The Practice Lab: CBT skills for managing self-harm: Online Workshop via ZOOM


Registration closes @ 9am on 14.10.25

When we are working with people who self-harm as a way of coping with distress, CBT “first principles” help us and our clients to make sense of this and guide us in where to target our treatment.

Do any of these statements ring true for you?

I work with people who self-harm but I am unsure how to use my CBT skills to manage it

It would be helpful to have the chance to practice formulating and treatment planning my clients’ self-harm in a protected space.

I would like to get hands on and leave the webinar feeling more skilled.

We are pleased to be offering an opportunity to gain experiential knowledge and skills-based practice that is often missing from usual webinar teaching formats. This short online workshop is highly experiential, focusing on skills as well as knowledge, and run by an OCTC trainer with much experience in the topic. Places for these experiential workshops are allocated on a first come, first served basis and limited to 12 participants only.

This managing self-harm Practice Lab will equip participants with the knowledge and skills to:-

Engage, motivate and resource clients to reduce or stop their self-harm
Build individualised CBT formulations that make sense of self-harming behaviour
Support clients to break the pattern of self-harm behaviour using CBT “first principles”
Use the self-harm formulation and intervention throughout and alongside the wider CBT intervention

Presenter

Sarah Lack, Principal Clinical Psychologist

Dr Sarah Lack qualified as a Clinical Psychologist in 2009, and is a BABCP accredited CBT psychotherapist and Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She completed the OCTC PGCert in CBT for Psychological Trauma and Personality Development in 2014. Since then she has gathered extensive experience of teaching and supervising CBT and is now Deputy Lead for this course. Sarah has worked in Community Mental Health Teams, Psychological Therapies Services, Talking Therapies for anxiety and depression, acute hospitals and is currently based in a specialist NHS psychological trauma service. Sarah was course tutor at the Oxford Institute of Clinical Psychology Training and Research from 2020-2023, supervising doctoral research projects focused on CBT and PTSD presentations. Sarah was recently the Programme Lead for a national CBT training programme funded by NHSE to support CBT competence and BABCP accreditation within the clinical psychology profession.

Additional Information

Cancellation & changes policy

If you cancel more than 14 days prior to your booked event, we will refund your fee minus a charge of 15% to cover our administration costs. We regret that cancellations 14 days or less before the booked event cannot be refunded or changed/transferred.

If you wish to change/transfer your booking after confirmation we will do our best to accommodate you if you notify us 14 days prior to your booked event, and if there is space to do so. However there will be an administration charge of £15 per change/transfer.

Confidentiality

Workshops often contain clinical material. This is always anonymised as far as possible but delegates are none the less reminded to respect confidentiality.

All that is discussed in your therapy sessions will be treated as confidential, with the following exceptions.
We are required to seek supervision by our professional body (The British Psychological Society or equivalent) as a means of ensuring good practice. We will usually inform your referrer of your progress, but the details that we disclose will be discussed with you. We do have a statutory obligation to break confidentiality under rare circumstances, namely, if we believe that a client is of danger to themselves or to others (under the Mental Health Act, 2001) or if we believe that a child is at actual risk of physical or sexual abuse (The Children Act, Section 47, 1989).

If we felt that it would be helpful to request additional medical, social or legal information, we could only do this with your consent. Similarly, should another medical, social or legal professional request information from us, we would not release this without your consent.

Disclaimer

OCTC makes every effort to ensure that this programme is delivered as advertised. However, should a presenter have to cancel, we will endeavour to find another suitable presenter. We will inform attendees as soon as is reasonably practical and, if requested, will offer a refund. In the rare event that we are unable to substitute a presenter, we may cancel a workshop and refund payments already made by attendees. OCTC will not refund travel and accommodation costs that attendees may incur.
All the workshops in this programme are carried out by highly experienced therapists and trainers. The individual presenter is responsible for the content of the workshop and any views expressed do not necessarily represent those of OCTC.
Although highly informative, none of the open workshops or workshop series confer a formal qualification or assurance of competence in CBT (or a specialist area of CBT) since we are unable to assess attendee competency within the training event. However, credit and award-bearing courses that lead to formal qualifications are offered by OCTC in conjunction with the University of Oxford. More about these courses is available on our website www.octc.uk

Levels of competence

Before booking a place on a workshop, please ensure that it is pitched at the appropriate level of competence for you. The guide to levels is as follows:

Basic

Basic workshops are for people from a variety of backgrounds, who have at least one year’s clinical experience. Cognitive behavioural knowledge is not necessary for attendance at these workshops, though in practice, a number of attendees will have some skills in the area, and are refreshing/updating their knowledge.

Intermediate

Intermediate workshops are directed towards people who already have knowledge of CBT, and experience in using cognitive formulations and treatment methods – for instance, they are able to identify and test automatic thoughts, and design behavioural experiments. Most participants will be using CBT as part of their clinical practice, and may still be acquiring new CBT skills.

Advanced

Advanced courses are directed towards those professionals who use CBT routinely as part of their clinical practice. They have probably undertaken a significant number of training courses and/or workshops, and use a broad range of cognitive behavioural strategies to work with a range of presentations at varying levels of complexity.

Making reservations

Bookings can only be considered confirmed after we have received your online registration or application form and payment (or invoicing details, including an official purchase order document).

The registration closing date for each workshop is shown on the workshop description page.  Please note that no applications received after this deadline will be permitted.

If you are booking a workshop place for someone else, you must complete your own details in the billing field, but ENTER THE WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS NAME/ADDRESS in the shipping field. If you wish to order items using a paper order form instead of online, you can view or download an order form in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format. Once downloaded, print it out, fill it in, and send off with your payment [cheque made payable to OXFORD HEALTH NHS FOUNDATION TRUST] to the address on the form.

Refreshments

The cost of the workshops includes hot drinks on arrival, mid-morning and mid-afternoon, but not usually lunch unless stated. However, for workshops that do include lunch, if you have any special dietary requirements please let us know at the time of application.

Accessibility requirements

We welcome applications from diverse backgrounds. If you have any particular needs, please contact us
prior to booking.