9 x monthly Thursdays across 2025.
Learn to incorporate the following arts modalities in therapy:
- drawing and painting
- clay
- sandtray
- instant poetry
- story making
- lyric writing
- music making and voicework
- movement and drama
- sound healing
- ‘kitchen puppetry’
This 9-month in-person course draws inspiration from the pioneering work of Gestalt therapists Violet Oaklander and Mark McConville whose approaches put the relationship between therapist and young person at the heart of the therapeutic process.
Children and adolescents use their contact skills as relational tools; troubled young people struggle to make good contact; others may suffer from low self-esteem. Therapy helps facilitate exploration of emotional blockages and ‘unfinished business’, helping children and young people reconnect with emotions, body, intellect and imagination, rediscovering competence and resilience.
This workshop caters for counsellors, psychotherapists, teachers, health and other professionals working directly with children and young people in a therapeutic or pastoral capacity. It is likely to interest practitioners familiar with process work or dialogic therapy, and also those simply wishing to explore their own relationship with creativity and play.
Training methods
Includes:
- ‘live’ demonstrations
- theory
- vignettes
- experiential exercises
- roleplay
- journaling
- group work
- discussion
- practicum (optional)
Objectives
Participants will learn to:
- weave arts methods into an experiential framework
- explore and use images, metaphor, movement and play
- understand how the relational self emerges and develops uniquely in childhood and adolescence
- engage young people in phenomenological exploration of troublesome thoughts and feelings using expressive arts
- utilise a variety of safe, practical skills and techniques suited to therapeutic field work with young people (including young adults)
When
January to October 2025.
9 x monthly Thursdays:
- Thursday 23 January
- Thursday 20 February
- Thursday 20 March
- Thursday 17 April
- Thursday 22 May
- Thursday 19 June
- Thursday 17 July
- Thursday 18 September
- Thursday 16 October
Hours: 10am to 1pm and 2pm to 5.30pm (60 hours of CPD over 9 days)
Where
Opportunities to work outside in secluded garden, weather permitting.
Friends Meeting House
17 Woodville Road
Ealing
London
W5 2SE
- disabled access
- kitchen
- secluded garden
- 5-minutes’ walk from Ealing Broadway station (Elizabeth line; trains from Paddington take 7 minutes)
- free on-site parking
Local accommodation:
- Ealing Travelodge
- Ealing Premier Inn
Fees and booking
- Fee: £890
- Includes materials, worksheets, attendance certificate* and refreshments
- Small bursary for overseas applicants or those on low wages – details on application
To register, or for more information, contact me by email.
* An attendance certificate is awarded on completion of the course. Hours also count toward the Violet Solomon Oaklander Foundation’s certification programme.
Recommended reading
The following books are particularly useful:
- Oaklander, V. (2006), Hidden Treasure: A Map to the Child’s Inner Self, Karnac, London
- Oaklander, V. (1978), Window to our Children, Gestalt Journal Press, USA
- Mortola, P. (2006), Window Frames: Learning the Art of Gestalt Play Therapy the Oaklander Way, Gestalt Press, USA
- McConville, M. ( 1995), Adolescence: Psychotherapy and the Emergent Self, Jossey Bass, USA
Syllabus
NB: Details are approximate and subject to change.
9 x monthly days across 2025:
Day 1: Drawing
- Introduction to course
- Sociometry
- How young people enter therapy
- Development
- Assessment
- Safe Place
- Rosebush
Day 2: Clay
- Family consultation 1
- Contracting
- Working with clay
- Exploring anger and grief
- Anger expression and containment
Day 3: Sandtray
- Making a help plan
- Reviews, referral on, endings
- Family consultation 2
- House, Tree, Person
- Sandtray work
- Case vignettes
Day 4: Music and voice
- Lifemusic precepts (after Paton)
- Themed musicking
- Bonny Method
- Sustain
- Lyric writing
- Sound healing – the sound bath
Day 5: Quick-fire and movement work
- Sentence stems
- Change
- The Club
- Essential movements: infancy +
- Piaget’s movements
- Supporting parents
Day 6: Puppets, poetry and pitching…
- Kitchen puppets
- Safeguarding and child protection
- Reviews, referral on and ending
- Group work
- One-minute pitch
- Haiku
Day 7: Adolescence
- Adolescence in the Western world
- Maturational changes
- Experimentation and risk-taking
- McConville’s stages of development
- Disembedding
- Questing
- Anxiety and depression
Day 8: Adolescence (continued)
- Interiority
- Role of parents, community
- Suicidal ideation
- Integration
- Identity construction
- Anticipatory grief and loss
Day 9: Young adulthood
- Failure to launch
- Field view of collapse
- Journaling and memoir work
- Projective cards
- Adapting the arts for hybrid working
- Certificates
- Review and ending
About Gazebo Training School London (GTSL)
Jon founded GTSL to further the pioneering Gestalt psychotherapy work with children and adolescents undertaken by Violet Oaklander.
Building on over 20 years of working with the Oaklander projective arts-based approach, Jon has incorporated into his practice ideas from leading theorists, therapists and researchers in the field of working with young people, including adults in transition and families.
This approach, together with Jon’s experience of working dialogically with individuals and families in hospital, community and residential settings, utilises relational principles that help facilitate emotional expression and aware choice-making across many cultures.
About Jon Blend (course facilitator)
Jon (MA Dip Child, Dip Psych) has delivered Oaklander-inspired trainings to therapy institutes in the UK, Georgia and Poland and given keynote addresses and workshops in Canada, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine and the USA,
During the pandemic, drawing inspiration from his visits to Gazebo School at Esalen, Jon established Gazebo Training School London, purchasing a ‘pop up’ gazebo and working creatively ‘al fresco’ with clients in natural surroundings.
Jon facilitates annual trainings, working ‘under cover’, online and outdoors.
