half day workshop

BECOMING A BETTER THERAPIST: ADOPTING A COHERENT FRAMEWORK TO GUIDE THE DEVELOPMENT OF SUPERVISEES, TRAINEES AND OURSELVES
James Bennett-Levy, Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre U.K.

CCIB Room: 219/220

What skills should we be developing as cognitive therapists?  How do these skills relate to one another?  Do different skills require different methods of training/supervision?  How can we best pinpoint the difficulties we are having? How best to implement appropriately targeted training strategies, tied to the level of experience of the therapist?    Cognitive therapists have models of disorders aplenty.  But we have lacked useful developmental models for conceptualizing: The skills that we’re trying to learn; Our own learning process as therapists; The best strategies for learning.   For a discipline raised on a diet of evidence-based research and neat theory, these are strangely murky areas.  In this workshop, an innovative model – the Declarative-Procedural-Reflective (DPR) Model ((Bennett-Levy, 2006; Bennett-Levy & Thwaites, 2007) – will be presented, which provides a coherent framework for thinking about our therapy skills.  The model has the capacity to pinpoint more accurately the kinds of difficulties therapists might have, and to suggest what training strategies may be most useful in overcoming them.    The aim of the workshop is for participants to familiarize themselves with the model and use it to guide their thinking about their own development and that of supervisees/trainees.

James Bennett-Levy is Consultant Clinical Psychologist at Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre.  He has published extensively on the training and supervision of cognitive therapists.  In particular, he is known for the development of a self-experiential training strategy for cognitive therapists known as self-practice/self-reflection (SP/SR) (Bennett-Levy et al., 2001, 2003), and more recently for his DPR model of therapist skill development (Bennett-Levy, 2006, Bennett-Levy & Thwaites, 2007). He is also one of the editors of the popular Oxford Guide to Behavioural Experiments in Cognitive Therapy.

Key References:
Bennett-Levy, J. (2006).  Therapist skills: A cognitive model of their acquisition and refinement. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 34, 57-78. 
Bennett-Levy, J. & Thwaites, R. (2007). Self and self-reflection in the therapeutic relationship: A conceptual map and practical strategies for the training, supervision and self-supervision of interpersonal skills. To appear in: P. Gilbert and R. Leahy (eds): The therapeutic relationship in the cognitive therapies, in press. Routledge, London.