Cupid and Psyche An Embodied Therapeutic Exploration of Love Styles & Adult Attachment Styles

Name: Cupid and Psyche An Embodied Therapeutic Exploration of Love Styles & Adult Attachment Styles
Start: 2025-05-14T08:30:00+02:00
End: 2025-05-14T13:45:00+02:00
Location: Pembroke (Malta)

Schedule

Wed May 14 2025 at 08:30 am to 01:45 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Pembroke (Malta) | Saint Julians, MA

A Training Workshop for Multi-Disciplinary Practitioners
With Dr Elaine Grech (Ph.D.)
Warranted Gestalt and Systemic Psychotherapist,
Accredited Supervisor and Warranted Teacher
Date: Wednesday 14th May 2025
Time: 8.30 am to 1.45 pm (5 CPD hours)
Location: Pembroke (Limited Number)
Price: 100 € (includes tea breaks)
Early Bird: 90€ if you pay by the 14th March 2025
• Do you work with individuals or couples who struggle to come to terms with “love”?
• Do you feel called to explore love and attachment more deeply in a therapeutic way?
• Would you like to practice multi-sensory, embodied therapeutic interventions when working with people struggling in their love relationships?
“The heart knows a thousand ways to speak”. Rumi
This experiential workshop aims to support multidisciplinary practitioners in gaining a deeper understanding of love styles (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1987), attachment styles (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991), and practising how to apply these ideas through reflexive and embodied therapeutic clinical interventions with individuals or couples struggling with “love.” I will be sharing and exploring these models with the participants, including:
1. the Love Attitude Scale (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1987)
2. the Relationship Questionnaire (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991)
3. and the Family Attachment Interview (Hill, Fonagy & Sargent, 2003).
Aimed for: The professionals include psychotherapists, family therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, guidance teachers, teachers, creative arts therapists, social workers, child and youth care workers, support workers, and others.
Research findings have established links between insecure attachment patterns and a wide range of dysfunction. In situations of distress, danger, or acute stress, therapeutic professionals can rapidly become temporary attachment figures. Therapeutic relationships can provide a missed "secure base," supporting us in exploring other relationships in our lives (Byng Hall, 1995). In this training, we will have the opportunity to reflect on our lenses, how we understand love and our evolving attachment predisposition and how this informs how we work with people with similar or different attachment inclinations. We aim to develop our role as a temporary secure base so that through our therapeutic relationship, the explorers can develop their secure-base relationships in their own lives.
Actual clinical vignettes (which you are also encouraged to bring forward) can help us explore and practice embodied, multi-sensory ways of supporting the people we work with. Through embodied therapeutic interventions, I aim to bring to life with you the theories of love styles (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1987) and adult attachment styles (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991) in the context of our work with individuals and couples. I have incorporated the adult attachment styles model again in my master’s thesis in systemic couple and family therapy, which focused on substance abuse in couple relationships, “Relationship Patterns in Couples Addressing Substance Misuse Issues” (Grech, 2003). This time, I included a semi-structured face-to-face interview incorporating the Family Attachment Interview (Hill, Fonagy & Sargent, 2003). Byng Hall’s ideas on scripts will also be incorporated into this workshop. I will share these, and other embodied therapeutic tools I developed over the years to delve deeper into understanding couple relationships from the attachment lens.
These ideas on love and attachment never ceased to inspire me over the years, and I look forward to creating a secure base for training together!
Self-Reflection:
When did my interest in understanding “love” start? Oh! Looking back, I feel it has grown up with me at each stage of my life; picture 3-year-old me mesmerized by couples holding hands and hugging on movies, to adolescent university student me who, in her desperate enthusiasm to make sense of this fascinating mystery called love, even chose love as the topic of her first dissertation. The name of the study was Cupid and Psyche Gender Differences in Love Among Maltese University Students as conceptualised by the Love Styles and Adult Attachment Styles Models (Aquilina, May 1988).
Almost thirty years later, here I am, honoured and grateful to have experienced abundant stories of love and attachment inspired by my personal and professional life experiences. I am incredibly thankful to all the “explorers” who have entrusted me with their love stories. If you get to read this, you know that you have inspired me to keep searching and growing. If you are considering joining me, perhaps we share this passion for love and attachment, and perhaps you are feeling called to revisit this “crazy little thing called love”, this time embodying it more deeply.

Booking and Payment Procedure:
1. Booking through the website: https://www.drelainegrechpsychotherapist.com/upcoming-events
and click Register Now on the event of your choice. If the website allows you to book, it means there are availabilities. If the workshop is full, there will be a notification which offers the option of a waiting list.
2. How to secure your payment:
• Payment must occur within 24 hours; otherwise, your registration will not be secured.
• Write your name and the workshop's title when processing the payment so that payment can be identified.
• Please email payment confirmation to [email protected] so that I can confirm your booking: Name and Surname, Workshop Title and Date, Method of Payment chosen, and email address for correspondence regarding the workshop.
3. Participants will receive a receipt of payment via the email provided within the following week and, after completing the workshop. within a week, a certificate of attendance with the number of CPD hours completed. The certificate will reflect the completed hours, so please ensure you are present for the whole workshop.
4. Please note that it is on a first-come, first-served basis, and your booking can only be confirmed after payment and registration.
5. The payment is non-refundable except in the rare event that the facilitator cancels the workshop. The payment for the workshop is NOT transferable to someone else. If the person who has booked and paid cannot attend, they cannot transfer their booking to someone else.
6. Bookings need to be made individually; if an organisation wants to sponsor employees' attendance, prospective workshop participants are still requested to book and pay individually. They will be given a receipt of payment in their name, and they can choose to present it to the organisation.
7. Around a week before the workshop, you will receive an email with the location and some ideas for preparing for the training.
Payment Options:
Full Fee 100€
Early bird fee: 90€ if you pay by the 14th March 2025
Payment Options:
Payment on Revolut
or Mobile Banking: 00356 99447307
Paypal [email protected] (If using PayPal, please add 5 euros to the amount to cover the PayPal Fee).
Online Bank Transfer
SWIFT Code: VALLMTMT IBAN: MT60VALL22013000000040013125068
I wish you well, and thank you for your service to the community!
Looking forward to our shared space.
Many blessings
Dr Elaine Grech