Founded in 1982, the North West Regional Psychotherapy Association is an independent association of psychotherapists, counsellors and psychoanalysts of different backgrounds, training and clinical strengths.
We are a not-for-profit association run by volunteers who organise talks, seminars and workshops on Zoom for the second Monday of the month.
Events are free to members and £7.50 to non-members. You can become a member of the NWRPA for as little as £30 a year. New members are welcome. Join at any time of year and your membership lasts for 12 months.
NEXT MEETING
Monday, December 9 at 7pm GMT
Cultural systems, Culture and Cognition – Dr Ivan Kroupin
This talk will outline a model for thinking about how culture has changed across time, and how this is changing what demands people experience and, potentially, what mental health challenges they are likely to face. Ivan’s goal is to zoom out and give some context to how unusual the world we live in today With reference to the standards of most humans throughout history and engage in dialogue with the group about what ramifications this may have at the level of individual wellbeing.
Ivan Kroupin is a post-doctoral researcher at LSE and Harvard. His main focus is on how the shift from life in subsistence villages to increasingly technology-saturated metropolises is reshaping our minds and our wellbeing, as well as the evolutionary dynamics driving this cultural-cognitive transformation.
NWRPA does not meet in January
First meeting in 2025 –Monday, February 10
An Exploration of Mirrors in Compassion Focused Work – Howard Winfield
Mirrors have long been considered to have particular significance and even spiritual implications in the realm of psychology and psychotherapy. Consider for example the concept of the “mirror self” in which a person seeks to act in a way consistent with their perception of how other people see them, or Lacan’s “mirror self” as a stage in the formation of the “I-self.” Indeed, the very beginnings of an autobiographical sense of self can be detected in infants aged between 18 and 24 months by use of the mirror (Amsterdam, 1972). Athough not formally trained as a psychologist and psychotherapist, author Louise Hay’s self-help book “Mirror Work: 21 Days to Heal Your Life” became an international bestseller when it was published in 2016, leading to a surge of interest from professionals about the potential role of mirrors in client work. Many therapists came to believe that using mirrors with clients could be valuable, yet with scant if any, evidence of efficacy other than an investigation into heart rate variability when mirrors were utilised in compassionate self talk (Petrocchi et al., 2016). Intuitively perhaps, mirrors seem to enable us to meet perhaps or even confront ourselves, but is this necessarily “a good thing?”
Counselling psychologist Howard Winfield became interested in this question based on his own study of Buddhism, his practise in meditation and his interest in compassion focused approaches to therapy, particularly the concept of “self-love.” Recognising an absence of evidence in the literature, he set out to investigate this area, ultimately conducting his own empirical study to identify the impact of using mirrors in research where participants were randomly assigned to one of two versions of a seven session self compassion focused intervention, in which one group completed the work while sitting in front of a mirror and the other group simply closed their eyes. Each participant then wrote a reflective journal entry, following each exercise. Howard will share with us his findings, which are both interesting and indeed surprising.
Amsterdam, B. (1972). Mirror self‐image reactions before age two. Developmental Psychobiology: The journal of the international society for developmental psychobiology, 5(4), 297-305.
Hay, L. (2016). Mirror Work: 21 Days to Heal Your Life. Hay House, Inc.Hay, L. (2016). Mirror Work: 21 Days to Heal Your Life. Hay House, Inc.
Lacan, J. (2006b). “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I,” in Écrits [1949], eds J. Lacan and J. A. Miller, pp. 75–81. (W. W. Norton).
Petrocchi, N., Ottaviani, C., & Couyoumdjian, A. (2017). Compassion at the mirror: Exposure to a mirror increases the efficacy of a self-compassion manipulation in enhancing soothing positive affect and heart rate variability. The Journal of positive psychology, 12(6), 525-536.