Clinical Applications of Dr Margot Sunderland’s Integrative Approach

Therapeutic Arts in Practice

• Integration of Multiple Art Forms: Experience how the seven distinct art forms (visual arts, drama, movement, sound, poetry, sandplay, and imagery) can be strategically combined within therapeutic conversations to access the unconscious mind and facilitate emotional growth
• The Big Empathy Drawing Technique: Learn this powerful method for helping clients visualise and externalise emotional experiences, creating a bridge between internal states and external expression that facilitates deeper understanding and processing of trauma
• Narrative Transformation Through Arts: Explore how creative storytelling and metaphor can help children and young people reframe traumatic experiences and develop new, empowering narratives
• Embodied Approaches to Healing: Understand how movement and sensory experiences can bypass cognitive defences and access pre-verbal memory, particularly valuable when working with developmental trauma
• Sandplay Therapy as Core Intervention: Master the fundamentals of this powerful approach pioneered by Margaret Lowenfeld that enables clients to express complex emotional material that may be inaccessible through verbal communication alone
• Working with Core Affect: Develop techniques to help clients move beyond secondary symptomatic emotions (anxiety, depression) to access underlying core pain (shame, fear, abandonment) and facilitate transformational healing through arts-based interventions
• Right Brain to Right Brain Communication: Enhance your capacity for attuned emotional responsiveness based on Allan Schore’s research, learning how to “listen with your right brain” while facilitating creative expression
• Creating Safe Therapeutic Spaces: Design environments and approaches that invite creative exploration while maintaining psychological safety for even the most traumatised clients

Neuroscience-Informed Psychotherapy

Applying Current Neuroscientific Understanding to Clinical Practice

Margot Sunderland will share how neuroscientific insights can transform therapeutic work with children, adolescents and families:

• Foundation Knowledge: Essential neurobiological understandings to inform effective therapeutic journeys, including the impact of adverse epigenetic changes on mental health (from prenatal development onwards)
• Neuroplasticity and Healing: Evidence-based approaches demonstrating the reversibility of trauma impacts and pathways to recovery
• The Neurobiological Basis of Change: Understanding the neuroscience that underpins effective therapeutic interventions and transformations
• Measuring Therapeutic Success: What successful child psychotherapy looks like neuroanatomically, neurochemically and physiologically
• Trauma and Brain Development: How trauma affects the developing brain and evidence-based approaches for repair and recovery
• The Neurobiology of Emotional Pain: Why emotional suffering creates such intense physiological responses
• Neurobiological Maps of Common Conditions: Essential frameworks for understanding the neuroscience of conditions such as anxiety, depression, self-harm, functional neurological disorders (FND), OCD, insomnia, dissociation, and suicidal ideation
• Understanding Violence: The neuroscience of aggression and violence
• Differential Diagnosis: Clarifying the neurobiological distinctions between ADHD and trauma presentations
• Adolescent Emotional Health: Why teenage heartbreak can have profound neurobiological impacts beyond emotional distress

Format

This unique online event offers a rich exploration of Margot’s application of neuroscience and arts based approaches in therapeutic work. There will be demonstrations of key techniques, with opportunities for experiential learning.

The session will include case illustrations that show Margot’s synthesis of arts and neuroscience coming together in real therapeutic settings, and an interactive discussion will give space to explore clinical challenges in depth. There will also be a dedicated Q&A to support practitioners in applying these methods across various contexts.

The event will be held on Zoom, and a recording will be made available to all ticket holders.

This practice-focused workshop will help you:

• Implement creative arts approaches with solid neuroscientific foundations
• Develop practical strategies for working with emotional pain and trauma
• Apply effective techniques for helping children and young people express difficult feelings
• Strengthen therapeutic attunement and right-brain communication
• Translate complex neurobiological concepts into accessible interventions
• Integrate these approaches within your existing therapeutic modality
• Connect with global colleagues across disciplines

Suitable for:

Child and adult psychotherapists, counsellors, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, educators, foster carers, and mental health practitioners working with children, young people, and families. All theoretical orientations welcome.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn practical applications of Margot’s innovative integration of arts and neuroscience from the pioneer herself.

Special Offer!

If you haven’t yet purchased a ticket to Margot’s Legacy Interview, you can now get it included with her Supervision Workshop at a 25% saving! Simply select the ‘Margot Sunderland Workshop Ticket with Legacy Interview’ option below to take advantage of this offer.

About MINDinMIND

What makes MINDinMIND events unique is our distinctive approach to bringing you insightful conversations with renowned clinicians and thought leaders in mental health. As former journalists turned psychotherapists, we draw on our skills in deep listening and storytelling to connect the threads of personal and professional experiences that have shaped our guests’ work and their clinical legacies, preserving their wisdom for current and future generations of mental health professionals.

The event will be hosted by Jane O’Rourke.

Jane is a Psychodynamic Child, Adolescent and Family Psychotherapist and former award-winning BBC Producer, and founder of MINDinMIND. She creates rich, multi-layered conversations through carefully crafted live interviews with luminaries such as Arietta Slade, Anne Alvarez, Alicia Lieberman, Beatrice Beebe, Patrick Casement, and Miriam Steele. MINDinMIND’s in-depth approach helps to create a special feel to our live events, producing original, thoughtful and at times deeply moving conversations with our visionary legacy interviewees. We deepen these conversations with the inclusion of special guests chosen by our interviewees for the support or inspiration they have offered over their careers, creating a rich, multi-faceted exploration of their work and ideas—bringing to life not just the clinical work but the person behind it as well.

Event Timezones

UK | 7.30–9.30 PM
US (Eastern) | 2.30–4.30 PM
US (Central) | 1.30–3.30 PM
US (Pacific) | 11.30 AM–1.30 PM
Canada (Toronto) | 2.30–4.30 PM
Canada (Vancouver) | 11.30 AM–1.30 PM
AUS (Western) | (May 1) 2.30–4.30 AM
AUS (Central) | (May 1) 4.00–6.00 AM
New Zealand | (May 1) 6.30–8.30 AM

MINDinMIND has no income stream, and we depend on donations and ticket sales to keep putting out content like our Legacy Interviews.

Please do get in touch if you are living and working in a Low Income country as we have special discount codes available.

If you are experiencing financial hardship and wish to attend we have a number of sponsored tickets:

contact@mindinmind.org.uk

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