Medusa
Meeting Medusa
Taming the Dragon Within
Meeting, managing and processing anger - a CPD workshop for therapists, counsellors and other practitioners working with the body
Improving therapeutic outcomes for your clients by changing how you understand and work with anger in the therapy space
As a therapist, you are fully aware that anger is an emotion to be welcomed into the therapy space. It can offer important information about the client’s inner world and it brings an energy that has positive as well as negative possibilities.
But there’s a problem: you often feel uneasy and uncomfortable around anger. Perhaps you have a certain client that brings a lot of anger towards others, themselves and their life experiences into the room and it’s hard to know quite how to help them; perhaps you feel unnerved by a client’s passive-aggressive anger for example when they challenge your hourly fee or they’ve DNA-ed and won’t pay; maybe your relationship with your own anger isn’t straightforward you’re ashamed that you can’t deal with your anger better. You’re a therapist, for goodness sake; shouldn’t you have it all worked out?? You end up feeling deskilled and ashamed.
This training will support you to explore your relationship with anger through:
✔️grounding and resourcing using nature and the self
✔️movement and creativity
✔️working with safety, boundaries and protection
✔️accessing and working with personal anger
✔️ learning tools for working with anger
✔️ having space to reflect on and discuss anger in your client work
✔️ fireside connection, soup and cake
Benefits
This workshop will support you to:
🔥Gain insight into your own anger responses, defences and sense of safety
🔥Improve your capacity to support your clients with their expressions of anger
🔥Feel more confident and better equipped to welcome your clients’ anger
🔥Improve your clients’ therapeutic outcomes
The workshop will take place at Wild & Green in Crowborough. Wild and Green provides a woodland setting for our workshop that is equipped with shelter in the case of poor weather and a loo. The campfire acts as the hearth and heart for us to return to as we work in small groups and in a plenary throughout our day together.
Physical and emotional safety are important factors in being able to work with anger. As outdoor therapists, we have chosen to run this workshop outdoors because of the natural environment’s capacity to support our full presence, grounding and regulation. At the same time, we recognise that for some participants, being in nature may come with more difficult emotions, including anxiety. We will invite space for identifying, naming and managing these emotions early in the workshop.
What is Anger
Anger is an emotion that ranges from mild frustration and upset to red hot roaring rage and it doesn’t appear from nowhere. We all have patterns of anger that are rooted in a complexity of causes, for example, the parental modelling we experienced as children, our resilience and beliefs about the world, early life trauma experiences, past experiences involving our friends, acquaintances, school teachers, work colleagues or bosses, the wider society, and hormones, medication or substance use, etc.
We usually experience anger (our own or others’) when a need is left unmet and perhaps even unrecognised, a boundary is violated or there is a mismatch of expectations. All these may be perceived as a threat to the nervous system and, as we know, one of the responses that this can evoke is us is the ‘fight’ response. Depending on our anger make-up, this may emerge as an episodic flash and expression of anger or aggression or as an underlying and ongoing pattern of indignation, resentment and simmering anger that explodes.
Without an understanding of what it is that’s causing our anger, and because there is a threat to our survival, it can appear powerfully and overwhelm the angry person and others in their vicinity or the target of the anger.
You know that anger is an important messenger and the therapy space is the ideal place to hear and respond to anger but that doesn’t stop you feeling uneasy about how best to work with it.
Your job is not to help your client to ‘control’ or ‘manage’ their anger. Rather it is to support them to understand the root causes of their anger and help them develop their capacity to mobilise and redirect the energy of the anger in a more effective way
Anger is held in the body as well as the mind. This CPD training offers you the chance to work safely to understand your own anger by working in an embodied way to look at some of your own anger and how you can help it feel better.
eel wobbly when their anger towards their boss, partner, children, parents, friends, acquaintances, someone who cut them up that day, etc. or worse, when they start to complain about your inflexibility around appointment times, your hourly fee or they DNA and won’t pay, even though it’s clearly stated in your terms. Perhaps you have some persistently angry clients whose sessions you dread…..
This may be an unmet need or a mismatch of expectations. and develop and strengthen the parts of themselves that will enable them to get their and meet the underlying needs of their angry part and resource them. use the anger to better develop strategies that reduce their ‘need’ to be angry.
work through the and meet the underlying needs that are not being met - and may rarely have been met in their lives.
and conflict.
Sometimes your own anger can leave you feeling fragile.
Meet the Team
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Lucinda Weis
Embodied Arts Psychotherapist and Workshop Facilitator
Lucinda has many yeas’ experience of working with a range of deep and heartfelt emotions including anger
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Mary Gordon-Cummings
SALES MANAGER
Focused, approachable, and driven by results, our sales manager is all about building strong relationships. They help connect people to the right solutions—with clarity and care.
