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Mastering Psychotherapy Skills: A Video Resource Pack Guide to Attachment-Informed and Existential Therapy

Mastering Psychotherapy Skills: A Video Resource Pack Guide to Attachment-Informed and Existential Therapy
This video resource pack includes:
- Existential Therapy: Helping Clients Reclaim Choice & Purpose (Prof Mick Cooper, 6 CPD/CE)
- The Art of Psychotherapy: Sharing Distilled Wisdom and Contemporary Insights (Professor Jeremy Holmes and Dr Gwen Adshead, 3 CPD/CE)
Video course packs, including all notes are available immediately on booking. The access links are part of your ticket. Online video access remains available for 1 year from the date you receive the video course.
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There is no known commercial support for this programme.
£ 225.00 Original price was: £ 225.00.£ 165.00Current price is: £ 165.00.

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Dive into the depths of psychotherapeutic excellence with our exclusive video resource, Mastering Psychotherapy Skills: A Guide to Attachment-Informed and Existential Therapy. This meticulously curated combo pack brings together the profound insights of Prof. Jeremy Holmes, Dr Gwen Adshead, and Mick Cooper, offering an unparalleled educational experience.
This resource features two illuminating workshops that explore the intricate facets of psychotherapy. The first, led by Prof. Holmes and Dr Adshead, delves into the latest advancements in Attachment-informed psychotherapy. Their rich discussion covers essential topics such as the four stages of becoming an effective therapist, handling challenging clients, the nuances of ending therapy gracefully, and the impact of tele-therapy and non-binary gender identities on therapeutic practices. Gain wisdom from Prof. Holmes’ celebrated works, including The Art of Psychotherapy and The Spirit of Psychotherapy, as well as Dr Adshead’s insights from her best-selling book The Devil You Know.
The second workshop, led by Mick Cooper, immerses you in the existential approach to therapy, tracing its roots to philosophical giants like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Participants will explore key existential concepts such as the freedom of choice, the confrontation with life’s ultimate limitations, and the search for meaning and purpose. This workshop offers a blend of theoretical input, personal development exercises, and practical skills work, equipping you with the tools to incorporate existential understandings into your therapeutic practice.
By integrating these two powerful frameworks, this comprehensive resource equips psychotherapists, psychologists, counsellors, and mental health professionals with the advanced knowledge and practical techniques needed to elevate their practice. Join us for this intellectual journey and gain access to a year-long complimentary video resource, accredited with nine CPD points. Expand your expertise and enrich your professional journey with Mastering Psychotherapy Skills.
This video resource pack contains two complete workshops (CPD/CE credits: 9) that cover:
Part 1: Existential Therapy: Helping Clients Reclaim Choice & Purpose (Prof Mick Cooper), CPD / CE credits: 6
With roots that can be traced back to the existential work of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche; Existential Therapy is a diverse, vibrant, and wonderfully rich tapestry of understandings and methods that has the potential to make a valuable contribution to the work of any counsellor, psychotherapist or psychologist. It is one of the oldest forms of therapy, and yet one of the most innovative and radical in its approach.
Existential therapy is orientated around the development of a deep relational bond with clients, which allows clients to explore the most fundamental aspects of their existence. This includes questions like: ‘What is the meaning of my life?’ ‘What choices can I make?’ and ‘How do I face the limits of my circumstances?’
This workshop will introduce the existential approach to therapy, and focus on three particular aspects of existential work:
- Helping clients acknowledge their fundamental freedom and capacity to make choices
- Helping clients to face the givens of their lives, like death and the unattainability of perfect happiness
- Helping clients to find meaning and purpose in life
The workshop will combine a mixture of personal development exercises, skills work, discussion and theoretical input; and will be divided into four sessions:
The first session invites participants to consider, and discuss, key assumptions underlying the existential approach. It then reviews the history and development of the existential approach to therapy and looks at key figures in existential therapy and its phenomenological foundations.
The second session explores one of the key assumptions underlying existential thought and practice: that clients have the capacity to make choices in their lives, and that through enacting their will they have the potential to find more satisfying, fulfilling and authentic ways of being. We will: consider how this can be applied to therapeutic work, explore our own relationship to freedom and choice, understand psychological difficulties in terms of a refusal to accept one’s freedom and practice existential work with client’s choices.
While existential therapy holds that human beings always have choices, it also suggests that there are certain limitations in life that we always face. This includes death, financial and economic restrictions, and the inevitable paradoxes of being. The third session will explore these limitations through focusing on – the ‘givens’ of existence; the tensions in our lives, and how this understanding can be applied to work with clients. We will examine transcripts of therapeutic work with clients addressing the limitations of existence.
The final session looks at how clients can be encouraged to address issues of meaning and purpose in life. We will look at: An existential understanding of human beings as purpose-oriented; personal reflections on our own meanings and goals; andunderstanding the link between meanings and psychopathology.
