FAQ

All participants to our Program and Seminar only course need to have completed a minimum of 200 hrs in so called “mental health” training (counselling, psychotherapy, psychology, psychiatry, psychitric nursing or social work) and have an existing “counselling” client base. In addition, we require you to attend an interview so we can get a sense of you as a practitioner, what motivates you to attend the course and we can establish together whether you are ready to do the course. The interview is also an opportunity for you to ask any questions of us and get a sense of who we are. After completing the registration form online and making the $250 admin payment, we will be in touch to set up a 30 minute interview after September.

There is no interview required for the seminars only course. You can book and pay the total seminar only fee when you are ready.

We are a small institute and at this stage we don’t offer payment plans.

At this stage, there won’t be a need for you or any other participants to come to Sydney.  We are still being cautious around COVID and we are running all our training seminars online.  

As a participant of the Full Program, you will also be assigned to a small “syndicate” peer-group (max 4-5 people), based on your location, and it maybe that some of these small groups will be able to meet face-to-face, if that’s possible, or if they so desire – but it’s not necessary.  This may mean that – depending on your syndicate group, there may, at times, be an agreement to meet in person – it is really up to you as a small peer-group.  We obviously suggest that you manage this with safe social distancing.

We  highly recommend that you have your own personal experience of receiving therapy from a Somatic Psychotherapist when you are doing the Full Course.  Ideally, this person should be fully trained professionally, experienced, registered and insured: they should be in supervision themselves appropriately.  None of the IOSP Course Tutors are available for this requirement: they have a different “hat” on here.

We will supply you with a list of such somatic psychotherapists that we know of in your area and then you make your own arrangements.  The ‘modality’ of somatic psychotherapy is probably less important than the quality of your experience: so, one size does not fit all, and you will need to discover “What works for you?”.  We recommend a regular, on-going experience and have nominally “allocated” 25 hours of the course for this component in the 1^st year.

A ‘caveat’: Somatic therapies (massage, acupuncture, Rolfing, Feldenkrais, etc.) are not somatic psychotherapies.  The practitioner should be registered as a “Psychotherapist”:  i.e. a Gestalt or TA psychotherapist, with significant training in a somatic therapy as well, might feel able to offer somatic psychotherapy sessions.  You will need to check out all these points for yourself.  If you have already worked extensively with a somatic psychotherapist, the question then becomes: “What might I need to do to refresh that experience?”

One of the main aims of our Program is to guide participants in identifying the “felt experience” of your Self, which then leads into your subjectivity when in relationship to others in the group, the reading material, etc.  The focus on the “felt experience” … will come through guided exercises in the seminars and through the syndicate groups (small groups of people in the same area, who may or may not meet in person).  The experiential material is a guide to you feeling your Self experientially.

At the completion of the training you will receive a Certificate of Completion showing 40 CPD hours as endorsed by PACFA. This is available for both the full and seminars-only training.

PACFA members are entitled to claim 40 hours of category A CPD points after attending to either the “Seminar only” or “Full Program” option of the 1 year Somatic Psychotherapy course. We encourage attendees to check with their individual associations how many CPD hourse they are entitled to.

To do the full course we recommend you set aside at least 5-7 hrs a week while the course is on from March to November.  Your are expected to attend the  2 hr live seminars and each of the 2 hr syndicates plus prepare for these with the pre-reading.  There is also time required to reflect and process the relational aspects and material that you will be exposed to for each session.

We expect participants to attend 100% of the seminars and for the full course the syndicates as well.  Your presence and contribution is important. From a relational aspect it means that your presence will impact and be felt by others and the group as a whole.  Of course we understand that unforeseen events can happen so that this may not always be possible.

We are also giving thought to the entry requirements to the somatic psychotherapy modality under the PACFA umbrella.  It is a bit too early to say something specific about that, as PACFA are revising their training requirements for psychotherapists.  We will be guided by that process, and we are hoping that this will be clarified some time in 2023.

PACFA are in the process of reviewing the training requirements for psychotherapists. Once this process is finalised, we hope to have our program accredited and listed as “specialist course.” So, that is something PACFA and we are working on.