The Imperfect Therapist: Navigating Therapeutic Mistakes and Failures
About this Event
Workshop's Purpose
No therapist is immune from mistakes and failures. Sooner or later, even the most experienced, most ethically committed practitioner may encounter them. Despite our best intentions, clients can come away feeling misunderstood or unseen, and sometimes, the impact may go further than that.
Mistakes and failures usually find their way into supervision rooms and training courses. But there is a difference between examining what went wrong clinically and sitting with what it means for the therapist who lived it. And many of us carry something we may not even be aware of: a quiet but powerful belief that a good therapist simply does not struggle in the way we do when making mistakes.
In this one-day workshop, we will look honestly at mistakes and failures: what makes them more likely, how they affect our sense of identity and clinical confidence and how, with the right conditions, these experiences can become doorways towards greater self-awareness, more authentic presence, and a more compassionate relationship with ourselves.
Drawing on psychosynthesis as our theoretical and experiential home, we will explore how the encounter with our mistakes and failures can become part of the deeper process of Self-realisation. Not despite our inevitable human imperfection, but through it.
Who is it for?
This workshop is open to qualified and trainee counsellors, psychotherapists, practitioner psychologists, supervisors, other helping professionals and health practitioners at any stage of their career. Any therapeutic modality is welcome.
Learning Outcomes:
After attending this workshop, participants will be able to:
- Develop a clearer map of the most common clinical pitfalls and begin to recognise the situations that make mistakes more likely, before they become problematic
- Gain a deeper understanding of how professional identity and unconscious expectations influence the way we respond to errors and failure
- Acquire practical tools for managing shame, self-doubt, and self-criticism in the aftermath of a mistake
- Learn how to bring these experiences into supervision more effectively, even when shame makes it harder to speak
- Explore psychosynthesis perspectives on imperfection and therapeutic humility, and how these can support a more compassionate and realistic clinical identity
- Develop self-compassion practices applicable to everyday clinical life
- Leave with a different relationship to their own imperfection, less defensive, more curious, and better equipped to learn from experience
What to expect?
The day will combine theoretical inputs with personal reflection, experiential exercises, and small and whole-group dialogue. Participants are welcome to bring their own experiences of mistakes, or simply the fear of them, into the room, but there is no expectation to do so. This is a space where each person is free to engage at whatever depth feels right for them.
Our Approach
This workshop is grounded in psychosynthesis, a bio-psycho-social-spiritual framework developed by the Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli in the early twentieth century. By holding the full complexity of human experience, psychosynthesis offers a uniquely rich lens for exploring mistakes and failures in clinical practice.
From this perspective, errors and failures are not simply things that went wrong. When approached with honesty and compassion, they can become catalysts for deeper self-awareness and facilitators of the process of Self-realisation, an invitation to become more fully ourselves, as human beings and as practitioners.
Ticket Price
At the Trust we appreciate that each person has their own unique situation, so we invite you to select the price point that feels like it represents a fair contribution for attending this event.
There are three options to choose from when purchasing tickets: £75; 100; £150. If you have any concerns around affordability, please email [email protected].
If you book a ticket and cannot attend, you can claim a refund up to seven days before the event. Eventbrite fees are non-refundable.
About Paolo Assandri
Paolo Assandri is an HCPC registered Counselling Psychologist, a UKCP accredited Psychosynthesis Psychotherapist, and a trainer at the Psychosynthesis Trust in London. With over twenty years of clinical experience, he works in private practice in London.
His interest in this area is not purely academic. In 2014, a clinical experience he lived as a profound therapeutic failure prompted him to ask questions he could not leave unanswered, questions that led, eventually, to his Masters research, The Imperfect Psychosynthesis Psychotherapist, and to this workshop.
Paolo does not come to this work as an expert delivering answers. He comes as someone who has sat with these questions himself and who believes that what practitioners need, more than instruction, is a space where mistakes, failures, and even the fear of them can be met with honesty, compassion, and loving presence. A space where what feels like failure might begin to reveal itself as something more.
For further information on Paolo, you can visit his website: .
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 75.00 to GBP 150.00