By the end of the workshop, participants will have developed a greater understanding of the existential approach and will have developed ideas about how to incorporate existential understandings and methods into their own practice.
Learning Objectives:
- Discuss the key assumptions underlying the existential approach
- Discuss the history and development of the existential approach to therapy as well as the key figures in existential therapy and its phenomenological foundations
- Explain how to help clients acknowledge their fundamental freedom and capacity to make choices
- Explain how to help clients to face the givens of their lives, like death and the unattainability of perfect happiness
- Discuss how clients can be encouraged to address issues of meaning and purpose in life, including an existential understanding of human beings as purpose-oriented; personal reflections on our own meanings and goals; and understanding the link between meanings and psychopathology
- Explain how to incorporate existential understandings and methods into your own practice
Part 2: The Art of Psychotherapy: Sharing Distilled Wisdom and Contemporary Insights (Professor Jeremy Holmes and Dr Gwen Adshead), CPD / CE credits: 3
Prof Jeremy Holmes and Dr Gwen Adshead – two luminaries in the field of Attachment-informed psychotherapy – have known each other for many years, with a shared background in and deep enthusiasm for their field of therapy. Now, for the first time, they come together for a seminar – an evening of scintillating conversation and thought-provoking discussions on the challenges and highlights of running an effective psychotherapeutic practice.
The starting point for their conversation will be Prof Holmes’ latest book The Art of Psychotherapy (AoP). The book began life as Anthony Storr’s 1979 volume – turned into an instant classic – and will soon be available in its latest edition, re-written and revised by Prof Holmes. Storr and Holmes are the elders in the world of psychotherapy, and AoP represents a distillation of their joint wisdom and experience of working and teaching psychotherapy in the NHS, in private practice, and internationally. While much has changed in the world of psychotherapy, much has stayed the same. Prof Holmes’ thoughtful, experienced and cultured voice provides clinical wisdom, largely uncluttered by jargon, that is hard to find elsewhere.
Beyond fresh insights into quotidian psychotherapy, contemporary themes that Prof Holmes has explored include e-therapy, gender dysphoria, and the Bayesian Free Energy neuroscience model which Holmes has developed in his recent books The Brain has a Mind of its Own and The Spirit of Psychotherapy. In his upcoming writings, Prof Holmes has added discussions on the scientific validation of psychotherapy, sections on tele- and e-therapy; non-binary gender and sexual identities; while also sharing his thoughts and insights on the impact of race and class on the therapeutic relationship. At this evening conversation Prof Holmes and Dr Adshead with touch on these topics and include thoughts and obervations from delegates who are attending.
Dr Adshead will also discuss the concept of the Good Enough therapist, based partly on Prof Holmes’ work, as well as her own best-selling book The Devil You Know, which emerged from her work as a forensic psychotherapist, and her interest in the different ways that therapists provide a secure base in the therapeutic space. She will explain how therapists can learn to become good enough, what happens when their work is not ‘good enough’, and how that might be assessed and redressed.
Prof Holmes and Dr Adshead will end by discussing how their ideas about therapy have changed over the years, and what that might mean for the contemporary practice of psychotherapy.
This course will be of particular value to psychotherapists, psychologists, counsellors, supervisors and mental health professionals.
Learning Objectives:
- Explain the four stages of becoming an effective therapist
- Discuss the efficacy of time-limited therapy
- Explain what is a good outcome in therapy
What's included in this course
- Presented by world-class speaker(s)
- Handouts and video recording
- 9 hrs of professionally produced lessons
- 1 year access to video recorded version
- CPD / CE Certificate
- Join from anywhere in the world
Part 1: Existential Therapy: Helping Clients Reclaim Choice & Purpose (Prof Mick Cooper)
By the end of the workshop, participants will have developed a greater understanding of the existential approach and will have developed ideas about how to incorporate existential understandings and methods into their own practice.
Part 2: The Art of Psychotherapy: Sharing Distilled Wisdom and Contemporary Insights (Professor Jeremy Holmes and Dr Gwen Adshead)
Prof Jeremy Holmes and Dr Gwen Adshead – two luminaries in the field of Attachment-informed psychotherapy – have known each other for many years, with a shared background in and deep enthusiasm for their field of therapy. Now, for the first time, they come together for a seminar – an evening of scintillating conversation and thought-provoking discussions on the challenges and highlights of running an effective psychotherapeutic practice.
Learning objectives
- Discuss the key assumptions underlying the existential approach
- Discuss the history and development of the existential approach to therapy as well as the key figures in existential therapy and its phenomenological foundations
- Explain how to help clients acknowledge their fundamental freedom and capacity to make choices
- Explain how to help clients to face the givens of their lives, like death and the unattainability of perfect happiness
- Discuss how clients can be encouraged to address issues of meaning and purpose in life, including an existential understanding of human beings as purpose-oriented; personal reflections on our own meanings and goals; and understanding the link between meanings and psychopathology
- Explain how to incorporate existential understandings and methods into your own practice
- Explain the four stages of becoming an effective therapist
- Discuss the efficacy of time-limited therapy
- Explain what is a good outcome in therapy

