Northside Training

We keep participant numbers on our courses small. There's a reason for that.

What small groups make possible isn't just a better learning experience in a vague sense. It's something specific: the quality of attention that can be brought to each person, whether in a virtual or in-person room. It gives space for genuine conversation rather than presentation and Q&A. Giving real thinking and exploration an opportunity rather than information transfer.

We choose our trainers carefully - for the depth and experience they bring, and for their commitment to meeting each participant as an individual.

If you are curious about Transactional Analysis - you've heard it referenced in supervision, by someone else at work or encountered it in a book or article, or just kept meaning to find out more - the TA101 is where most people start.

Its the official introduction course to TA as well as being an internationally recognised CPD course.
Its a weekend with experienced and valued trainer, Andy Williams, in North West Leeds.
Andy ensures he covers the core concepts in a way that applies to everyone in the room, no matter what their background or situation.
Its a space where you can ask questions and explore how the ideas connect to real life.

The next course is on 11 & 12 July 2026, 9.30 - 4.30pm both days. Places are £215 and include lunch and refreshments.
Find out more via link in first comment.

Andy Williams Psychotherapy

Anxiety feels productive. That can often the harder problem to address than the anxiety itself. Thinking and behaviour need to change.

One useful framing for anxiety is "perverted problem-solving"- agitated, future-focused, achieving very little, but feeling like action. The client isn't just struggling to manage their anxiety. On some level, they believe the worry is doing something for them too.

Anxiety = overestimating the danger / underestimating the ability to cope. Or, to put it another way: Is this a danger problem? Or a coping problem?

Andy Williams' piece on the blog has ten practical ideas for working with anxious clients including psychoeducation approaches, how to work with catastrophic thinking, and the worry tree.

Link in first comment. Let us know if you find it useful.

Clients don't always arrive overtly talking about their relationship with food or eating distress. But eating patterns - whether its restriction, avoidance or something other relationship with food, can often come up in therapy.
But what do we do with it?

The next Cup of TEA on 17 June is bringing this into focus. Debbie Thomson will be exploring how eating patterns and distress show up, what they might be pointing to, and what that means for us as practitioners. Its an invitation to explore something that's probably already present in your client work.

Online via Zoom, 6–8pm, £12.
Details and booking in the first comment.

If you've been thinking about the Certificate in Working with Groups, we've only got a couple of places left on the October cohort, and the early booking rate closes on 30 June.

Want to have a clearer sense of the facilitator that you already are? This course with Bev Gibbons doesn't only give you an understanding of what's happening in a group. You will also develop your skills and confidence in working with the group members and the internal group dynamics. Bev works with each unique person on the course - so what you take away is specific to you, not a one-size-fits-all toolkit.

Three online weekends with Bev Gibbons, October 2026 to January 2027. £660 while the early rate lasts.

Art therapist is a protected title. Counselling psychologist is a protected title.
Psychotherapist is not. Neither is counsellor.

The debate around statutory regulation of psychotherapy and counselling has been running for years. UKCP has now taken it directly to parliament, publishing a formal briefing this month setting out their position: they will support statutory regulation where it demonstrably meets a set of principles, including protected titles, a single public register, real enforcement powers, and crucially, the preservation of modality diversity.

That last principle is where the interesting tension sits. The case for protection is well understood by most practitioners. The current voluntary framework, however meaningful for those of us who are registered, has real gaps. Without statutory powers, there is no mechanism to prevent an unsafe practitioner from moving between registers or withdrawing from them altogether to avoid scrutiny. The public cannot easily distinguish between a fully registered, experienced practitioner and someone with no qualifications at all.

But the concerns on the other side are equally worth taking seriously. Who defines the entry standard? Whose model of training, supervision and suitability gets written into law? The risk of statutory regulation, depending on how it's designed, is that it codifies one version of good practice and quietly marginalises others - narrowing a profession that has always drawn strength from its plurality of approaches.

UKCP's principles explicitly address this, calling for standards to be evidence-based and EDI-aware, without privileging any single therapeutic framework. Whether that commitment survives contact with the legislative process is a different question.

It's a debate worth having properly. We're curious where practitioners in our community sit on it, particularly on that question of 'What gets preserved and what gets lost if regulation comes?'

Most of us, if we're honest, work at some distance from the model we trained in.

We learned it thoroughly, trusted it over time through hours in the therapy room, through supervision, through the slow accumulation of knowing what you're looking for and why. And yet, depending on the client, the situation, the moment, our way of working adapts.
The client who responds well in the session and returns the following week having done none of it - do you know that one? The relationship where the warmth is genuine, the insight is real, and somehow nothing shifts?
We adapt. We borrow. We find what actually works, even when it doesn't have a neat theoretical home.

It's one of the things that doesn't often get talked about openly in the profession - the gap between the model we trained in and the way we actually work.

What does that look like for you? Did you train in one approach and find yourself drawing on others over time - or has your original model deepened rather than expanded?

If you're curious about developing your theoretical toolkit, the TA101 is the internationally recognised two-day introduction to Transactional Analysis and integrates well with other models. Link to know more in the comments

Three conversations. Three very different outcomes. Which one do you recognise most from your week?

There's something in this that sits at the heart of therapeutic work - not just for clients, but for practitioners too.

The willingness to look honestly at our own patterns, our relational history, the ways we have been shaped by experience. It's an ongoing practice.
And Brown is right that it takes a particular kind of courage. Not the dramatic kind, but the quiet, sustained kind that shows up in supervision, in personal therapy, in the moments when we notice something uncomfortable about ourselves and choose to stay with it rather than look away.

What does owning your story look like in your practice - personally or professionally? We'd be interested to know.

Food and eating show up in the therapy room more often than we'd think.

Sometimes it's explicit - a client who mentions restricting, or bingeing, or a complicated relationship with their body.
More often it's quieter than that. A passing comment. A pattern that doesn't quite fit anywhere else. Something a practitioner notices but isn't sure what to do with.

Debbie Thomson is bringing this into the next Cup of TEA on 17 June - exploring how eating patterns and distress show up in the work, what they might be pointing to, and what that means for us as practitioners. Not a clinical training in eating disorders, but an invitation to think more about something that's probably already present, at some level, in your caseload.

Cup of TEA 17 June 2026. Online, 6–8pm, £12. Details and booking in the first comment.