Birkbeck Training Series 2025-2026
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Online
The Student Counselling Service at Birkbeck, University of London launched The Birkbeck Training Series in September 2018 in response to need for specialist short-term HE specific training and a space for counsellors in the sector to meet and think together about the challenges of our work. This year we enter our eighth year in bringing the series to you.
The theme of this year’s series is the Beneath the Armour: Working with Defences in short-term work.
In an increasingly uncertain and turbulent global climate, both therapists and clients are navigating heightened levels of anxiety, instability, and emotional overwhelm. Within the higher education sector, these pressures are felt acutely. Students face increasing academic, financial, and social stressors, while counsellors are often working within time-limited frameworks within high-demand services. Such conditions often activate deep psychological defences—mechanisms designed to protect us from psychic pain.
Defences such as denial, avoidance, projection, dissociation, withdrawal and intellectualisation serve a protective function, helping us manage overwhelming feelings and maintain a sense of control. Yet when these defences dominate, they can obstruct therapeutic engagement and limit emotional processing. For therapists, encountering these defences—especially in short-term work—can evoke frustration, helplessness, or even a retreat into our own defensive postures.
This years’ series invites clinicians to reflect on the role of defences in the therapeutic process, how to recognise when defences are mobilised, understand their underlying function, consider ways in which we can re-establish and foster safety to help clients feel safe enough to lower their psychological armour.
Through presented material, theory, clinical examples, and shared discussion, these trainings will look at how to work with defences in a way that honours their protective role while gently inviting clients into deeper engagement, and to help clinicians feel supported so they are better able to remain present and attuned, even in the face of complex and challenging dynamics.
We hope that this series will arm and support clinicians in fostering spaces where both client and clinician can safely put down their armour, and in turn make room for vulnerability, connection, and transformation—the very heart of therapeutic work.
With that in mind we would like to invite you to join us for our 2025-26 Training Series.
TRAINING 1: Projective Processes and how to survive them by Cynthia Rogers
Wednesday 28th January 2026, 9.00am-1.00pm
About the Workshop
Splitting and projection are powerful psychological defences that help clients survive overwhelming experiences. However, when these strategies dominate, they can hinder therapeutic progress. Clients who engage in splitting and projection often leave counsellors holding intense emotions—hopelessness, despair, or rage—that can evoke feelings of inadequacy or paralysis in the therapeutic work.
This workshop will explore how counsellors can recognise and respond to these projections without becoming entangled in them, while remaining open to the underlying communication they carry. Through theoretical insights, clinical examples, and shared discussion, we will consider practical ways of working effectively with projective identification—what Bion describes as an attack on the capacity to make links, and thus on the therapeutic process itself.
By approaching projective processes with curiosity and care, counsellors can deepen engagement in long-term work and facilitate meaningful shifts in short-term interventions.
About the Speaker
CYNTHIA ROGERS is a highly respected counsellor, lecturer, and author with over two decades of experience in psychotherapy and counselling. She has worked extensively across the voluntary sector, the higher education sector, the NHS, and in independent practice, supporting individuals, couples, and groups.
Cynthia’s early research into the challenges therapists face in their work was published by Wiley as Psychotherapy and Counselling: A Professional Business. Her seminal paper on projective processes remains a foundational text in the field and continues to influence therapeutic practice.
Known for her engaging and insightful teaching style, Cynthia has been a sought-after lecturer for more than 20 years. She brings a deep understanding of the group analytic model, which she applies not only in therapy but also in supervision, reflective practice, and organisational consultancy.
Cynthia is a training group analyst, teacher, and supervisor with the Institute of Group Analysis. She is a senior accredited member of the BACP and is registered with the UKCP.
TRAINING 2: Dissociation: The Forgotten Defence by Dr. Joanne Stubley
Wednesday 25th February 2026, 1:00pm-5:00pm
About the Workshop
The growing recognition of complex trauma in clinical practice has brought the defence of dissociation back into awareness, particularly in the psychoanalytic field.
