This video resource pack contains a digital version of Jan McGregor Hepburn’s book ‘Guilt and Shame: A Clinician’s Guide’ and two complete workshops (CPD hours: 6 / CE credits: 6) that cover:

Part 1: The Emotion that Devours the Self – Envy: manifestations, meanings and clinical challenges (Dr Jan McGregor Hepburn)

Part of the deadly sins, an extremely unpleasant emotion to handle and a terrifying one to be at the receiving end of – Envy, has always carried moral overtones and internal censorship. Freud found envy to be a psychological bedrock while Klein saw it as an expression of death instinct.

Regardless of the lens that we use to view Envy as an emotion, we observe in our clinical settings that patterns of envious response can present us with a number of challenges:

• Non-recognition of envy towards self can show up as behaviours of denial in our clients – recurrent, self-defeating actions, negative relationship loops and a continual search for an external locus for events
• Envy prompts deception, dampens cooperation and fosters schadenfreude when others fail; all adding up to maladaptive emotional states and negative affect in our clients
• Envy can show up as both Machiavellian and psychopathic behaviours – including suppressed anger and angst directed at the therapist

A deeper understanding of the aetiology, representations and patterns of envious behaviour can not only inform our assessment of clinical presentations, but also be part of our tool repository for managing intense transference.

At this intellectually stimulating and therapeutically oriented seminar, Dr Jan McGregor Hepburn draws on practical learnings from psychodynamic, cognitive and object-relations domains – to help us delve deep into the complications that envy presents in our clinical settings and uses case-vignettes to specifically discuss:

• The differences between admiration and envy – the stage at which envy can cross-over into malevolent manifestations
• How discerning the patterns of envy can help us interpret and work therapeutically in novel ways
• Comprehending the elements of envy – longing, feelings of inferiority, ill-will toward the envied person, resentment and guilt
• How the experience of envy has changed in the age of social media
• Getting to grips with the internal origins of envy and its destructive aims
• Understand how envy can attack the therapeutic process and manage situations where the client’s envy is directed at the therapist
• Working with clients who fail to recognise envious attacks by others, or their own envy

Part 2: The Rope that Wears Thin – Guilt: manifestations, meanings and clinical challenges (Dr Jan McGregor Hepburn)

The ability to feel true guilt is a developmental achievement and very few people will admit to not feeling guilt. While this may seem to be related to an internal cathexis of guilt-as-regulator – the idea that guilt is effective as a controller of one’s own or other’s behaviour is actually illusory. At the same time, the idea that guilt may not be present or useful stimulates an anxiety that without it we would be at the mercy of primitive impulses. Clearly – guilt as a concept is multi-layered, multi-faceted and more complex than it seems at first.

At this intellectually stimulating and therapeutically oriented seminar, Dr Jan McGregor Hepburn draws on her new book Guilt and Shame: A Clinician’s Guide – to help us delve deep into the complications that guilt presents in our clinical settings and uses case-vignettes to specifically discuss:

• How do we work with clients who seem weighed down and oppressed by feelings of guilt – some of which may appear irrational and yet be pervasive and intractable
• The paradox presented by clients who act out, so they can have something to feel guilty about
• The two main processes which are labelled guilt – how persecutory guilt cannot be mediated by forgiveness or reparation and may be viewed as sterile
• The implications from a clinical standpoint that we need to bear in mind when noting that persecutory guilt is not on a continuum with reparative guilt
• The meanings and origins of guilt and the differences between remorse and guilt
• What do we mean when we say that guilt is about intentions and not actions
• How persecutory guilt is counterproductive and has the potential to derail the developmental process