An effective psychotherapy requires the psychotherapist to constantly and relationally attend to various expressions of such unconscious communication – a process, which can be facilitated using the beneficial aspects of therapeutically guided age-regression.

Often misunderstood and applied ineffectively, age-regression can be an extremely effective therapeutic approach, that can allow our clients to reframe their early childhood memories that are embodied in physiological sensations, entrenched in affect, or unconsciously enacted in relationships. Such memories are not available to conscious thought because they are prelinguistic, presymbolic, procedural, and implicit. However, these neurological imprints give rise to unconscious relational patterns that affect our clients in their adult lives.

To get these effective results, however, not only does the therapist need to be attuned to the client’s psychological & developmental levels but also be skilled in guiding the regression such that it is aimed at healing of childhood traumas and neglects and not reinforcing of archaic patterns of psychological organisation.

This seminar is aimed at psychotherapists and counsellors who are keen to learn these therapeutic skills. At this workshop, we use lecture, case-discussions and live demonstrations to explore various child development hypotheses and concepts that are based on the writings of John Bowlby, Selma Fraiberg, Jean Piaget, Daniel Stern, and Donald Winnicott as well as a number of contemporary researchers including Margaret Little and Lorraine Price.

Specifically, we will look at:

• Working with the client’s unconscious processes, with the aim of resolving childhood conflicts, neglects and traumas that have become fixated as physiological strategies for self-stabilization
• Identifying and using implicit and procedural memories – bringing expression to memories that have not been transposed to thought, concept, language, or narrative
• Identifying various forms of age regression and formulating developmental images
• Using therapeutic inference – the process of co-creating a narrative collage of the client’s life story
• Using phenomenological and historical inquiry that facilitates the healing of relational disruptions
• Protectively differentiating between re-experiencing and reliving – while one is therapeutic, the other can potentially be re-traumatising
• Titrating the level of therapeutic support according to the client’s capacity – finetuning the intensity of affect so the client can process without relying on old self-stabilization patterns
• Ethically facilitating a therapeutic age regression using Relational Security, Internal Conflict Awareness and Affect Arousal goalposts

To prepare for this workshop participants are requested to read the following:

• Erskine, R.G. (2021). Early Affect Confusion: Relational Psychotherapy for the Borderline Client. nscience publishing house.
• Erskine, R. G. (2015).Relational Patterns, Therapeutic Presence: Concepts and Practice of Integrative Psychotherapy. London: Karnac Books.

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