Can love — deep, attuned, and boundaried — be the most powerful force in the therapy room?
In this workshop, Malcolm Stern invites us to reflect on what it means to work from the heart. Not romantic or rescuing love, but a grounded, courageous presence that holds clients with honesty, care, and deep ethical commitment. Together, we’ll explore how love can disarm defences, restore dignity, and reawaken a sense of aliveness — especially in the wake of trauma, loss, or disconnection.
We’ll consider what it means to let love lead: how to stay emotionally available without becoming entangled, how to hold boundaries without closing down, and how to bring warmth and truth into the relationship in service of transformation.
This session is a chance to return to the heart of our practice — to honour love not as sentiment, but as a steady, relational force that can support healing, deepen connection, and create real change.
Course Content
Presenter
Malcolm Stern has worked as a group and individual psychotherapist for more than 30 years. He was a co-founder of Alternatives at St James’s Church in London and runs groups internationally.
He is the author of Falling in Love / Staying in Love (Piatkus 2004) and Slay Your Dragons with Compassion ( Watkins 2020). He co-presented Channel 4’s relationship series, ‘Made for Each Other’ in 2003 and 2004 and sailed on the ‘Rainbow Warrior’ with Greenpeace in the 1980s. The book he is currently writing is an exploration of the shadow and its necessity in our evolutionary development.
