Patrick Ryan
Minding minds that Mind Minds
Workshop Abstract
Being a practitioner in the field of sexual abuse, harm and violence brings us into highly charged, emotionally demanding and potentially transformative spaces with those who abuse and those that are victims. It is work that many would not do or could not do. For those of us who do, while we are often a number, we are never a machine.
There are a variety of mind and body costs to our work that require deliberate, intentional management not just to enhance the quality of the experience for our clients but to ensure that what we input to our work, is not greater than the psychological resources that we have available. Such intentional focus on the practitioner often gets lost in the demands of meeting the service user needs or ensuring the system needs of preventing harm.
In this experiential workshop, a focus on energy management will act as the foundation for engaging in some reflective conversation on well-being, sleep, nutrition, exercise (in their psychological guise), light and gentle body work, and guided visualisations. An objective will be to consider what is required to stay regulated and in balance, so that practitioners can engage in physically and mentally demanding work and still go home with a sense of being personally and professionally intact.
An objective will be to enable the practitioner to bring that same sense of cohesion and being psychologically intact back to our client work so that they experience us as ‘walking the walk’ and learn of its value through how we co-regulate their charged and intense life experiences.
About the Speaker
Patrick Ryan is a clinical psychologist since 1996 and works at the University of Limerick, Ireland, as Director of its Doctoral Programme in Clinical Psychology. Maintaining clinical practice, teaching and research roles, he has supervised 60 PhD’s to completion, is author of three books and is a consultant to national media and broadcast platforms.
His area of expertise in clinical practice is working with self-performance management, and making sense of trauma with a particular focus on sexual trauma. Through his research, he has brought relationship models to further the understanding of psychological consequences of distressing experiences.