The first part of this training will give an historical overview of the concept of dissociation which inevitably links with the repeated cycles in the trauma field of acknowledgement and denial. This will be followed by an understanding of dissociation as a defence against overwhelming helplessness and terror, which will include the Window of Tolerance.
Different presentations of dissociation and how to recognize these will be accompanied by an understanding of grounding techniques and their uses in clinical practice.
The second part of the training will focus on structural dissociation as seen in presentations of Dissociative Identity Disorder. A consideration of this diagnosis, it’s prevalence, presentation and treatment within a phase-based approach will be given.
About the Speaker
DR JOANNE STUBLEY is a Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust. She joined the Tavistock Trauma Service in 1998 and has been the lead clinician since 2004. She is a psychoanalyst who has also been trained in trauma-specific modalities of care.
Dr Stubley is Co-Chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Expert Reference Group on non-recent child sexual abuse. She is an honorary lecturer at University College London and Kings College and has written widely on trauma, teaching nationally and internationally.
She is co-editor of “Complex Trauma: the Tavistock Model” with Linda Young, published in 2022, which was nominated for a Gravida Award.
TRAINING 3: Decoding Defences by Dr. Ruth Schmidt Neven
Wednesday 18th March 2026 , 9.00am-1.00pm
About the Workshop
In classical psychoanalytic theory, defences are viewed as part of normal ego development. Traditionally, unhelpful defences originate in early life and have often been addressed through long-term therapy. However, recent global events—particularly the COVID-19 pandemic, have challenged these assumptions.
This workshop explores how the pandemic has disrupted our usual defences, leading to a collective sense of abandonment and emotional disorientation. In response, emotional distress is increasingly framed in rigid, pathological terms, often bypassing the complexity of human experience. A surge in mental health diagnoses, particularly those such as ADHD and the emphasis on neurodiversity, might reflect a societal search for certainty—often at the expense of a more meaningful understanding of one’s difficulties.
We will consider how these shifts affect both clients and therapists. How do we respond when our own defences are activated in the countertransference? Can we resist the pull toward simplistic solutions and instead stay with the uncertainty in such challenging times?
The psychodynamic method offers a powerful framework for exploring these tensions; but it too, must evolve. This workshop invites us to rethink some of our core assumptions—particularly the conventional views about long-term therapy as the gold standard versus time-limited work; and proposes that crisis can be reframed as opportunities for deeper understanding and communication.
Workshop Structure
Part One: Rethinking Mental Health in Uncertain Times
• How emotional distress is increasingly medicalized
• The impact of the pandemic on life transitions and identity
• The rise of diagnostic certainty and its limitations (e.g. ADHD, ND etc)
Part Two: Recalibrating the Psychodynamic Method
• Depression and anxiety as core developmental tasks, not just symptoms
• Crisis as opportunity: opening up the discourse and making meaning in communication
• Time-limited therapy as a valid and effective approach
• The symptom as a multi-dimensional system
• Inheriting a process, not just applying a strategy
About the Speaker
DR. RUTH SCHMIDT NEVEN is a clinical psychologist and child and adolescent psychotherapist who trained at the Tavistock Clinic in London. She worked for over twenty years in the NHS and was co-founder of the national parenting support service Exploring Parenthood in the UK.
Her current clinical work is with couples in relationship counselling.
Ruth came to Melbourne Australia to take up the inaugural position of Chief Psychotherapist at the Royal Children’s Hospital. She established an independent Centre of Child and Family Development where aside from clinical work, she conducted training courses throughout Australia, the UK, United States and South Africa.
Ruth is a prolific author and has published highly acclaimed books that are used in higher education training including on time-limited psychotherapy. She has also published articles in refereed and other journals and book chapters. She is a regular consultant to child and adolescent psychotherapists in the UK and continues to run training courses online.
Ruth is the presenter and producer of the podcast series Talking Child Development which has had over 26,000 downloads.
Contact name: Aditi Dhar
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