Working with Complex Trauma
CPD Credits
3.5
Event Type
Recorded Event
Location
Your TR Together account
Standard
£60.00
Trainee/NHS
£51.00
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Working with Complex Trauma

Working with Complex Trauma

The Tavistock Model

With Jo Stubley, Adam Flintoff, Ines Mota & Zack Eleftheriadou (Chair)

Recording of the Month: Use following code for 25% off: RECORDING25

The diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) raises important clinical and theoretical questions for psychotherapists. As our understanding of trauma broadens, so too must our thinking about how to approach it in the consulting room, especially when working psychoanalytically. 

This recorded conference on Complex Trauma, led by Jo Stubley, Adam Flintoff, and Ines Mota, brings together diverse perspectives on how trauma shapes experience over time, and how therapists can respond with both rigour and flexibility. Drawing on the work of the Tavistock Trauma Service, our speakers will explore how an applied psychoanalytic approach can support clients living with the effects of complex, cumulative, or relational trauma. 

Topics include the impact of trauma on the body as well as the mind, the role of attachment, the unconscious and neurobiological processes, and the centrality of the therapeutic relationship. While some presentations touch on specialist areas, the emphasis throughout is on how this thinking can inform everyday clinical practice, including when and how to adapt the therapeutic frame. 

This conference recording is particularly suited to clinicians across modalities who may not specialise in trauma but are increasingly encountering its presence in varied forms and who are seeking an integrative approach rooted in psychoanalytic thinking to make sense of their pressing clinical work. 

Recording includes: Access to Jo Stubley's and Ines Mota's slides, and Adam Flintoff's references.

Programme

Introductions
Jo Stubley 
What is Complex Trauma? 

This introduction will provide a brief overview of the theoretical underpinnings of the Tavistock Model of complex trauma. This will include definitions of trauma, complex trauma and complex PTSD, the window of tolerance, dissociation, failures of symbolisation, the importance of the body, the repetition compulsion and enactments. A description of the different aspects of the model in practice within the service will also be given. 

Adam Flintoff 
Trauma Work and Learning From Other Modalities 

Working as a therapist in the trauma field involves remaining a perpetual student as therapeutic knowledge and practices continue to evolve. The patient population readily inform therapists of their therapeutic preferences, often informed by a close engagement with the trauma literature filtered through a wish to ease pain and come unstuck. A key feature of trauma work is the question of other modalities and therapists may turn in this direction themselves when clinical work runs off course. Drawing upon experiences in the Tavistock Trauma Service, this talk will consider the necessity and the complexity of learning from other modalities. 

Q&A 
Break
Ines Mota 
Art Psychotherapy in Trauma Work 

Since its inception art psychotherapy has developed in the intersection of two worlds. In our minds, creative approaches are often seen as having the capacity to adjust and evolve in response to changing needs.  Thinking about some of the particularities of psychodynamically informed art psychotherapy this talk will explore how the modality responds to evolving needs and challenges with this particular client group and setting. 

All Speakers with Q&A
What adaptations may be helpful in working with complex trauma? 

Whilst the Tavistock model has been developed in the context of a team working within the NHS, the principles of the adaptations that therapists may need to consider when working with traumatised patients hold true across different settings. This may include adoption of a more active stance, challenges to the frame, managing countertransference experiences and working with the inevitability of enactments. The presenters will discuss together their experiences of what may be necessary adaptations to psychoanalytic ways of working before opening the discussion to the audience.  

End 

Zack Eleftheriadou

Dr Zack Eleftheriadou is a Chartered Counselling Psychologist and Fellow of the British Psychological Society (HCPC reg). She has trained as a child and parent-infant psychotherapist (CPJA/UKCP) and as an adult psychoanalytic psychotherapist (CPJA/UKCP & Tavistock Society/BPC). Zack runs the consultancy service ‘Noema Psychology and Psychotherapy’, providing psychotherapy, supervision and teaching. She lectures in the following areas: developmental issues, trauma/complex trauma, migration/cross-cultural work and the ‘replacement child’ psychodynamics. She has published widely, including the text ‘Psychotherapy and Culture’. She is member of The Bowlby Centre and is a visiting external examiner for Doctoral projects across the UK. She feels passionate about early intervention and regularly presents on ‘the psychology of the baby’, for health professionals and psychotherapists. She has previously worked in several London NHS Hospitals and charities, such as Nafsiyat Intercultural Therapy Centre and Freedom from Torture. She is also currently an honourary psychotherapist of the Tavistock Complex Trauma Service.

Joanne Stubley

Dr Joanne Stubley is a Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust. She is the lead clinician of the Tavistock Trauma Service, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and 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 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. 

Adam Flintoff

Adam Flintoff is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychodynamic Psychotherapist. He completed his clinical psychology training at the University of Essex and trained as a psychotherapist at the Tavistock Centre. He now works as a senior therapist within the Tavistock Trauma Service. He is also an honorary lecturer on the UCL Clinical Psychology Doctorate and prior to his psychology training completed an MSc in the History and Theory of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. 

Ines Mota

Ines Mota is an art psychotherapist working across several NHS trusts, including the Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust, with adults living with complex trauma and dissociative presentations.

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