Events

‘Disruption, Play and Protest: Systemic Exploration with the Clown’

With Robyn Hambrook

This immersive training series invites practitioners into a playful, reflective, and deeply relational space where systemic ideas come alive in dialogue. Led by Professor Hannah Sherbersky, each session explores the patterns that shape our work and homelives — the spoken and unspoken, the visible and the subtle — and offers opportunities to experiment, collaborate, and co-create new possibilities. At a time of climate crises and polarised thinking, and whether you’re a therapist, supervisor, system-oriented practitioner, or just a curious deep thinker, this series offers a rich blend of theory, experiential learning, and creative dialogue. Together with professionals working across a range of arts, health and science contexts, we trace spirals of meaning, notice constellations of connection, and cultivate the capacity to work with complexity in ways that are grounded and ethical. In this next special Emergent Patterns in Practice session, Professor Hannah Sherbersky is joined by Robyn Hambrook for an evening of systemic curiosity about how patterns of connection, disruption, and meaning emerge across play, activism, and public life. Drawing on systemic ideas and the creative provocations of clowning, the workshop explores how humour, transgression, and not-knowing can surface hidden dynamics, challenge power, and open new relational possibilities. Clowns, as tricksters, expose what is often left unsaid – offering a lens for working with uncertainty, difference, and tension in ways that are both ethical and generative.

Participants will engage in dialogue and creative inquiry to consider how we work with complex relational systems – whether in therapy, communities, or moments of social change -foregrounding responsiveness over certainty, and collaboration over fixed outcomes. Clowns have always been society’s tricksters – a subversive force, exposing truths, mocking power, healing and critiquing through disruption, transgression and play. For the past eight years Robyn Hambrook has been researching at the intersection of clowning, activism and the politics of public space. Her work examines the clown through the lens of non-violent direct action; dissecting how the tools and tactics the activist clown can bring to the front line of protest and their power to bring about real and lasting change. 

Bio: Robyn is a Bristol-based director, teacher and performer. With over 20 years’ experience she is passionate practitioner of clowning, physical theatre, circus and street arts. For the past seven years she has been exploring the meeting point of clowning, politics and a deep desire to address the injustices in the world. This specialism has developed through her master’s Research, on the streets and in protests with the Bristol Rebel Clowns and in research residencies with the Nomadic Rebel Clown Academy.

Keen to explore the intersection of clowning and politics, Robyn is driven to create collaborative, research spaces, testing and pushing the limits of the artform to create new knowledge and methodologies for her industry and strengthen partnerships for future work. Some of her most recent collaborations and teaching projects have included the Nomadic Rebel Clown Academy (5-day Activist Clown Training), The Laboratory of the Un-beautiful (Feminist Grotesque Bouffon Training for Womxn Theatre Makers) and the Clown Congress (annual gathering of clowns, activists & academics collectively exploring what it means to be a clown in this current era). Robyn has most recently founded the Bristol Clown School, creating a home for clowning in the Southwest of England.

WEBSITES

www.robynhambrook.com

www.bristolclownschool.co.uk

INSTA

@robynonfire

@bristolclownschool

LINKEDIN

Robyn Hambrook

Bio: Professor Hannah Sherbersky is a Family and Systemic Psychotherapist and Associate Professor at the University of Exeter. She is the former CEO of the Association for Family and Systemic Psychotherapy (UK) (2022–2025) and brings over 30 years of national experience across mental health services as a clinician, academic, and trainer.

At the University of Exeter, Hannah is Deputy Director of the clinical training department CEDAR, Psychology, and Director of the Systemic Portfolio. She is dedicated to expanding access to systemic ideas through innovative formats and continues to practice clinically as a psychotherapist and supervisor. Her work also includes contributions to a BBC documentary, an online couple therapy app, and various podcasts. She presents internationally and has published widely on various systemic ideas. 

What you’ll gain from these sessions:

• A deepened understanding of systemic theory and relational frameworks
• Practical tools for working with complexity and uncertainty
• Enhanced confidence in co-creating change through dialogue and experimentation
• Creative integration of systemic ideas into your practice
• A community of practice with likeminded and transdisciplinary colleagues

Who can attend:

• Curious thinkers
• Relationship therapists
• Clowns and theatre practitioners
• Family and Systemic psychotherapists
• Mental health practitioners
• Supervisors and trainers
• Other professionals seeking relational depth

Practical details:

• Date & Location: Online – 14^th July 2026 – 6.30 – 8pm GMT.
• Cost & Registration: From £27.80

Contact and ticket: Eventbrite – see link.

