Tag Archives: Cognitive Analytic Therapy

CAT on Film at July’s Café CAT

8th June 2019Cafe CATCafe CAT, CAT Practitioner Training, Cognitive Analytic Therapy, Fictional CAT Therapy, Training Materialsrhona

Café CAT will be held at HOME in Manchester on Thursday 4th July 2019. HOME is a perfect venue for this meeting’s topic, a screening and discussion of the CAT training films. Therapist (Lisa) and client (Paul) are actors and the films illustrate the course of a fictional CAT therapy.

Kathryn Pemberton will present excerpts from this series which she directed and produced with support from a steering group of Catalyse trainers.

Dawn Bennett, Practitioner Course Director, will share initial feedback and experience from piloting the materials in a training setting.

This event was prompted by interest and demand following Kathryn’s presentation about this work at our recent celebratory conference ’25 years of CAT Practitioner Training in the North’. We hope to run another screening in Sheffield later in the year.

As part of the evening we welcome your reactions and feedback. We also invite your thoughts on how these materials can be used in training and supporting resources that may help to scaffold learning.

We’re delighted to be able to hold this Café CAT meeting at HOME, “Manchester’s centre for contemporary theatre, film, art, music and more”. It has plentiful options for eating and refreshments. As we’re starting a little later than usual there may be more time for a post-work snack before the meeting begins.

The screening and discussion will run from 7 – 9 pm in the Event Space on the second floor. You’re welcome to join us in the second floor bar outside the Event Space before the Café meeting begins , anytime from 6.30 pm.

Details of how to find the venue, transport links and parking can be found at the link at https://homemcr.org/visit/getting-here/ The venue is fully accessible.

There is a £5 fee to pay in the room (nb NOT via HOME’s box office) and no need to book.

Please note that the date of the meeting coincides with the opening event of the Manchester International Festival (Yoko Ono’s Bells for Peace, 6 – 7 pm in Cathedral Gardens) so the city centre and transport may be busier than usual, but filled with culture!

We look forward to seeing you there.

Hashtag – tweets about all Café CAT events are collected under the hashtag #CafeCatalyse

More details about Café CAT can be found by clicking on this link. You can contact us with any other queries.

CAT on Film Flyer

25 Years Conference – Workshops, Posters, Celebration

15th April 2019Uncategorised25 Years, CAT Practitioner Training, CAT therapy, Celebration, Cognitive Analytic Therapy, Poster presentations, Workshopsrhona

It’s now just over a month before our conference celebrating 25 years of CAT Practitioner training in the North takes place. The programme is now finalised and available to download. We’re really pleased with the range of workshops and posters being offered by trainers and graduates of the course, past and present.

Workshops will be open for advance bookings at the end of April. To start to decide on your preferred choices, have a look at the workshop details. You can download these along with the programme by clicking on this link: Full Conference Programme - April 2019.pdf

We’re still open to offers of poster presentations. If you have a development, a reflection, a story, a piece of research or an evaluation you’d like to share, get designing. Let us know an outline of your plans so that we can make sure there’s space. You’ll have the chance to give a sixty-second ‘call-out’ to the whole conference to draw people to visit your poster.

If you have a local or regional network, gathering or special interest group you’d like to promote, we’ll find a place for this too.

We are struck year on year by the quality and range of essays written as part of the course. We know some of our graduates go on to publish articles based on these, or on subsequent work. As a course we don’t claim any ownership of these but would like to provide space to collect, collate and celebrate graduates’ publications as part of the conference. If you’d like to share any of your publications, send on details of your books, articles, chapters and blogs.

There may be other events or networks you’ve been part of or helped create that you consider have grown from your CAT training. If you’d like to mark or record these too in some way at the conference, then let us know.

We plan to have some interactive space to help house all of these ‘artefacts’ on the day. We’ll use the Twitter hashtag #CAT25celebrate to gather any images and online links. We also hope to create a virtual record through a website page linked to the conference.

Do feel free to pass on details of the day to colleagues, managers, trainers and others who might be interested. All are welcome to join us to learn more about how CAT’s grown in and around the North, its evidence base, and future developments.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Book your place on our celebratory conference on 17th May by clicking on this link and scrolling down to the bottom of the page.

CAT’s Whiskers? Four weeks to apply for our 2019 Intake

12th April 2019UncategorisedCAT, CAT Practitioner Training, Cognitive Analytic Therapy, Trainingrhona

For anyone interested in applying to join the next intake of our two year CAT Practitioner Training, please note that the initial deadline is Friday 10th May 2019. This is now four weeks away, so there’s plenty of time to put together your application.

Full details and downloads of prospectus, course dates, application form and guidance are available by clicking on this hyperlink.

You will also find a download of a number of frequently asked questions . This is a summary of some discussions between past graduates and trainees at the start of the course. We hope this will give you useful insights into some of the nuances of what doing the training is like.

