Annual Conference 2026
The Studio, Hope Street, Glasgow
Tickets on sale from 9am Friday the 21st of August
Our Annual Conference is a 1-day in-person event
Key Note Address:Feeling our way: Eros, risk, and the limits of rationality
Our November Conference will continue our theme of Challenging the Orthodoxy, to take risks, to come alive, to move towards the expansive unknown.
We are very excited and privileged to have the wonderful and knowledgeable Helen Rowland TSTA(P) as our 2026 keynote speaker!
Helen will open the day with a challenge to the idea that psychological health is about being rational, controlled and productive, instead embracing the self as embodied, contradictory and alive.
She will explore how meaningful therapeutic work asks us to take risks, engage with desire and uncertainty, and move beyond what can be neatly resolved by the rational Adult.
Join us in this thought-provoking exploration of what it means to move beyond productivity, control, and the rational self. Together, we’ll explore vitality, embodiment, risk, and the messy, contradictory parts of ourselves that invite us to come more fully alive.
About our speaker - Helen Rowland - TSTA (P)
Helen Rowland CTA-P TSTA-P is a Transactional Analysis Psychotherapist, trainer, and supervisor, in private practice since 1996.
Her practice is grounded in embodied, relational theory. She is particularly interested in working at depth (attentive to the unconscious and the unspoken) whilst holding a social justice lens, and how these two commitments can inform and challenge each other.
She runs reading, study, and professional development groups online independently, and as part of the Fullcircle Learning Collective. She has been a coeditor of the Transactional Analysis Journal since 2018 and has published several papers and a book chapter on gender and relationship diversity, pluralism in practice, and critiques of CBT and the measurement culture in psychotherapy. She lives in the Scottish Borders.
Workshops
This year, 10 dynamic workshops bring our conference theme, Challenging the Orthodoxy: Embodied, Erotic, Equal, vividly to life. Expect bold ideas, creative and experiential learning, and fresh perspectives that invite us to question what we take for granted in TA, in practice, and in relationship.
All workshops are open to practitioners from all four fields of Transactional Analysis - Psychotherapy, Counselling, Educational and Organisational. We warmly invite you to bring your own field of practice into the room, taking the ideas, experiences and learning from each workshop and translating them into the contexts in which you work.
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This workshop invites you to explore how unspoken normative Scripts assume certain relationships are more 'important' than friendship. Drawing on queer theory and relationship anarchy within a TA framework, we will challenge that hierarchy and its inherent assumptions. Is a sexual bond more significant than a platonic one? Can a friendship be erotic? Where are the boundaries between love, desire and companionship? We will be grappling with experiences of intimacy that refuse to be neat. In doing so, we will reflect on what this means for us personally and in our work. This is an invitation to 'rewrite the rules'.
Carina Badger (she/her) is a CTA(P), UKCP psychotherapist who works in private practice in Manchester. She is doing a Professional Doctorate at the University of Chester and her current research interests include psychotherapy training, philosophy of the self, queer theory and critical psychotherapy. She tends to leave people with more questions than answers.
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This workshop invites participants to think 'outside the circles', to explore ego states beyond the constraints of received knowledge. Berne's ego state diagrams carry cultural assumptions and therefore the physicality of the diagrams shapes how we use them to understand our experience of ourselves in relation to others and the world. We explore the ego states' physicality using Freud's concept of 'Eros' — the drive for survival, creativity and connection. Bringing in concepts such as homonomy, we promote a re-examining of ego states through experiential exploration in service of equality in the context of self and the natural world.
Amy is a PTSTA (P). Having gratefully received the TA concepts and enjoyed profound change from embodying them, she is now exploring the 'what's outside?' and 'what if this was different?' of TA concepts. It's her personal journey, marrying this with her social, political and conscientious self to see what she finds.
Carolines bio to come.
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Eating disorders are often treated as uniquely difficult or specialist within psychotherapy, evoking anxiety, helplessness, and avoidance in therapists themselves. This experiential workshop explores eating disorders through a relational Transactional Analysis lens, inviting participants to reflect on the assumptions, prejudices, and countertransference responses that emerge when this work enters the therapy room. Drawing on creative reflection, metaphor, TA theory, and lived experience of anorexia and recovery, the workshop reframes eating disorders as embodied script adaptations and relational survival strategies rather than simply symptoms to eliminate, exploring what supports relational healing beyond behavioural change alone.
Vicki is a TA therapist working towards CTA. She is passionate about exploring the intersections of ecology, socio-political landscapes, co-consciousness, and disconnection/reconnection, including how these shape experience and eating distress. When not working, she can be found outside.
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This experiential and clinically focused workshop explores how Transactional Analysis practitioners can work effectively with autistic clients experiencing "Pure O" obsessive processes. Pure O may involve distressing intrusive thoughts relating to paedophilia, murder, incest, rape, or causing harm, alongside shame, catastrophic fantasy, hyper-responsibility, and relentless internal monitoring. While research into Pure O in autistic populations remains limited, clinicians increasingly recognise intrusive taboo thoughts, internal compulsions, and obsessive rumination as under-identified autistic experiences. Using a TA framework, participants will explore practical interventions that reduce shame, support integration, and adapt classical TA approaches for neurodivergent processing styles within clinical practice.
Hayley Johnson is a psychotherapist specialising in neurodivergence, trauma, shame, and identity development. Her work integrates Transactional Analysis with neurodiversity-affirming practice, with particular interest in autism, masking, obsessive internal processes, and supporting therapists to work compassionately with complex, often hidden presentations.