‘Tracing the shifting patterns of intimacy, connection and estrangement’

With Annalisa Barbieri

This immersive training series invites practitioners into a playful, reflective, and deeply relational space where systemic ideas come alive in dialogue. Led by Professor Hannah Sherbersky, each session explores the patterns that shape our work and homelives — the spoken and unspoken, the visible and the subtle — and offers opportunities to experiment, collaborate, and co-create new possibilities. At a time of climate crises and polarised thinking, and whether you’re a therapist, supervisor, system-oriented practitioner, or just a curious deep thinker, this series offers a rich blend of theory, experiential learning, and creative dialogue. Together with professionals working across a range of arts, health and science contexts, we trace spirals of meaning, notice constellations of connection, and cultivate the capacity to work with complexity in ways that are grounded and ethical.

In this next special Emergent Patterns in Practice session, Professor Hannah Sherbersky is joined by Annalisa Barbieri, long-standing advice columnist and journalist, and host of Conversations with Annalisa Barbieri, for an evening of systemic curiosity about the relational dilemmas of our time. Advice columns are a unique social archive: thousands of private struggles, offered to a public space, revealing what people hope for, fear, endure and repeat. Together we’ll ask: How have relationship problems shifted over the years? Which themes remain stubbornly familiar, and which feel newly shaped by contemporary life? We’ll pay particular attention to digital intimacy – the ways phones, apps, messaging and online visibility can intensify longing, jealousy, misunderstanding, rupture, or repair, and to emerging patterns such as estrangement, where cutting off contact can seem like the only route to safety or sanity, yet rarely ends the story cleanly.  The format is a lively conversation (part interview, part shared inquiry) with time for Q&A, followed by a practice-based discussion where participants will map dilemmas as interactional patterns – including the often-unseen digital and cultural forces that shape them- and experiment with systemic questions that invite alternative meanings and next steps. Come to think, listen, and notice what’s emerging – in relationships, in culture, and in us. 

Bio: Annalisa Barbieri is a journalist, writer, and long‑standing advice columnist for The Guardian, where she writes the much‑loved Ask Annalisa column. She is also the host of the podcast Conversations with Annalisa Barbieri, in which she speaks with clinicians, thinkers and writers about the psychology of everyday life and relationships. 

Over many years of responding to readers’ dilemmas, Annalisa has developed a rare vantage point on how intimacy, family life and personal struggle are shaped by culture, power, and social change. Her work is known for its warmth, psychological depth, and unwavering commitment to compassion, complexity, and honesty. 

Bio: Professor Hannah Sherbersky is a Family and Systemic Psychotherapist and Associate Professor at the University of Exeter. She is the former CEO of the Association for Family and Systemic Psychotherapy (UK) (2022–2025) and brings over 30 years of national experience across mental health services as a clinician, academic, and trainer. At the University of Exeter, Hannah is Deputy Director of the clinical training department CEDAR, Psychology, and Director of the Systemic Portfolio. She is dedicated to expanding access to systemic ideas through innovative formats and continues to practice clinically as a psychotherapist and supervisor. Her work also includes contributions to a BBC documentary, an online couple therapy app, and various podcasts. She presents internationally and has published widely on various systemic ideas. Her latest training initiative is an Eco-Systemic Psychotherapy programme at the University.

What you’ll gain from these sessions:

• A deepened understanding of systemic theory and relational frameworks
• Practical tools for working with complexity and uncertainty
• Enhanced confidence in co-creating change through dialogue and experimentation
• Creative integration of systemic ideas into your practice
• A community of practice with likeminded and transdisciplinary colleagues

Who can attend:

• Curious thinkers
• Relationship therapists
• Family and Systemic psychotherapists
• Mental health practitioners
• Supervisors and trainers
• Other professionals seeking relational depth
•  

Practical details:

• Date & Location: Online – 16^th June 2026 – 6.30 – 8pm GMT.
• Cost & Registration: From £27.80

‘Systemic Oppression – From Hating to Hoping and the Internalised Other’

Dr Dwight Turner

This immersive training series invites practitioners into a playful, reflective, and deeply relational space where systemic ideas come alive in dialogue. Led by Professor Hannah Sherbersky, each session explores the patterns that shape our work and homelives — the spoken and unspoken, the visible and the subtle — and offers opportunities to experiment, collaborate, and co-create new possibilities. At a time of climate crises and polarised thinking, and whether you’re a therapist, supervisor, system-oriented practitioner, or just a curious deep thinker, this series offers a rich blend of theory, experiential learning, and creative dialogue. Together with professionals working across a range of arts, health and science contexts, we trace spirals of meaning, notice constellations of connection, and cultivate the capacity to work with complexity in ways that are grounded and ethical.

In this next workshop, Hannah will be in conversation with Dr Dwight Turner about systemic oppression and finding hope in troubled times. The politicisation of transphobia, the hatred embedded within the Manosphere, war in the Middle East, and the global Climate Crisis.  There is so much for us to be afraid of in the current cultural climate.  It can feel that this is a very bleak time.  Clients feel fear and anxiety, there is an undoubted rise in mental health conditions linked with these wider societal issues, and for many of us in the helping professions, it can often feel like so much of what we are doing is fruitless. 

