationships, and how therapists can support clients to understand the patterns that keep them distant from others.

Georgina begins with a clear introduction to attachment as an internal “alarm system”. When life feels stressful, threatening or emotionally exposing, avoidantly attached clients may protect themselves by moving away, becoming self-reliant, shutting down feelings, or keeping others at a distance. On the outside, this can look calm, confident and capable, but underneath there may be fear of rejection, dislike, vulnerability or being overwhelmed by closeness.

The session looks at how avoidant attachment can affect romantic relationships, family relationships, friendships, work relationships and the therapeutic relationship itself. Georgina uses the case example of Bob and Sarah to explore the relational “dance” that can happen when one person seeks closeness and the other withdraws. She invites therapists to think about what this dance might feel like for the client, for the other person, and for the therapist in the room.

A strong focus of the workshop is on helping clients slow down and notice what happens in the moment their attachment alarm goes off. Rather than trying to change behaviour straight away, Georgina encourages curiosity about what feels threatening, what the client imagines is being asked of them, and why distance begins to feel like the safest option.

The workshop also explores practical ways of working with avoidant attachment, including attunement, co-regulation, mentalisation, psychoeducation, the Parent-Adult-Child model, inner child work, body awareness and metaphor. Georgina shows how therapists can help clients understand their need for space without using it as an attack, and how they can begin to recognise the emotional cost of always protecting themselves through distance.

Ultimately, this session is about increasing safety rather than forcing vulnerability. When avoidantly attached clients feel safe enough, the dance can begin to change — not because they are pushed into closeness, but because they no longer have to dance alone.

Key clinical themes

• Understanding avoidant attachment as protection
• Attachment as an internal alarm system
• How avoidance shows up in adult relationships
• The link between closeness, alarm and withdrawal
• Working with clients who minimise, intellectualise or use humour
• Using the metaphor of the relational “dance”
• Understanding pursuer-withdrawer dynamics
• Exploring the therapist-client relationship with avoidant clients
• Supporting mentalisation and curiosity about others’ feelings
• Using psychoeducation without encouraging over-intellectualising
• Working with the Parent-Adult-Child model
• Exploring younger parts and inner child work when safety has been built
• Helping clients notice body signals when their alarm goes off
• Increasing safety so vulnerability can become more possible

This recording is suitable for therapists and counsellors who want to understand avoidant attachment in adult relationships and work more confidently with clients who protect themselves through distance, self-reliance and withdrawal.

PLEASE NOTE: The time of the recording has been adapted from a live session and includes time for reflection

Becoming Research Confident: A Therapist’s Path to Level 7
Tutor: Uruj Anjum

In this workshop, Uruj Anjum invites therapists to think about research in a way that feels more human, accessible and rooted in clinical practice.

Rather than presenting research as something distant or purely academic, Uruj begins with the idea that research often starts in the therapy room. Therapists are already noticing patterns, asking why certain dynamics emerge, wondering what helps clients, and making meaning from what unfolds in the work. In this sense, research is framed as structured curiosity.

The session gently demystifies different types of research, including quantitative research, qualitative research, systematic reviews, mixed methods, case studies, practice-based research and clinical trials. Uruj offers simple explanations of what these approaches involve, and how some may feel closer to the way therapists already think and work.

A key focus of the workshop is helping therapists reflect on their own relationship with research. Uruj explores how words like “research” can bring up curiosity, doubt, avoidance, perfectionism, fear of getting it wrong, or memories of earlier academic experiences. She also looks at what Level 7 study involves, including critical thinking, engaging with literature, developing an independent research project, and integrating reflection with academic thinking.

The workshop includes a reflective exercise and breakout discussion to help participants identify areas of clinical curiosity. Uruj encourages therapists to notice the questions that already live in their practice, and to begin imagining how those questions might be shaped into research.

Uruj also shares her own research journey, from working as an NHS research genetic counsellor across multiple studies, through to her current systematic review exploring the intergenerational psychological effects of having a parent with Huntington’s disease.

This recording is suitable for therapists and counsellors who feel curious about research, interested in Level 7 training, or unsure whether they are “academic enough” to take the next step.

Key clinical themes

• Research as structured curiosity
• Recognising the research skills already present in therapy practice
• Understanding different types of research in simple terms
• Exploring the difference between literature reviews and systematic reviews
• Reflecting on fear, doubt, confidence and avoidance around research
• Understanding what Level 7 study involves
• Moving from clinical curiosity to research question
• Bridging therapeutic identity and research thinking
• Using systematic review to gather and make sense of existing knowledge
• Seeing research as human, relational and connected to practice

This workshop offers a gentle and encouraging introduction for therapists who want to become more research-confident and begin imagining a pathway toward Level 7 study.

PLEASE NOTE: The time of the recording has been adapted from a live session and includes time for reflection

Autism & Attachment in the Therapy Room
Tutor: Darren Sharpe & Jo Oxley

In this 2.5 hour training, Darren Sharpe explores the intersection between autism and attachment in the therapy room, with a focus on helping therapists avoid misreading autistic clients and adapt practice in ways that support safety and engagement.

The session begins by framing autism as a lifelong neurodevelopmental difference, with highly variable presentations. Darren introduces key ideas including the spectrum model, the neurodiversity perspective, and differences in communication, social interaction and flexibility. The training invites therapists to consider which behaviours in therapy may be autistic traits rather than resistance, disengagement or emotional avoidance.

A strong focus of the workshop is sensory processing and the nervous system. Darren explores how sensory sensitivity or sensory seeking can shape emotional regulation, relational safety and therapy engagement. Participants are encouraged to think about behaviour as communication, and to ask what the client’s nervous system may be communicating in the room.

The training also includes an attachment theory refresher, looking at secure, avoidant, ambivalent/anxious and disorganised attachment patterns. Darren then explores where autism and attachment can overlap, and how autism may sometimes look like attachment difficulty. For example, reduced eye contact may be about sensory regulation, independence may be misread as avoidance, and literal communication may be mistaken for emotional distance.

A key part of the session focuses on therapy-room misreads. Darren invites therapists to reflect on how clients who appear disengaged, distant, avoidant or emotionally unavailable may in fact be overwhelmed, processing, regulating or communicating differently.

The workshop includes case study exploration and practical strategy building. Participants consider clients who speak in monologues, struggle with emotional language, or appear distant but attend consistently. The session then moves into autism-supportive adaptations, including clear structure, predictable pacing, explicit expectations, processing time, sensory adjustments and open repair of misunderstandings.

This recording is suitable for counsellors, therapists and mental health professionals who want to better understand autistic clients through both autism and attachment lenses, and adapt their work to reduce harm and increase therapeutic safety.

Key clinical themes

• Autism as a lifelong neurodevelopmental difference
• Neurodiversity-affirming therapeutic practice
• Understanding highly variable autistic presentations
• Sensory processing and nervous system safety
• How sensory safety supports relational safety
• Attachment patterns in the therapy relationship
• Where autism and attachment may overlap
• Avoiding misreads around eye contact, distance and engagement
• Understanding behaviour as communication
• Working with clients who appear distant but attend consistently
• Adapting therapy through structure, clarity and predictability
• Supporting emotional language and processing time
• Reducing sensory load in the therapy room
• Using both autism and attachment lenses in formulation

This training offers practical, reflective guidance for therapists who want to work more confidently and safely with autistic clients in the therapy room.

PLEASE NOTE: The time of the recording has been adapted from a live session and includes time for reflection