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Challenging the Orthodoxy: Embodied, Erotic, Equal is to examine how patriarchal power shapes the psychodynamics of gendered trauma and domestic abuse. The workshop explores how systemic norms restrict embodiment, distort erotic agency, and undermine relational equality, producing trauma marked by hypervigilance, shame, and emotional dysregulation. Introducing a new TA 'Liberation Model' for practice, it guides clinicians to recognise patriarchal dynamics in client narratives and institutional responses. Through case material, participants learn strategies that centre agency, validate lived experience, and support survivors in reclaiming autonomy in their bodies, relationships, and communities.
Jazz is a co-founder of @TAFeminist – a trauma-informed, power-aware, feminist psychotherapist, primary tutor, and clinical supervisor whose work centres liberation, social justice, and the dismantling of patriarchal harm. A Board Member of Woman's Trust, she supports survivors of domestic abuse and equity-driven practice with private clients, supervisees and in her role as a corporate psychotherapist. Jazz is based in East Sussex.
Laura is a radical feminist psychotherapist and co-founder of @TAFeminist, committed to confronting patriarchal violence through liberation-centred clinical practice. A Board Member of Women's Trust, she is a senior psychotherapist in private practice and at the Kent Sexual Assault and Abuse Service, supporting survivors resisting systemic harm.
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The goal of this workshop is to get insight into your relational patterns through salsa. The purest form of love is the freedom to give all you wish to and letting it go, and the freedom of the other to choose to receive it or not. Nowhere is that more true than in dance. Using 40 years' experience in TA and 20 years' experience as a salsa teacher, Sari will offer a space for participants to learn more about their holding – with some basic salsa steps along the way. Using the metaphor of the holding in salsa we will explore our capacities to give freedom and safety, and to balance autonomy and interdependence in relationship. How do you invite someone into relationship? When do you lead, when do you follow? Do you maintain the bridge of communication? How do you use your potency?
Dr Sari van Poelje is an international consultant, executive coach and trainer. She is Managing Director of INTACT (international training, coaching and consultancy), which offers executive coaching, management consultancy and EMCC-accredited TA training programmes for coaches, consultants, and leaders. Sari has 40 years' experience of coaching and consulting with managers and directors in multinational business settings, and previously held senior director roles at KLM, EMI Music, ASML and Shell over a 20-year period.
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What becomes possible when two people truly meet? This experiential workshop invites participants to go beyond words and enter the unspoken dimensions of the therapeutic relationship. Through embodied working, silence, gaze, symbolic play and carefully contracted, limited touch, we will consider how holding is co-created through mutual vulnerability, trust and the therapist's use of self. Together we will explore what becomes possible when when we risk being fully present in the therapeutic encounter, allowing ourselves to be genuinely open, genuinely impacted, and genuinely met.
Sally is a contractual trainee, practicing from her smallholding in rural North Wales. She has a particular interest in embodied psychotherapy and using creative play in her work. Sally especially loves being in learning spaces that invite reflection, curiosity and exploration.
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Rhythm is a fundamental part of human experience, shaping how we connect, regulate, communicate and relate. In this experiential workshop, we will explore the impact of rhythm and music on our emotional and relational lives, and how they can be used therapeutically. Structured around a series of Permissions, the workshop will weave together Transactional Analysis theory, personal and professional reflections, and creative experiential exercises. Participants will be invited to notice, experiment and reflect on their own rhythms and patterns, discovering how music and rhythm can open new possibilities for contact, spontaneity, choice and change in therapeutic practice.
Hanna Konoplianyk is a TA trainer, supervisor and psychotherapist. Originally from Ukraine and now living in the UK, she brings a multicultural perspective to her work. A keen recreational drummer, she is interested in how rhythm, music and embodied experience foster connection, regulation and therapeutic change.
Lisa has been practicing since 2013. In private practice, she works predominantly with neurodivergent people, those with depression, anxiety and C-PTSD. Lisa loves working creatively alongside talking therapy, my her interests are using music, nature and art.
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Northern Scotland has one of the highest rates of Huntington's Disease in the world. This genetic disease has a profound psychological impact, yet evidence-based psychological care remains limited for people facing genetic disease or chronic illness. This workshop is useful to all therapists who may work and want to question the current orthodoxy of working relationally with people embodied by genetic and chronic disease. It will consider aspects of love, dignity, and equality in therapeutic work to advance relational understanding of the needs of people whose lives are limited or restricted, their families, and the communities they inhabit.
Gwynneth is a counsellor/ psychotherapist and Registered Mental Health Nurse with 40 years of experience. Born at risk of Huntington's disease, she brings both personal and professional insight to disease-based trauma and the relational impact upon the individual, families and communities as well as health care.
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Every day, people walk into organisations with their whole selves, and learn very quickly which parts are welcome. Physis, Berne's most neglected concept, is the life force that drives human growth, creativity and transformation. Yet organisations across every industry systematically suppress it through script, hierarchy, conditional stroke economies and counterscript drivers that mistake compliance for contribution and performance for aliveness. The cost is visible everywhere, in silence where ideas should be, in indifference where care once lived, in people who are physically present and psychologically gone. Through the lenses of Embodied, Erotic and Equal, this workshop uses TA to diagnose what organisations are actually producing in their people, and to ask the question that orthodoxy never does: Who decided aliveness was unprofessional?
Priyanka Lenka is a Certified Transactional Analyst (CTA) with 16 years in Talent and Organisation Development. A presenter at WTAC 2025 Europe, she specialises in workforce transformation and designing future-ready talent in global organisations.