Yet, there will always be shoots of hope.  This session, which will be part presentation, part discussion between Hannah and Dwight, and part a wider exploration of just how we might approach these themes, will involve all of us using the skills that we have as practitioners, or just as fellow human beings, to return to our world that which it most importantly needs, hope.

Bio: Dr Dwight Turner is Course Leader on the Humanistic Psychotherapy Course at the University of Brighton, and a psychotherapist and supervisor in private practice.  Dr Turner is the author of Decolonising Counselling and Psychotherapy: Depoliticised pathways towards intersectional practice (2025), The Psychology of Supremacy (2023), and Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy (2021).  All are published by Routledge. 

An Intersectional Psychotherapist, Dr Turner is an experienced conference speaker.  He can be contacted via his website www.dwightturnercounselling.co.uk or on social media on LinkedIn, Threads, or on BlueSky at @dturner300.

Bio: Professor Hannah Sherbersky is a Family and Systemic Psychotherapist and Associate Professor at the University of Exeter. She is the former CEO of the Association for Family and Systemic Psychotherapy (UK) (2022–2025) and brings over 30 years of national experience across mental health services as a clinician, academic, and trainer.

At the University of Exeter, Hannah is Deputy Director of the clinical training department CEDAR, Psychology, and Director of the Systemic Portfolio. She is dedicated to expanding access to systemic ideas through innovative formats and continues to practice clinically as a psychotherapist and supervisor. Her work also includes contributions to a BBC documentary, an online couple therapy app, and various podcasts. She presents internationally and has published widely on various systemic ideas. Her latest training initiative is an Eco-Systemic Psychotherapy programme developed in collaboration with Roger Duncan at the University.

  What you’ll gain from these sessions:

• A deepened understanding of systemic theory and relational frameworks
• Practical tools for working with complexity and uncertainty
• Enhanced confidence in co-creating change through dialogue and experimentation
• Creative integration of systemic ideas into your practice
• A community of practice with likeminded and transdisciplinary colleagues

Who can attend:

• Curious thinkers
• Relationship therapists
• Family and Systemic psychotherapists
• Mental health practitioners
• Supervisors and trainers
• Other professionals seeking relational depth
•  

Practical details:

• Date & Location: Online – 12^th May 2026 – 6.30 – 8pm GMT.
• Cost & Registration: From £27.80

This immersive training series invites practitioners into a playful, reflective, and deeply relational space where systemic ideas come alive in dialogue. Led by Professor Hannah Sherbersky, each session explores the patterns that shape our work and homelives — the spoken and unspoken, the visible and the subtle — and offers opportunities to experiment, collaborate, and co-create new possibilities. At a time of climate crises and polarized thinking, and whether you’re a therapist, supervisor, system-oriented practitioner, or just a curious deep thinker, this series offers a rich blend of theory, experiential learning, and creative dialogue. Together with professionals working across a range of arts, health and science contexts, and drawing on the work of Nora Bateson, Dave Snowdon and others, we trace spirals of meaning, notice constellations of connection, and cultivate the capacity to work with complexity in ways that are grounded and ethical.

Collaborators include national and international family and systemic psychotherapists, as well as psychologists and therapists from other disciplines such as dramatherapy, psychoanalytic psychotherapy and play therapy. They also include colleagues working in specialist areas such as gender and sexual diversity, perinatal care, spirituality, mindfulness, foster care, decolonising literature and folklore, participation and co-production, couple therapy, ecology, intercultural work, community-focussed research around food systems, activism and social justice, as well as radical approaches to mental health research, and the intersections of clowning and politics. They include those working in a wider systemic community; those in business, community development, local politics, post-colonial literature and poetry and even a colleague from the Nomadic Rebel Clown Academy! Our shared endeavour is to explore the emergent patterns of communication and interaction within our communities, and to invite deep thinking and listening to the systemic stories we share.

First series of collaborators (and there will be more!): Dr Lorna Hobbs, Maimunah Mosli Baffour Ababio, Professor Claire Pettinger, Dr Reenee Singh, Martin Gill, Fajar Saban, Robyn Hambrook, Mark Rivett, Di Gammage, Kate Groucutt, Olivia Doherty, Roderick Peake, Jo Hogan, Professor Emily Zobel Marshall, Dr Julia Wahl. More details about the collaborator profiles to follow.

