Online Workshop 1

Wednesday 30 April: 9.30am - 12.45pm

Working with Dissociation and the Self: identifying and intervening with dissociated ‘parts’.

Fiona Kennedy, GreenWood Mentors Ltd. and University of Southampton

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In recent years, interest in dissociation has grown amongst psychological clinicians and researchers as the relevance of this process in psychological theory and therapy has been recognised and accepted. Dissociative responding is often a part of clinical presentations, from a simple ‘blanking’ during therapy all the way through to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Few clinicians have any training in understanding or handling these responses. In my experience as a supervisor, such clinical presentations can challenge a therapist’s skills in conceptualisation and treatment, undermine confidence and thus compromise patient care. This workshop will briefly present the CBT theory of dissociation and focus on how it can create ‘incoherence’ of the personality. It will show how to identify, map and validate the functions dissociated self-states. Some key techniques for working with self-states will be demonstrated.

Implications for everyday clinical practice of CBT

There is evidence that dissociation can be present in the full gamut of psychological conditions and yet clinicians and researchers rarely receive any training in this area.

The workshop will provide a basic understanding of how dissociation alters information processing from early to later stages of processing, affecting perception, experience and personality or self. It will also offer a CBT perspective on ‘parts’ work, in terms of working with dissociated self-states to increase coherence of personality and sense of self. The insights and strategies described can be directly applied in clinical practice.

Key learning objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Describe the CBT theory of dissociation
• Understand how to formulate dissociation within individual case formulation
• Use the formulation to choose therapeutic targets for intervention
• Map and validate the function of self-states
• Use familiar CBT and third-wave strategies to increase coherence of the personality or sense of self

Fiona Kennedy is a Clinical Psychologist, Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist, Supervisor and Trainer, Fellow of BABCP and Trustee of BABCP. She is director of GreenWood Mentors Ltd. www.greenwoodmentors.com and a Visiting Academic at Southampton University where she teaches and researches on dissociation. She also works pro-bono in India developing interventions for children and youth from adversity as well as tools and research to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions and systems change.

Key references

Kennedy, H. Kennerley and D. Pearson (Eds.). (2013). Cognitive Behavioural Approaches to the Understanding and Treatment of Dissociation. London; New York, NY: Routledge.

Kennedy, F. & Pearson, D. (2020). Integrating CBT and Third Wave Therapies: Distinctive Features (CBT Distinctive Features). London: Routledge.

Kennedy, F. C., and Kennerley, H. (2023). Taking CBT Forward: Focusing on the Self in CBT: Working with self-states across presentations, using CBT DBT ACT and CFT. CBT Today, (51)1.

Lord, C., Maguire, T. and Kennedy, F. (in press). Development and standardisation of a scale to measure dissociation between self-states: The Dissociation–Integration of Self-states Scale (D-ISS). Accepted for publication in the Cognitive Behaviour Therapist.