Join our monthly discussion groups. Places limited.
Discussion Groups — Explore the Application.
Explore how attachment theory can inform clinical practice and our understanding of relationships through facilitated discussion and shared professional perspectives
Application of Attachment Theory Discussion Group
Join Beatriz Folch for a thought-provoking discussion exploring Thinking Relationally About Autism: Exploring Attachment, Family Experience, and Clinical Practice- A Discussion Group. Details to follow.
I’d like to invite practitioners working with autistic children and young people to a reflexive, exploratory discussion around attachment and autism.
This is not intended to be a lecture or a space where I position myself as an expert providing answers. Rather, I hope to create a space where we can think together, question our assumptions, share experiences and explore the ways attachment theory may — or may not — help us understand our work with autistic children and young people.
I am a psychologist and psychology teacher. I began my career in education, working in Special Educational Needs settings in Oxford, primarily with autistic children and young people, before completing my PGCE and teaching Psychology in mainstream schools. I currently work as a psychologist at an international sixth-form centre in Madrid, with a diverse caseload including autistic children and young people.
Attachment Theory has become an important framework in how I understand the young people I work with and formulate their difficulties. At the same time, I have become increasingly interested in where this framework is helpful, where it becomes more complicated, and what we might miss when we apply it too readily.
Some questions we might explore:
What happens when we look at autism through an attachment lens?
Where might attachment theory enrich our formulations?
Where might we risk confusing autistic characteristics with attachment-related difficulties?
How might differences in communication, sensory experience and social interaction shape our thinking about attachment?
What assumptions do we bring to our understanding of relationships between autistic young people and their caregivers?
How might an attachment-informed perspective influence our therapeutic relationships and interventions?
And perhaps most importantly: what are we not seeing?
There won't be a fixed set of answers or a definitive model to take away. The aim is to create a thoughtful, psychologically informed space for reflection and dialogue, drawing on our different experiences and perspectives.
Application of Attachment Theory Discussion Group
Join Dr Kate Brown for an engaging discussion on Musical Soundscapes : Attachment informed perspectives on the implications and applications of music in the therapeutic encounter.
Sound creates our first awareness of another, informing us, even en
utero that we are not alone. In our final moments softly spoken loving
words might be the thing that we most long to hear. Throughout the
life-span, music and sound informs how we learn, work, rest, and play.
Music has implications for how we interact in groups, how we tell
stories and construct narratives, and how we regulate or manipulate
affect. Music can also be inherently political, voicing the sound of
grief, protest and mourning. Yet our responses to music and musical
interests might too infrequently claim our attention in the therapeutic
encounter. Drawing from examples of music in therapeutic communities,
use of music with children in care, and adults in therapeutic-treatment,
and lived experience of being a life-long music fan and occasional
performer, musics place in therapy is explored. The therapists use of
self as someone with a musical interest and cultural history is also
considered. Musicality’s power to enhance therapy and communicate what
might be preverbal or unconscious, and possible contra-indications about
use of music is explained. This talk concludes with highlighting that
although as therapists we might always be listening, when we pay
attention to the musicality of the interaction, there is more to be
heard.
Please view our cancellation policy here.
In this online discussion group Paul Renn presents the concepts in his new book: Relational Foundations: A Relational-Neurodevelopmental Approach to Cumulative Trauma (Routledge, 2026)
Paul will explore how repeated relational disruptions — often subtle, often unnoticed— can shape a child’s developing expectations of what is possible with another person. The focus is on the concept of cumulative relational trauma, and on how such experience becomes embedded in developing systems of regulation and stress responses.
Please view our cancellation policy here.