In this workshop, Neil and Cathie will present their ideas about the Adult, with the intention of provoking those who join them into a new and fruitful way of thinking about longstanding beliefs of what the Adult ego state
Course Content
Presenter
Cathie Long is an award winning, highly acclaimed independent social worker, expert witness, and trainer. She works primarily with ‘disabled’ children/young people and their families to secure appropriate Education, Health and Care Plans, ensuring delivery of a person-centred, needs-led social care provision. She is the social care advisor to the PDA Society and a partner with Sunshine Support. With an MA in Autism, Cathie decided to train in Transactional Analysis to enhance both her professional and personal development. She has recently completed her second clinical year as a trainee psychotherapist with Contact Point in Bristol. Cathie has written soon to be published practice guidance, on behalf of the British Association of Social Workers, on Fabricated or Induced Illness using Transactional Analysis to highlight and support professional practice. Following her own diagnoses of autism and attention deficit hyperactivity ‘disorder’ (ADHD) in her mid-fifties, Cathie is developing a post-diagnostic therapeutic service to support others who have been missed and/or misdiagnosed. Cathie lives in West Wales. She has four children, two of whom are neurodivergent. She enjoys sea swimming, walking on the beach, writing, and evolving into being her fun-loving, uniquely quirky self.
Neil Keenan (PTSTA(P)) has specialised in working with neurodivergent clients for a number of years, and the majority of his clinical work is with people in this population. He has adapted both his therapeutic relational style and TA theories to make them useful to the clients he meets. Over this period, Neil has encountered and supported people who have specialist skills and thinking by virtue of their different way of thinking. Many of these people are high achievers in their professional life, working in leadership positions. He supports clients who face a combined challenge of having a different relational style to the majority, as well as occupying senior organisational roles that further isolate them.
Neil is also the training director of The Wyvern Institute of Psychotherapy and Counselling, which is a UKATA Registered Training Establishment based just north of Bristol. He is passionate about training new psychotherapists. The Wyvern Institute training programme emphasises the significance influence that awareness of neurodivergence (or, as Neil prefers, ‘neurovariance’) must have on the way therapists think and work with this client group. In his teaching at The Wyvern Institute, Neil incorporates the essential therapeutic accommodations, and adaptations of TA theories, that therapists need to make to meet the needs of neurodivergent clients.