Mick Cooper is an internationally recognised author, trainer, and consultant in the field of humanistic, existential, and pluralistic therapies. He is a Chartered Psychologist, and Professor of Counselling Psychology at the University of Roehampton. Mick has facilitated workshops and lectures around the world, including New Zealand, Lithuania, and Florida. Mick’s books include Existential Therapies (2nd ed., Sage, 2017), Working at Relational Depth in Counselling and Psychotherapy (2nd ed., Sage, 2018), and Integrating Counselling and Psychotherapy: Directionality, Synergy, and Social Change (Sage, 2019). Mick’s principal areas of research have been in shared decision-making/personalising therapy, and counselling for young people in schools. In 2014, Mick received the Carmi Harari Mid-Career Award from Division 32 of the American Psychological Association. He is a Fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and the Academy of Social Sciences. Mick’s latest book explores the contribution that counselling and psychotherapy theory and practice can make to wider social progress and justice: Psychology at the Heart of Social Change: Towards a Progressive Vision for Society (Bristol University, 2023).

Dr Gwen Adshead is a Forensic Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist. She trained at St George’s Hospital, the Institute of Psychiatry and the Institute of Group Analysis. She is trained as a group therapist and a Mindfulness-based cognitive therapist and has also trained in Mentalisation-based therapy. She worked for nearly twenty years as a Consultant Forensic Psychotherapist at Broadmoor Hospital, running psychotherapeutic groups for offenders and working with staff around relational security and organisational dynamics.
She is the co-editor of Clinical topics in Personality Disorder (with Dr Jay Sarkar) which was awarded first prize in the psychiatry Section of the BMA book awards 2013; and she also co-edited Personality Disorder: the Definitive Collection with Dr Caroline Jacob. She is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Forensic Psychiatry (2013) and the Oxford Handbook of Medical Psychotherapy (2016). She is also the co-editor of Munchausens’s Syndrome by Proxy: Current issues in Assessment, Treatment and Research. Her latest book, The Deluded Self: Narcissism and its Disorders (2020) is out now with nscience publishing house.

Jeremy Holmes, MD, FRCPsych is Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter. His books include John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (2014), Attachment in Therapeutic Practice (2017), and The Brain has a Mind of its Own (2020). Gardening, Green politics and grand-parenting parallel his lifelong devotion to psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice and attachment theory.
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