What you’ll gain:

• A deepened understanding of systemic theory and relational frameworks
• Practical tools for working with complexity and uncertainty
• Enhanced confidence in co-creating change through dialogue and experimentation
• Creative integration of systemic ideas into your practice

Who can attend:

• Curious thinkers
• Relationship therapists
• Family and Systemic psychotherapists
• Mental health practitioners
• Supervisors and trainers
• Other professionals seeking relational depth

Practical details:

• Dates & Location: Online. The second Tuesday of every month – starting 14^th April 2026. Moving towards fortnightly in due course.
• Cost & Registration: From £27.80
• Contact and ticket: Eventbrite – see link.

In the first workshop, Hannah will set the scene, provide some basic understanding of systems thinking, and start to explore how we can shift paradigms. This opening session invites us to step into the spiral together — to arrive, to orient, and to begin noticing the patterns that shape our work. We will explore the foundations of systemic theory and family therapy practice, not as abstract ideas, but as living, breathing ways of seeing and relating.

During the session together, we will trace the roots of systemic thinking: how families organise themselves, how patterns emerge and repeat, and how meaning is co-created in relationships. We will consider the shift from linear explanations to circular ones, from “what is wrong?” to “what is happening between us?”, and from individual stories to relational ones.

This session offers a grounding introduction for those new to systemic practice, a reflective re-entry point for those returning to these ideas with fresh eyes and an opportunity to start cultivating our new community of practice. Each of the following sessions will stand alone but will also be an opportunity to start growing our community. Following this first workshop in April, other collaborators will join Hannah on a journey together and dates and further information will follow. Certificates of attendance are available on request.

Women at the forefront of nature based therapy and wellbeing businesses – Panel discussion

Looking forward joining this special panel event on 8th March 2026 with Nature and Therapy UK, celebrating International Women’s Day.

🌿 Stefan Batorijs, the Founder and Director of Nature and Therapy UK will host the five of us in discussion about Nature-Based Therapy and Wellbeing Businesses in the UK.

🌳 This is an event to celebrate the work women are doing in Nature, with Nature and supported by Nature, set to inspire all those in their own Nature-based work and to invite an ever deepening connection…

🌱 I will be joining Amanda Bailey: Founder of Let’s Step in, Honey Wylde: Founder of Honey & Wylde, Ciaran Ivanovic: Founder of Mindful Kids, and Dot Moorhouse: Emotional Breakthrough Coach.

🌻 Join us in our discussion and celebration! Details and link below:

It’s my pleasure to be presenting at the College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists’ winter conference in December.

The conference will be looking at the rich history of Relationship Therapy and how it continually adapts to meet changing needs.

The event

Come join a thriving community of outdoor therapy professionals where we will explore, share, develop, and deepen perspectives across diverse practices of outdoor, nature and adventure-based therapies.

The national conference of the Association for Outdoor Therapy will explore perspectives in the development and application of integrated outdoor therapy practices, that will help to examine different professional landscapes influencing the developments of ethical outdoor therapy practices and the building of a professional outdoor therapy community in the UK.

With a diverse range of presentation topics across a wide range of outdoor workshops in nature, indoor presentations, and main speaker session topics, this is an exciting opportunity to engage, network, reflect and learn with like-minded professionals, in developing understanding and sharing practice, and contributing to the shaping of future developments of outdoor therapy in the UK.

My presentation at the event

I’m delighted to be speaking at this event, where I will invite delegates to widen the lens beyond the individual client to consider the complex systems we are all part of; families, communities, cultures and ecologies. I will provide an overview of systemic ideas and practices, inviting an exploration of how relational patterns, intergenerational dynamics, and broader social contexts shape the therapeutic process.

At a time of profound ecological crisis, systemic thinking becomes not just a therapeutic tool but a vital orientation—one that helps us understand the interdependence between personal wellbeing and planetary health. My presentation will consider how our work can respond to ecological grief, climate anxiety, and the urgent need for reconnection with the more-than-human world. Through reflective dialogue, I will explore how systemic thinking can enrich our understanding, enhance our therapeutic presence, and support more holistic, inclusive approaches to wellbeing, as part of ongoing developments across outdoor therapy.

Multi-family group treatment is a growing evidence-based intervention which is used as an adjunct to single family therapy. The format draws on the experience of a number of families and increases motivation, commitment and a sense of sharing between them. This collective experience is balanced by the presence of staff members who guide families during a range of exercises and most crucially during lunch and snack times. The intensive days are spent in a range of ‘sub-groups’ including young people, siblings, and parents on their own.

Multi-family groups have been adapted for a range of presentations including adult mental health issues, ADHD, and paediatric illnesses.

This experiential training seeks to orientate clinicians into the full workings of a group. A number of the key exercises used in each group will be practiced and each participant will take up a role in a created family. The training will be suitable and beneficial for any clinician working with a diagnosis of eating disorder, whether in CAMHS or adult services. Significant systemic facilitation techniques will be demonstrated and later deconstructed. The Maudsley Manual for MFGT will be followed and adapted.

This training will be delivered by myself and Louise Cooper.