Have you ever found yourself thinking…
- Why do I feel like we're going around in circles?
- Is this reaction mine, my client's, or something we're creating together?
- What do I actually say when I notice a relational pattern emerging?
- How can I understand this client's difficulties beyond their symptoms or diagnosis?
If so, psychodynamic thinking can offer a framework for understanding these moments and using them to deepen formulation, strengthen the therapeutic relationship, and guide intervention.
About this two-part series
This webinar series provides an accessible and practical introduction to psychodynamic therapy for psychologists seeking to develop greater confidence in applying psychodynamic concepts and skills in their everyday clinical work. While psychodynamic ideas underpin many contemporary therapeutic approaches, they are often experienced as abstract or difficult to translate into practice. This series helps to begin bridging that gap by focusing on how psychodynamic thinking can be used in real clinical encounters to deepen formulation, strengthen therapeutic relationships, and guide effective intervention.
The emphasis throughout will be on helping participants move beyond understanding the theory to feeling more confident in recognising, making sense of, and responding to the interpersonal and emotional processes that unfold in therapy. It is particularly relevant for clinicians who are new to or curious about psychodynamic thinking or seeking to deepen existing skills; this series is designed to complement your current therapeutic orientation and enhance your work.
Part 1: 5 November 2026
Foundations and core relational skills - Understanding what happens between us
Part 1 provides a brief theoretical orientation before moving into the core relational dynamics that shape therapeutic work. You will begin with foundational psychodynamic concepts - attachment, unconscious processes, and adaptation mechanisms - before focusing on the interpersonal and emotional processes that unfold in the therapy room itself.
The heart of Part 1 is learning to recognise and work with transference, countertransference, enactments, collusion, and rupture and repair. These are not abstract concepts but lived experiences in every therapy - moments when something shifts between you and your client, when patterns repeat, when the relationship itself becomes both the problem and the solution, when the client allows you a window into their outside world and patterns. Through case examples grounded in real clinical work, you will learn what these processes look like, why they matter, and most importantly, what you can actually do when you notice them emerging.
You will develop practical skills for:
- Recognising when transference and countertransference are active in the room
- Understanding enactments: when old relational patterns are being lived out rather than talked about
- Identifying collusion: the subtle ways therapist and client can unconsciously collude to avoid difficult material
- Navigating rupture and repair: how to work skillfully with disconnection and restore the therapeutic alliance
By the end of Part 1, you will have:
- A working understanding of core psychodynamic concepts and how they operate in real clinical encounters
- Practical frameworks for recognising transference, countertransference, enactments, and collusion
- Confidence in beginning to use the therapeutic relationship as an intervention
- Strategies for navigating rupture and repair to deepen the alliance
- Clarity about what to say and when to intervene.
Part 2: 12 November 2026
Working with the embodied and disembodied self - Meeting clients where they are: the non-verbal realm and relational presence
Part 2 builds on the relational foundations of Part 1, moving into more nuanced clinical territory. This session helps to build your capacity to work with clients whose difficulties manifest in distinctly different ways: those who live in their minds and disconnect from their bodies, and those whose bodies carry what their minds cannot yet articulate.
You will explore how to work with:
- Disembodied minds: intellectualisers and over-functioners who use thinking to defend against feeling, creating a particular kind of therapeutic impasse
- Mindless bodies: emotionally dysregulated clients whose distress lives in sensation, impulse, and somatic experience, often ahead of conscious awareness
- The non-verbal realm: what happens beneath and beyond words - tone, gesture, posture, silence, presence, and the felt sense of being with another person
Through case examples and applied discussion, you will see how attending to the non-verbal, understanding defensive patterns around embodiment, and bringing psychodynamic thinking to bear on these presentations can enhance outcomes and deepen the therapeutic work. You will learn how to bridge the gap between mind and body, help clients access what they've defended against, and use your own embodied presence as a therapeutic tool.
By the end of Part 2, you will have:
- Skills for recognising and working with dissociation, intellectualisation, and somatic dysregulation
- Strategies for bringing disembodied clients into their bodies and helping dysregulated clients access their minds
- Skills for working with the non-verbal realm: silence, gesture, presence, and felt sense
- A deeper understanding of how to translate formulation into metabolised, sustainable change
- Greater capacity to integrate psychodynamic thinking into your existing therapeutic toolkit
Who this series is for
This series is designed for psychologists and other mental health workers who are interested in beginning to explore psychodynamic therapies; in learning a bit more and seeing how this may be employed to contribute to their clinical practice.
What you'll take away
Participants will leave with:
- Practical formulation frameworks that deepen understanding of client presentations
- Immediately applicable skills for recognising and responding to transference, countertransference, enactments, collusion, and rupture
- Strategies for using the therapeutic relationship as an intervention
- Improved confidence in working with embodied and disembodied presentations
- Greater attunement to the non-verbal realm, what it communicates, and how to use it in the therapeutic encounter
- Clarity about when and how to intervene, and when to hold space and observe
- Greater capacity to integrate psychodynamic thinking into your primary therapeutic orientation
Timing and access to the recordings of these webinars
- This series is being held over 2 x 90-minute sessions on the 5th and 12th November 2026.
- Each session will run from 7:00 – 8:30 PM AEDT
- You will only need to register once to attend both sessions
- Recordings of both sessions will be available through the CPD Webinar Library the next day, but for the best experience and the opportunity to ask your questions, join us live. Everyone who registers will be advised via email as soon as the recording is available. Members have unlimited access to the recording, and non-members will have access for 6 months.
About our presenter: Gillian McGregor
Gillian McGregor is a psychologist with clinical and counselling endorsement in private practice in Australia, with a particular interest in complex presentations including complex trauma and adult survivors of childhood neglect, abuse, and relational and developmental trauma.
With over 15 years of clinical experience, Gillian completed her psychology training and Master's degree in South Africa, where relational psychodynamic psychotherapy formed a cornerstone of her postgraduate education. She has continued to deepen her expertise through ongoing professional development, supervision, and study, integrating psychodynamic thinking into case formulation and clinical practice with older adolescents (16+) and adults. Her work is grounded in attachment theory, trauma-informed and neuroaffirming principles, and draws on psychodynamic concepts, including the therapeutic relationship, attachment patterns, transference and countertransference, working with the non-verbal realm and here-and-now interventions - alongside evidence-based therapies such as Schema Therapy, EMDR, CBT, DBT, and ACT.
Gillian is equally passionate about making psychodynamic theory accessible and clinically relevant, believing these concepts are most valuable when they help clinicians make sense of what occurs in the therapy room and guide meaningful, effective interventions.
In addition to her clinical practice, Gillian is a Board Approved Supervisor, supervising provisional psychologists, registrars, early career mental health professionals, and experienced clinicians seeking to strengthen their psychodynamic understanding and skills. Originally from South Africa, Gillian emigrated to Australia in 2014. Practising across two countries has reinforced her appreciation of both the universality of human suffering and the remarkable capacity for resilience, growth, and recovery - a perspective she brings to her work supporting clinicians to help clients develop greater insight and metabolise this into deep, lasting change – in their sense of self, their relationships, and their capacity to meet their emotional needs more adaptively.
