A one-day, in-person, small-group training with Carolyn Spring and Sally Atkinson
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How do you stay with a client in their shame, when shame itself works so hard to make you both look away? And how do you respond to it in a way which helps them to work through it rather than reinforcing it, when reassurance can bounce straight off it, problem-solving can miss it, and even naming it can feel shaming? We will help you to explore what shame really looks like when it emerges in the therapy room – in the client, in you as the therapist, and in the co-created space between you – and how to respond to it in a sensitive, attuned way.
A one-day, in-person, small-group training with Carolyn Spring and Sally Atkinson
The Pad @ Rutland Therapy Centre, 40 Melton Road, Oakham, LE15 6AY · £150 including VAT · up to 18 hours of CPD
How do you stay with a client in their shame, when shame itself works so hard to make you both look away? And how do you respond to it in a way which helps them to work through it rather than reinforcing it, when reassurance can bounce straight off it, problem-solving can miss it, and even naming it can feel shaming?
In this live, in-person training day based in Oakham (Rutland, UK), Carolyn Spring and Sally Atkinson will help you to explore what shame really looks like when it emerges in the therapy room – in the client, in you as the therapist, and in the co-created space between you – and how to respond to it in a sensitive, attuned way.
Shame very often leads to stuckness, for therapists as well as for clients. Many of us find ourselves unsure how to approach it, aware that almost anything we say or do might make it worse, and very often hurrying past it without quite realising that we have. It can feel like working with an affect so volatile that the safest thing is not to touch it at all.
Part of the difficulty is that the field itself doesn’t agree on what shame is. Across roughly 70 years of writing, it has been described as an innate biological affect, a self-conscious emotion, a relational rupture, a response to social threat, and a survival state of the nervous system. Each of these answers leads to a different way of working with it, and whichever lineage our own training descended from tends to shape what we do in the room, often without our noticing. If we’re confused about what shame even is, then it’s hard to know how to work with it.
And too often shame is treated like a hot potato, to be dealt with, solved or eradicated as quickly as possible, and many clients experience that as shaming in itself: their shame becomes one more thing which is wrong with them, and they become ashamed of having shame. Shame which was laid down in relationship can perhaps only really be worked through in relationship, and that asks something different of the therapist. It asks us to stay whilst the shame is there, rather than trying to make it go away.
That is much harder than it sounds, because the therapist’s shame is in the room too. Shame is a two-person emotion, and what happens with it is co-created between therapist and client. The pull to reassure, to fix, to move on or to say something clever very often comes from our own discomfort as much as from the client’s, and our own histories with shame – our own inner critics, and our own default ways of defending against it – shape what becomes possible in the work.
On this training day, therefore, the focus will be not on theory, but on what happens when you are in the room with your clients. We will look at what shame actually looks like as it emerges – in the body, in behaviour, in the client’s words and in the space between you – and at how our own histories with shame can either be re-enacted, or used to furrow new grooves, with both clients and supervisors.
The training will be interactive, experiential, and relational. We will combine teaching and group discussion with small group work, reflective exercises, Q&A, and live supervision of case material brought by delegates. Although the day will be repeated, each day that we run will be unique, so you are welcome to attend more than once if you would find it helpful to do so. Places are strictly limited so that it is a small group experience.
Who this is for
Counsellors, psychotherapists, supervisors and other practitioners working with shame and complex trauma – whether you’ve been doing it for 30 years or you’re a student on placement. You don’t need any prior training in shame. You do need to be willing to think about yourself, to be honest, self-aware, curious and humble, and, because talking about shame can stir up shame, to be gentle with yourself and with others in the group.
What you get
- 6 hours of in-person CPD
- 6 months’ access to Carolyn’s online training series Shame in the Therapy Room
- Up to 3 recommended sessions from the series to watch before the day (to provide some common frameworks and shared language)
- A CPD certificate for up to 18 hours in total
- All for £150 including VAT
Next available dates
The training will be repeated on the following dates:
More dates to follow in 2027
Location and logistics
- The Pad @ Rutland Therapy Centre, 40 Melton Road, Oakham, LE15 6AY
- Ground-floor training room with step-free access and an accessible toilet
- Right next to Oakham railway station
- Pay-and-display parking in Westgate car park, immediately behind the Centre and reached via St Anne’s Close (LE15 6BH), with Blue Badge bays
- Bring your own lunch, or choose from the many cafés and food shops nearby
- If you’re staying over, hotels in Oakham include the Wisteria Hotel and the Admiral Hornblower, with The Barnsdale and Hambleton Hall a short drive away
- Registration at 9.30am, start at 10.00am, finish by 4.00pm
Your trainers
Carolyn Spring is a trauma trainer, consultant, and author of Unshame and Recovery is my Best Revenge. Since 2010, her has been attended by over 57,000 people and prior to that she worked as a therapeutic foster carer for 15 years, working up close and personal with disrupted attachment in the under 5s.
A survivor of complex childhood trauma, she teaches from both deep study and lived experience, holding firmly to the belief that there are two people in every therapy room and that training should hear from both. Her 4D Framework reframes trauma as the experience of ‘there’s nobody there’ – and locates recovery in the presence of a safe, attuned other. She has a rare gift to make the complex simple, transforming theory into practice and what it actually means to be a sensitive, attuned therapist in the room with the client.
Alongside her in-person training, she runs the Complex Trauma Training Hub, which provides weekly online training for a community of counsellors and psychotherapists. She also works as a consultant to a number of leading inpatient and outpatient services for complex trauma and dissociative disorders.
Sally Atkinson is a UKCP-registered integrative psychotherapist and clinical supervisor.
She is a tutor at Sherwood Psychotherapy Training Institute on the Level 7 Masters in Integrative Psychotherapy, where she is also lead facilitator on the mental health workshops.
She is Co-Director alongside Carolyn of Yellow Frog Psychotherapy Training, as well as co-facilitating on the Complex Trauma Training Hub.
She also runs the thriving Rutland Therapy Centre in Oakham, which comprises around a dozen therapists working across a range of modalities.