Love Addiction - a cognitive analytic approach 1.00pm-4.30pm

The concept of Love Addiction invites us to look at the relational origins and maintenance of all addictions and at the same link them to our ways of expressing and managing our needs for relationship.  CAT offers the tools to formulate the patterns and narratives of self and others that hijack our ways of relating to each other.  This workshop will show the traps, dilemmas and snags at the heart of love addiction and the process of recovering relational intelligence and narrative freedom and self agency within and between us.  The place of love addiction within other addictions will be explored and participants witll try out mapping the mixed feelings (excited misery, hopium, disorganised attachment) and binary and narcissistic ideas at the heart of love addiction. Social, gender and generational dynamics of love addiction will be explored and examples given with case illustrations and maps.  The extremes of love addiction: the yearning, the excited misery, the withdrawal and the hopium will be mapped out and reference to the range of ways of loving and connecting will be touched upon by way of comparison.  Participants should go away with a refreshed perspective on the use of CAT ideas through engagement with the powerful, exciting and distressing interpersonal and inner example of love addiction.  A post with a diagram supporting the workshop is available at www.mapandtalk.com/blog     The workshop is led by Jax Beatty and Steve Potter who are both CAT therapists and supervisors and have been using these ideas in their individual and group work.