A one-day, in-person, small-group training with Carolyn Spring and Sally Atkinson
How can you be the secure base and the safe haven that your complex trauma client has perhaps never had – to become the sensitive, attuned attachment figure that they need in order to heal? How can we translate attachment theory into attachment practice and become ‘the somebody who is there’ for clients for whom trauma has taken root because ‘there has been nobody there’?
A one-day, in-person, small-group training with Carolyn Spring and Sally Atkinson
Pera Business Park, Melton Mowbray, LE13 0PB · £150 including VAT · up to 18 hours of CPD
How can you be the secure base and the safe haven that your complex trauma client has perhaps never had – to become the sensitive, attuned attachment figure that they need in order to heal? How can we translate attachment theory into attachment practice and become ‘the somebody who is there’ for clients for whom trauma has taken root because ‘there has been nobody there’?
In this live, in-person training day based in Melton Mowbray (Midlands, UK), Carolyn Spring and Sally Atkinson will help you to consider the relational pulls, processes and dynamics for you as a therapist when working with people who have been harmed in relationship … and how to provide the kind of relationship that heals.
Therapy for complex trauma isn’t, at its heart, about assessment, diagnosis, treatment, or a protocol to follow. It isn’t simply about memory processing, or grounding techniques, or re-regulation of the nervous system. It is instead fundamentally about what has happened in relationship – or the lack of relationship – and what must therefore be healed in relationship.
Because working with complex trauma is working with attachment: they are two sides of the same coin. It’s about the therapist becoming for the client ‘the somebody who is there’: somebody who can stay, who isn’t frightened by what they see, and who can be a ‘secure base’ and a ‘safe haven’ whilst the client develops new grooves and ways of being safe in relationship.
But we cannot change attachment grooves simply by understanding attachment theory. We do not change our way of being safe in relationship through reading books, naming our attachment style, articulating our patterns, our narrating our history. To often we understand what has happened to us, and yet we persist in enduring patterns of protection and safety-seeking, avoidance and stuckness, or self-sabotage and isolation.
Because attachment does not reside in cognition alone. It resides in what happens wordlessly when two nervous systems meet, and it only begins to shift when something genuinely different happens there. New grooves are formed not through knowing in theory but through experiencing in practice.
But that requires a therapist who is sensitively attuned – not only to the client’s attachment system and its strategies for being safe in relationship, but also to their own grooves and defaults, their own needs and unconscious processes, and what is co-created between the meeting of these two nervous systems in relationship with each other.
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 how our way of being in relationship reflects our own attachment histories and how these histories can either be reenacted, 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 repeated monthly, 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.
We’ll be working with questions such as:
- Do you feel more comfortable with hyperactivating or deactivating attachment strategies, what does this mean, and what impact does it have on complex trauma work?
- What is your own strategy for seeking safety in relationship, and how does this manifest when a client is safety-seeking in the room with you?
- What impact does your own attachment style have on your work with your clients? What impact does your own therapist’s attachment style have on you? How does your supervisor’s attachment style impact on the support you receive from them, and the work you’re able to do with clients?
- How can you work effectively with the insecure-ambivalent client who needs more and more and more of you, and leaves you feeling overwhelmed and powerless to help?
- How can you work effectively with the insecure-avoidant who signals that they need little or nothing from you, and who leaves you feeling useless, unwanted and slightly frozen?/li>
- How can you stay grounded in the presence of disorganised attachment and avoid retraumatising the client through becoming the caregiver who is ‘frightened or frightening’?
- In working with complex trauma, where does the frame need holding more tightly, where does it need loosening, and how do you make sound judgement calls on which client needs which without being pulled by your own attachment history into rescuing or abandonment?
- When your client is distressed, triggered or dissociative, how can you use the way you are in relationship with them in those moments to form new groove and avoid reinforcing old grooves?
- What specifically is needed for effective supervision (giving it or receiving it) when working with complex trauma?
Who this is for
Counsellors, psychotherapists, supervisors and other practitioners working with complex trauma – whether you’ve been doing it for thirty years or you’re a student on placement. You don’t need any prior attachment training. You do need to be willing to think about yourself, to be honest, self-aware, curious and humble.
What you get
- 6 hours of in-person CPD
- 6 months’ access to Carolyn’s 12-hour online training series Becoming a Sensitive Attachment Figure
- Up to three 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
Pera Business Park, Nottingham Road, Melton Mowbray, LE13 0PB
- Free on-site car park
- 0.7 miles from Melton Mowbray railway station
- Bring your own lunch, or on-site café and Sainsbury’s and Starbucks across the road
- Registration at 9.30am, start at 10.00am, finish by 4.00pm
Your trainers
Carolyn Spring is a trauma trainer, consultant, and author of Unshameand 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 in 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.