WPF Therapy Reading Group 2021 – 2022
Book ticketsOrganised by:
WPF Therapy
Description
This unique reading group is now entering its 17th year and is still going strong. We are delighted to be able to offer an opportunity to explore, examine and enjoy the books below. Our presenters have been stimulating and challenging, and have introduced us to new delights or opened up fresh vistas onto pre-loved favourites.
Although many participants have been trainees and practising counsellors or psychotherapists, everyone is welcome to attend. If you are thinking of attending for the first time or have enjoyed one of the previous sessions, why not tell a friend and encourage them to come along too. Please read the book before attending.
All are welcome to attend this event.
Friday 29th October 2021 7-8.30pm A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
Led by Stephen Crawford
‘A Pale View of Hills’ was Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel published in 1982. Partly set in Nagasaki in the aftermath of the atomic bomb and the Second World War, and partly in England, it concerns the life of Etsuko, a Japanese widow, who has also been bereaved by her daughter’s suicide. The novel is understated, enigmatic and haunting, and leaves much unsaid, but touches on profound, and sometimes disturbing, questions about being human in the modern world.
Friday 26th November 2021 7-8.30pm A Grief Companion and Languages of Loss by Sasha Bates
Led by Sasha Bates
We are delighted that the author Sasha Bates will host this reading group.
Sasha Bates, MA, MBACP, is an integrative psychotherapist, yoga teacher and author.
Her first book “Languages of Loss: a psychotherapist’s journey through grief” was published in April 2020. In it, she describes her experience of losing her husband from two perspectives – that of a confused, grieving widow, and that of a psychotherapist truly understanding for the first time what psychotherapeutic theory can offer the bereaved. She explores the usefulness, and otherwise, of some of the grief theories, and looks more broadly at different approaches – psychodynamic, body, transpersonal, attachment and more – investigating how each may be useful when working with one’s own and a client’s grief.
Her latest book “A Grief Companion” was published in June 2021 and was, largely, a response to the many requests she received for a more practical ‘guidebook’ or ‘manual’ that could help people through the early months of grieving. With more people than ever before encountering loss due to the Covid pandemic, A Grief Companion offers reflections and suggestions on how mind, body and spirit can affect, and be affected by, loss of all kinds.
Friday 28th January 2022, 7-8.30pm Attachment, Relationships and Food: From Cradle to Kitchen edited by Linda Cundy
Led by Linda Cundy
We are delighted that the editor Linda Cundy will host this reading group.
Where there is food, there is attachment. This book explores relationships with other people, with oneself, and between client and therapist through our connection with food. We comfort, nurture, numb, neglect or attack ourselves through what we consume; food metaphors spice up a therapy session or, more concretely, clients may bring breakfast or edible gifts into the consulting room. Preparing meals and sharing them are therapeutic activities in themselves, helping to bring together couples, groups, and communities. The aim of this book is twofold: to examine the nature of attachment through narratives of feeding, and to enrich psychotherapy practice by encouraging exploration of clients’ food-related memories and associations. Like individual courses of a feast, every chapter has its own distinct flavour, but each author addresses the complex connection between what we eat and how we relate from an attachment perspective.
Friday 25th February 2022, 7-8.30pm, Yoga Saved My Life by Sasha Bates
Led by Sasha Bates
We are delighted that the author Sasha Bates will host this reading group.
Sasha Bates, MA, MBACP, is an integrative psychotherapist, yoga teacher and author.
Sasha’s latest book, “Yoga Saved My Life”, will be published in March. In it she explores the parallels between yoga and psychotherapy, investigating how working with the mind body connection can help all manner of presentations such as anxiety, depression, a lack of balance or self awareness, anger management, ingrained, unhelpful internal working models and so much more. It includes personal testimonies from a myriad of yogis who have themselves made the claim that yoga has saved their lives – lives of addiction, suicidality and misery.
Yoga Saved My Life questions how and why yoga is so transformational. It explores what it is that takes it beyond being merely a physical exercise, effectuating deep and lasting changes. It posits the idea that, albeit via a different medium, yoga is doing what therapy does – providing a safe, containing, reflective space in which to access the unconscious, learn about ourselves and find ways to relate to ourselves better. This new relationship with the self can offer ways to work with the automatic habits we do without thinking but which are holding us back, practically and emotionally. The world of psychotherapy has lately been opening itself to the multidisciplinary worlds of neuroscience, psychoneuroimmunology and more, and benefiting hugely from this inclusive welcoming of new discoveries. By also looking behind to the ancient Eastern practice of yoga, it can incorporate a similarly broad and integrative approach to help it grow holistically, further benefitting us and our clients.
Please book your ticket for the October Reading Group via WPF Therapy Eventbrite page.
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