The ACAT website also provides plenty of information about Practitioner Training nationally – click here to visit the ACAT pages.

If you have any other questions, do feel free to contact us to check things out. Frances Free can answer many common queries but may refer them to others in the training group. You may hear back from either Sarah Littlejohn, who leads on recruitment for the Practitioner Training course, or Dawn Bennett, course director.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

A Relational Approach to Recovery: Liverpool YMCA

28th February 2019UncategorisedCAT as an Organisational Framework, CAT Case Management, CAT Therapist, Cognitive Analytic Therapy, Recovery, Relational Approach to Recovery, Residential Carerhona

In this guest blog, Ellie McNeil , Chief Executive of YMCA Liverpool and Sefton, shares reflections on the journey both she and her organisation have taken in developing a CAT-informed approach over the last few years. She offers an opportunity to shape the development of a new residential rehabilitation programme where CAT will be embedded throughout.

The use of CAT in YMCA Liverpool and Sefton has been and continues to be a journey of reflection, challenge, hope and change. Working with Dr Karen Shannon, we initially brought in the CAT approach to enable the delivery of a project supporting people with multiple and complex needs. Disenfranchised, excluded, rejected and frightened manifested as aggressive, disengaged, self sabotaging, and rejecting. We knew we needed a different approach, not only to elicit change with service users but more so to support the staff in their roles.

The team were trained in CAT Case Management, and we started to use reflective practice. Over the subsequent years we tweaked and changed our way of working. With the support of Karen, we had created a framework to work within. We’d developed a shared understanding of why the people we supported behaved the way they did and what we could do to change our response so that we could support them more effectively.

From our current use of CAT I could see the breadth of application that the approach could give Liverpool YMCA as an organisation. It helped us understand the perspectives of our service users, staff, processes and policies, and the wider impact of the system. I was particularly interested in how CAT could help us in note the pulls and pushes of the outside world, including relationships with commissioners, funders, policy makers and influencers.

I myself embarked on the CAT Case Management course to gain a fuller understanding of this. The learning I have gained has helped me feel that change is possible. Through making changes to myself I can begin to ensure the organisation and the people in it have the best possible chance of change too.

Following a significant journey of reflection together, through some challenges and hurdles, we now have a strong leadership reflective practice group. This provides a safe space for us to work towards bettering the organisation for the staff and service users. I am incredibly proud of where we are as a team and believe we have got to this place because of the shared understanding, language and framework that CAT gives us. Working in a CAT informed way helps me to ensure the organisation can be a positive place for service users and staff members now and in the future.

In partnership with two other organisations, we have recently been successful in tendering for a range of recovery services in Liverpool. We will be delivering the accommodation based rehabilitation service. This is a 12 week treatment programme supporting people to understand and move on from their substance use. Our model for the residential rehabilitation service sets out a Relational Approach to Recovery (RAR) using CAT.

At the heart of this approach is a commitment to be collaborative and flexible. We will get alongside and ‘do with’ our service users in providing support and rehabilitation, not ‘do to/for’ them. Our service delivery will build further on the genuine psychologically informed approach we take in our other services, building and fostering hope and working alongside people to achieve sustainable recovery. We’re currently inviting expressions of interest in a Cognitive Analytic Therapist role to help progress this work.

We will work with our partners, ensuring good planning, co-operation and collaboration across organisations. We intend to agree and jointly own procedures for all stages of the interaction between service users and agencies. This includes the journey from referral to assessment, information sharing to planning, transitions, service provision to funding and review. We will hold operational and strategic reflective practice groups across the partnership. Both groups will be facilitated by Dr Karen Shannon. The recovery pathway across Liverpool will be dynamic and groundbreaking, providing a service that is therapeutically rich and provides the best possible opportunities for change.

The future of YMCA Liverpool and Sefton feels bright and vibrant. We are an organisation that genuinely reflects. We commit to noting challenges, and learning and growing from them as well as celebrating successes. Our staff team across our services are outstanding. Their resilience, commitment and kindness makes me so proud. Ultimately, however, we are here to serve the people that need us. Every person using our services shows bravery, courage and the ability to change when they step through the door. Through our understanding and use of CAT we are now able to get alongside them and support them to a brighter, sustainable future.

You can read more about how CAT has been used as an organisational framework at Liverpool YMCA in the following two Reformulation articles from 2016 and 2017 (full details are listed on Karen Shannon’s profile page):

Use of Cognitive Analytic Concepts; A relational framework for Organisational service delivery and working with clients with Multiple Complex Needs (MCN) at the Liverpool YMCA

‘Seeing the unseen’. Supporting organisational and team working at YMCA Liverpool with multiple complex clients. The use of Cognitive Analytic concepts to enhance service delivery

For more details and downloads about the CAT Therapist post with YMCA Liverpool & Sefton, click on this link. Expressions of Interest are invited prior to an open evening on 20 March 2019.