IARTA Annual Conference 2025
Event Overview
Facing Outward: Relational Therapy in a Fractured World
‘How do we rise to the level of events’?
With
Helen Rowland Carole Shadbolt Charoltte Sills
These words, spoken by Neville Chamberlain and reimagined in Robert Harris’s, Munich, echo across history and speak directly to our present moment. We live amidst war, forced displacement, ecological collapse, colonial violence, authoritarian resurgence, and systemic injustice. These are not distant or abstract concerns; they impact our clients, our communities, and ourselves. In the consulting room, we are not isolated from these events, we are deeply embedded in them.
As Mitchell Becker writes, we live within a dialectic of hope and despair. For relational practitioners, this raises urgent and essential questions:
- How do the traumas of the world enter the consulting room, and how do we witness and hold them?
- How can we stay in relationship with power, privilege, and inequality—without falling into judgment or shame?
- What happens when historical and political wounds are unconsciously re-enacted within the therapeutic dyad? When we risk replicating, rather than interrupting, oppressive dynamics?
This conference calls us to make therapy not just a space of refuge, but also a site of collective responsibility—a place where social pain can be held without condemnation, and where the therapeutic process is marked by compassion, empathy, and deep respect for the complexity of lived experience. In these challenging times, we need to be vigilant about ensuring that the work we do is empowering, not shaming—engaging with individuals and communities in ways that honour their humanity, not diminish it.
Relational psychotherapy cannot be separate from the world that shapes it. We need to work at the intersection of personal and collective trauma, meeting suffering with dignity and clarity, while recognizing the limits of our own power in the consulting room.
Can therapy be a place where we make room for discomfort and complexity without retreating into defensiveness or shame? Can we use the therapeutic space to resist oppressive forces, while cultivating a sense of collective hope and transformation?
“To face outward” is not just a political act. It is a deeply psychotherapeutic one. It invites us to listen—not only to what lies between therapist and client, but to the world around and within them both. We invite you to explore with us the role of therapy in a time of rupture—where meaning-making itself becomes a radical act of connection, complexity, and care.
Timetable
10:00 – Welcome and Introductions.
10:10 – Carole Shadbolt: Facing into the Pain – Silence, Powerlessness and Moral Injury
How might Winnicott’s idea of the “incommunicado self”—the silent, hidden core of the psyche—help us understand the struggle to respond meaningfully to overwhelming events? And how might the concept of moral injury help us frame the guilt and helplessness we sometimes feel when witnessing societal harm?
10:30 – Reflections and Dialogue. A space to engage with Carole’s ideas, share initial thoughts, and begin weaving connections.
11:00 – Tea & Coffee Break
11:30 – Keynote Address: Helen Rowland – Facing the Field – Critical Psychotherapy: Relational Psychotherapy in a Postmodern World
How do relational psychotherapists respond to the growing ‘social turn’ in psychotherapy? In an era where political identities and collective narratives are increasingly present in the clinical space, how do we hold that presence without collapsing into debate or default affirmation? Helen invites us to think critically—and compassionately about how the social and collective shape the psyche, while reaffirming the core task of deep psychic inquiry. How do we hold this complexity without splitting? Can we create a clinical frame that respects social pain without turning therapy into ideology?
12:20 – Questions and Group Discussion. A space to explore tensions, seek nuance, and reflect on the clinical challenges raised by Helen’s talk.
1:00 – Lunch Break
2:00 – Open Space Conversations
You shape the agenda. Bring a question, a provocation, or a related theme you’re passionate about. If you’d like to host a discussion, please get in touch in advance at heatherfowlie123@aol.com. This is a collective, emergent exploration.
3:30 – Tea & Coffee Break
4:00 – Closing Reflections. Sharing insights, questions, and tensions we’ll carry forward. A time to gather what’s emerged and imagine where we go from here.
5 – 5.30pm – IARTA AGM (please join us for the AGM)
Helen Rowland (she/her) MSc (psychol) CTA (P) TSTA (P) is a psychotherapist, supervisor, and trainer in independent private practice in the Scottish Borders and online. Over the past 30 years she has developed her interest in working with the sociopolitical in a clinical setting and has contributed papers and book chapters on queer theory, postmodernism, gender identity, and critiques of the sociopolitical function of CBT. She has been a coeditor of the Transactional Analysis Journal since 2018.
Carole Shadbolt lives and practices in the United Kingdom. In a long career, she originally trained as a social worker and worked both as a generic as well as a specialist psychiatric social worker at The Maudsley Hospital, part of the Institute of Psychiatry in London. She qualified as a Transactional Analyst Metanoia under the tutelage of Petruska Clarkson, Sue Fish and Maria Gilbert. Carole worked as a tutor for many years at Metanoia Institute on their MSc in Relational Transactional Analysis programme. She maintains an independent psychotherapy and supervisory practice in Oxfordshire. A relational psychotherapist by instinct, Carole is a published author and a founder member of the International Association of Relational Transactional Analysis and serves on their Steering group. She has been “out” since the late seventies, and her abiding interest is in LGBTQ + issues and diversity.
Charlotte Sills is a psychotherapist and supervisor in private practice, Visiting Professor at Middlesex University and Professor of Coaching at Ashridge Business School. Amongst her many publications are TA – A Relational Perspective with Helena Hargaden (Routledge 2002), for which they were awarded the Eric Berne Memorial Award in 2007. In the same year, Charlotte was awarded the EATA gold medal for services to the TA community .
IARTA Members £120 (Includes lunch, tea and coffee)
Non-Members £240 (Includes lunch, tea and coffee)
Please note: Bookings will close at 12 noon on the 14th November 2025
Venue: NVCO, Society Buildings8 All Saints Street N1 9R
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