Against the Current: Metaphor and the Art of Getting Through – With Pippa Fairhead
Event Overview
There are times in life when our usual ways of understanding experience simply aren’t enough. In periods of loss, uncertainty, illness, or conflict, we often find ourselves reaching for images — we are moving against the current, carrying a weight we can’t put down, standing at a crossroads with no map. These metaphors are not merely figures of speech. They can become powerful companions, helping us make sense of what we’re going through and find a way forward.
This practical, reflective workshop explores metaphor as a resource for navigating difficult times — and as a valuable tool within clinical practice. Drawing on psychological, creative, and experiential approaches, we will explore how metaphors emerge from lived experience or are deliberately sought, and how working with them can shift perspective, contain difficult feelings, and restore a sense of meaning.
Through guided reflection and discussion, participants will learn to identify the metaphors already operating in their own experience — and explore how these images might reveal hidden strengths, possibilities, and ways of enduring. Central to the workshop is the idea that metaphor can transmute suffering: not by removing pain, but by changing our relationship to it.
We will also consider how therapists can work with clients’ metaphors — listening for the images clients live inside and helping them work with those images to deepen understanding, support change, and transmute suffering.
Participants will be invited to reflect on questions such as:
- What metaphors are available to me when I face difficulty?
- Which images or symbols keep returning for me right now?
- How might a different metaphor change my relationship to a difficult situation?
- How can metaphor support therapeutic exploration, resilience, and transformation?
Suitable for psychotherapists, counsellors, and trainees, this workshop offers space to deepen both personal and professional engagement with metaphor as a vehicle for meaning-making and change. Participants will leave with practical ideas for working with metaphor in the therapy room — and a greater appreciation of the symbolic language we communicate our deepest struggles and resources.
This is an invitation to discover how the images and experiences we live by, the conditions we navigate, can help us endure, adapt, and move through life’s harder passages — and how therapists can use that same power to accompany clients on their own journeys.
Pippa Fairhead is a UKCP registered Psychotherapist and Supervisor, and a PTSTA (P). She holds a Master’s in Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy, a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching in counselling and psychotherapy, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
With over ten years of clinical experience, Pippa works with individuals across a wide range of backgrounds, challenges and life transitions in private practice on the South Coast, and online.
Her approach combines relational Transactional Analysis and humanistic practice, dream work, and symbolism — drawing on these to create a flexible framework tailored to each person. She is particularly interested in the inner life: the images, symbols, and stories through which we make sense of experience and find our way through difficult times.
Pippa’s approach combines relational Transactional Analysis and humanistic practice, dream work, and symbolism — drawing on these to create a flexible framework tailored to each person.
£24.00 members/£48.00 non-members.
PLEASE NOTE – This webinar will NOT be recorded.
Ticket sales will end Sunday, 19th July, at noon.
The Zoom Link will be sent out to all participants the day before the event.
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