Therapy in the world: how to create therapeutic situations outside the therapy room, for you and the people in your life, even in these times of emergency
- Zoom
- 21st Mar '25 3.00 pm – 5.00 pm
These times of conflict, climate disaster and capitalist exploitation are forcing a mental health emergency. It’s now very normal to be anxious, overwhelmed, and even despairing. Meanwhile, psychotherapy is unaffordable for most, and healthcare systems are overwhelmed. So if you or someone in your life is struggling, it will most likely be up to you to make things better. A million hucksters are counting on that fact to sell you quack therapies, conspiracies and faith cures. So it has never been more important for you to find reliable therapeutic ways of being, outside the therapy room.
This accessible and straightforward workshop will take you all the way back to Ancient Greece, where powerful therapeutic ways of being were built into everyday life. A network of community healing centres – the Asclepieia – used nature, journeying, dreams, movement, reading and writing, performance, and the sheer therapeutic force of doing these things collectively, to heal anxious and exhausted minds. Everything our ancestors did to heal themselves is still available to us today, if we only translate it into the key of 21st-Century life.
This workshop will share the inspiring examples of eight people who have done exactly that. They weren’t psychologists or psychotherapists, they were people from all walks of life with the courage to step outside the frame of their suffering. Drawing on those timeless methods of our ancestors, and bringing in the best of modern research and existential philosophy, this workshop will show you how they did it. And it will cue you to start noticing those unexplored therapeutic spaces in your own life, too.
Working from the principle that love, resistance and solidarity are the existential bedrock of sanity, this workshop invites you to survive these emergency times by becoming the therapist of your own life.
Dr Chris Cleave is a chartered psychologist, existential therapist, teacher and writer. A New York Times #1 bestselling author, his novels about emergency, trauma and recovery are published in 35 languages. His research and current writing focus on people transforming their lives into therapeutic experiences, outside the therapy room. Chris trained for his doctorate at the New School of Psychotherapy & Counselling. He keeps an existential practice at chriscleavetherapy.com