Working with Stuckness

Working with Stuckness with Dr Anna Oldershaw

“I’m stuck!” is a common way people arrive in therapy. It can also emerge mid-therapy, when momentum slows and everything starts to feel gridlocked. At first, this kind of presentation can seem straightforward: as therapists we may move quickly to problem-solve, offer strategies, or explore practical steps to help the client move forward. The difficulty is that many people remain stuck, struggle to access the tools we offer, and make limited change despite our best efforts. Over time, this can generate friction and frustration for both client and therapist. So what then?

Date: Friday 26th & Saturday 27th June

Time: 4pm to 8pm (AEST) both days

Location: Online

Cost: $437 AUD (incl GST) or $397 AUD (incl GST) for members (please apply your member code for discount on registration)

This workshop explores what it really means for clients to feel “stuck,” how to recognise and differentiate different kinds of stuckness, and how therapist and client can connect more meaningfully with what is happening in the room and in the client’s life. We will introduce new tasks to complement existing EFT practice, developed in work with chronically stuck eating-disorder clients during the SPEAKS programme (Oldershaw et al., 2024; Oldershaw et al., 2025). The workshop aims to offer practitioners concrete tools for working with stuck presentations, inviting them to lean into the experience of stuckness, help clients understand and loosen it, and support more engaged and productive therapeutic work.

 

This training employs an interactive and lively format. Tasks are illustrated using videos, taught descriptions, and small and large group experiential practice and discussion. All tasks covered in the training have an associated workbook with detailed step-by-step instructions.

Attendees will learn:

• What it means to get stuck in therapy and why people can struggle to engage in key EFT processes, such as experiencing emotion and receiving empathy
• The range of presentations that can impact traditional EFT delivery and/or create a sense of stuckness in therapy and in life, including:
  • Chronic self-interruption, and how this differs from classic self-interruption in EFT
  • Neurodivergent processes
  • Ambivalence about therapy
• What we can practically do to reduce stuckness and support clients to engage in therapeutic EFT work, including:
  • How and when to apply existing EFT tasks
  • Using adapted and new tasks developed during the SPEAKS
  • intervention development and research programme

 

About Dr Anna Oldershaw

Dr Anna Oldershaw is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Reader in Clinical Psychology (Canterbury Christ Church University, UK). With 20 years’ experience in the field of eating disorders, her research and clinical work work has utilised lived experience insights to develop the SPEAKS therapy, an integrative EFT/Schema-informed therapy for enduring anorexia, and she co-authored the corresponding clinical guidebook ‘Transforming Emotional Pain and Rediscovering the Self in Anorexia Nervosa’ (Routledge, 2025). Her ongoing research centres on eating disorders, EFT, emotion change processes, and neurodivergence.

Anna is Director of the Emotion Focused Therapy Institute of England which is housed within her broader practice at Emotion Speaks (www.emotionspeaks.co.uk). She is an accredited EFT trainer and supervisor with the International Society for Emotion Focused Therapy (isEFT). Alongside SPEAKS and EFT training and supervision, Anna has an academic role including training future clinical psychologists for the NHS. Anna has experience and expertise across modalities; however, her passion lies in EFT, and in providing EFT training that is engaging, exciting and accessible.

 

 

The broad structure of this workshop is as follows:

WHAT GETS OR KEEPS PEOPLE STUCK?
– Attendees will:
– Explore what it means to be stuck and why people get stuck
– Consider the experience of ‘feeling stuck’ for both client and therapist, and implications for the therapeutic approach

ENGAGING WITH ‘STUCKNESS’ USING FOCUSED TASKS
– Using tasks developed for work with people with chronic eating disorders and which can be used across presentations, attendees will
be introduced to and practise the following in small groups:
– Formulating stuckness: New ways to formulate giving language and images to an individual’s ‘stuckness’
– Focusing for feeling stuck: A task to engage with a client’s ‘stuck place’ and what it means for them, guiding to associated emotion and unmet needs

ENGAGING WITH ‘STUCKNESS’ USING FOCUSED TASKS
– Once ‘stuckness’ has been recognised and understood, attendees will consider how to apply more traditional EFT techniques to help clients
move forward

MOVING ON FROM ‘STUCKNESS’
– Once ‘stuckness’ has been recognised and understood, attendees will consider how to apply more traditional EFT techniques to help clients
move forward