Research in Resilience

Ethics: Confidentiality, Privacy, and what constitutes a medical record

Finding Common Ground: a proposed clinical and research collaboration between clinical psychology and psychiatry in WSLHD

Behind closed doors: what is going on? Somatic Countertransference and the Conversational Model of Psychotherapy

This presentation draws upon Karen’s treatise in the Master of Science in Medicine (Psychotherapy) degree at the University of Sydney. The heart of this presentation is a clinical vignette involving a patient with borderline personality disorder who was treated by the Conversational Model of psychotherapy (CM) in the Westmead Psychotherapy Program for Complex Traumatic Disorders. An excerpt from a clinical transcript, and patient drawings, will be examined in light of the common ground between patient and therapist. Specifically, shared unconscious traumatic memories will be discussed through the lenses of somatic countertransference (SCT) and clinical material.

Network Based Therapy approach to promoting coping

Couples Therapy - Finding Common Ground

The Conversational Model with its focus on affect, trauma and the minute particulars is well-suited to bridging the communications gap between people that find themselves alienated and at odds with each other. This paper will give a brief overview of the conversational model and offer a perspective on couples therapy from this vantage point. It suggests that subtle misinterpretations and misunderstandings of the other's communications are rooted in each owns traumatic past that may be preverbal and inaccessible to reflective awareness.

The Spiralling Self: growth in conversation

"It is language which created humans, rather than human’s language.” While self is first experienced in relation to another, the emergence of a mature self occurs in relation to a multiplicity of others in embodied communicative relationships to an individual. While "free association" is often thought of as psychoanalytic technique, it is argued that the primary form of free association is relational, and inter-subjective. In modern democratic societies the range of associative possibilities for the investment of individual lives leads to an enormous range of "forms of life". The developmental form involves a spiral of growth embedded in communicative exchange, and person-environment interaction. In humans, physiological homeostasis is a dynamic process that includes, at its highest level, shared understanding, contributing to the embedding of self in the physicality of the body. Such growth is impeded by traumatic experience that has its basis in the inter-subjective field.

The Spiralling Self: growth in conversation

"It is language which created humans, rather than human’s language.” While self is first experienced in relation to another, the emergence of a mature self occurs in relation to a multiplicity of others in embodied communicative relationships to an individual. While "free association" is often thought of as psychoanalytic technique, it is argued that the primary form of free association is relational, and inter-subjective. In modern democratic societies the range of associative possibilities for the investment of individual lives leads to an enormous range of "forms of life". The developmental form involves a spiral of growth embedded in communicative exchange, and person-environment interaction. In humans, physiological homeostasis is a dynamic process that includes, at its highest level, shared understanding, contributing to the embedding of self in the physicality of the body. Such growth is impeded by traumatic experience that has its basis in the inter-subjective field.

Keeping Developmental Trauma in Mind. Phil Graham, Kamal Touma, George Lianos

The Figure 8 Trauma Cycle and the Conversational Model

Working in the Flame. Conversational Model Psychotherapy with the Narcissistic Borderline Client

Self Coming Into Being

On Becoming a Psychotherapist

Resistance and Re-traumatisation – First Cut is the Deepest

The Struggle to Express: the language of betrayal and the betrayal of language.