Mark and Baz have 25 years experience between them of working in mental health crisis services, supporting clients with presentations such as suicide, self-harm and trauma. Both held management roles within an award winning crisis charity, with responsibilities which included supervising the practice of others and delivering training to staff and volunteers.
Mark and Baz are now both BACP registered Counsellors in private practice and provide the following training courses. These can be adapted for your team if you have specific requirements/experience levels. We can deliver these face to face or online via Zoom.
Our workshop / training style is supportive and safe. We train in an experiential way and are grounded within a Person-Centred (Rogerian) framework. Delegates leave our training feeling empowered, refreshed and like they have learnt something new.
Please contact us for more information by filling in the form below.
Working with Suicide and Self-Harm
This is a half day workshop introducing you to the foundational principles around supporting people who present with suicidal feelings (ideation) and who self-harm or self-injure. This is an experiential session, where we will provide a safe and supportive environment for you to explore your attitudes and learn at your own rate. You will leave with a framework to both look after yourself and others who you support.
Holding Risk
Often trauma survivors experience those they receive support from escalating their crisis to emergency services or the Crisis Team. This is often necessary, however there can be a positive, therapeutic effect for the client if you can hold that risk yourself.
This is a half-day training course for those who already work with suicide/self-harm and trauma, but would like to increase their tolerance and options when working with people in crisis. You maybe regularly feel that clients come to your sessions with a higher level of risk than you are comfortable with leaving after 50 minutes without contacting other services. We will explore these scenarios in a safe and supportive environment and leave you feeling more equipped to hold therapeutic risk.
Vicarious Trauma
If you regularly support others who have experienced trauma, you may have noticed the emotional impact it has on you. This is a half day course looking at the work you do and how it affects your nervous system to be in the same room as, or talking on the phone to, those with experiences of trauma. We touch briefly on the theory, but mainly this is an experiential workshop that will leave you feeling more in control of your work with traumatised clients. We will also offer strategies to increase your resilience to do this difficult work.
Dissociation Awareness and Grounding Skills
Dissociation has become more of a popular term in recent years to describe the familiar experience of not remembering things that happen to you (a common example being when you have driven somewhere but do not recall the journey).
This workshop is more about how to work positively with clients who may have experienced significant childhood abuse and live a life that is regularly punctuated with periods of lost time, flashbacks (emotional or sensory), and confusing relationships. The diagnosis DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder, previously Multiple Personality Disorder) is not commonly given in the UK as people with this kind of presentation are often not believed; their periods of losing time / switching between parts (identities/alters) often facilitate coping and functioning, so to the uninitiated, they appear to be fine.
This workshop will give you both an awareness of this and will enable you to better connect with and support CSA (childhood sexual abuse) survivors.
Mark Sunderland is a BACP registered Person-Centred counsellor and formerly the volunteer manager at Leeds Survivor-Led Crisis Service.
Baz Cooper is a BACP registered Humanistic Counsellor and former crisis service manager (Dial House), having also set up the first residential Crisis House in Leeds (OASIS) for Leeds Survivor-Led Crisis Service.
