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PURCHASING RECORDINGS SHAME SERIES 1
TO PURCHASE THE RECORDINGS OF EXPLORING SHAME SERIES 1 AND OTHER RECORDINGS BY JULIET AND WILLIAM CLICK HERE https://jandw.thinkific.com/ Purchase the recording of the complete first series of the EXPLORING SHAME SERIES 1 at a discounted rate of £10 (usual price £15) each, or the whole series for £50 (usual price £70). NB prices will go up sometime soon.
PRE-PURCHASING THE RECORDINGS OF EXPLORING SHAME SERIES 2 FOR £50 FOR 6 RECORDINGS CLICK HERE
DATES AND TITLES OF SHAME SERIES 2 FOR ONLINE EVENTS
Click here to purchase tickets (search for date to find the talk(s) you want to attend.
- The Nuts and Bolts of Shame October 4th6-8pm
- Breaking the Cycle: Treating Shame Monday November 15th6-8pm
- The Subtle Poison Of Shame Monday December 13th6-8pm
- Growing Up with Shame: Children of Shame. Monday January 10th2022 6-8pm
- Shame, Sex and The Body Monday 7thFebruary 6-8pm
- Shame: Trauma, Dysfunction and Abuse Monday 7thMarch 6-8pm
OTHER WORKSHOPS WITH WILLIAM, JULIET AND THE TEAM
COMING UP SOON:
Juliet has two spaces left on this DEEP DIVE RESIDENTIAL WORKSHOPS using Pesso Boyden System of Psychotherapy
21st Residential: 7 – 11 March 2022 click here
ONE DAY WORKSHOP ON SHAME: March 5 Working With Shame with Sue Parker Hall Online Live (NB very early booking discount runs out on 12th January) Click here for info
JULIET GRAYSON ANSWERING QUESTIONS ON SEX! FOR ONLINE EVENTS 2 hour talk on May 16th at 6pm. Watch out for details which will go onto my calendar page soon www.therapyandcounselling.co.uk (or sign up here to be sent info about this and other workshops).
JULIET AND WILLIAM WILL BE RUNNING A WORKSHOP TOGETHER – A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH. It will be 8 modules, starting Saturday 18th June 2022, and will run on alternate Saturdays (with a month’s break in August). If you’d like to be kept posted when the info is out sign up here https://forms.gle/4iXT7J7JtEa3ZBsD6
OTHER WORKSHOPS click here for dates and info, such as
- Anger Rage and Relationship with Sue Parker Hall
- Working With Shame with Sue Parker Hall
- Boys – For Therapists Working With Clients Who Have Troublesome Boys Age 2-12 with Lucinda Neall
- Teens – Understanding Teenagers and How to Support Them Through Adolescence with Lucinda Neall
- Lives of Quiet Desperation: Therapy for Men with Simon Roe and Lee Stagles
- Go Tell It On The Mountain: Storytelling for Healing and Change: Michael Harvey
- Attachment Informed Couple Therapy with Nicola Jones
- Working With Couples – 6 modules that can be taken individually, or do all and get a Certficate in Couples Therapy with Nicola Jones or Julie Newberry
- Pesso Boyden Personal Development Workshops with Juliet Grayson
PURCHASING BOOKS BY WILLIAM AYOT AND JULIET GRAYSON: SPECIAL OFFER
POEMS SHAME SERIES 2 MODULE 5
Shame, Sex and Body: February 2022
The Blessing and The Curse
You ask about shame — not sure of what it is —
Oh, the definitions are clear enough. You’ve read
Your Bradshaw, your Brown, your Kaufman.
You’ve watched the videos, listened to podcasts
And you’ve come to a sense of shame’s ubiquity
But the fact that you ask means one of two things:
Either you’ve flown free of shame’s toxicity,
Or, like a goldfish orbiting its bowl,
You’re unaware that shame is what you swim in —
the very water that supports and surrounds you.
To know its depth, you need to know your body,
To let yourself detach — to allow descent —
To tumble like a leaf or a clod of earth,
Already knowing the sickening certainty,
The all-awaiting thud of perpetual falling.
To feel shame’s fullness, you need to fill your nostrils
With the foul and acrid stench of yourself,
To feel your gorge rise at your own proximity —
To be disgusted, to loathe your very presence,
To shun the part of you that needs loving the most.
To understand the binding hate of shame
Is to glimpse your nakedness and be struck dumb,
To stand before a mirror and be appalled,
To see your one, blessed body as a lie
and turn away, shuddering, as from a crime.
To know the enormity of shame
Is to look at a razor blade as if it were a friend
Or to see your only child as an enemy,
A target, and worthy in their worthlessness,
Of carrying your curse down another generation.
You ask about shame — better not to know
Or knowing to at least have a way of forgetting.
There’s the rub — we tend to run away —
Who would not, given half a choice —
Shame or love, tranquillity or madness,
The grail of compassion, or the poisoned cup.
William Ayot
Mathern, February 2022
Unpublished. Please do not share on the web
Across a Crowded Room
Who’s that? What an extraordinary face.
And look at those eyes, amazing eyes.
Kind of — familiar. She’s looking over here.
You could get lost in those eyes.
I wonder if we’ve met before?
It’s as if we know each other already.
Maybe we were lovers in another life,
long ago, like Antony and Cleopatra.
Yes, we’re probably an ongoing item.
We came together: we were torn apart.
We loved, we lost, we betrayed each other,
compelled by an all-consuming passion.
And now we’ve spotted each other again.
Venus and Mars will collide right here.
There’ll be sparks, desire, a couple of children,
separations and tearful reconciliations.
Finally one of us is going to call it a day.
They’re going to croak and desert the other one.
I don’t know why we bother, really.
Here she comes… What are you looking at?
© William Ayot
From “The Inheritance”
Published by P S Avalon, 2011
A Silence
My father is nursing a glass of India Pale Ale
while my mother is wiping down the bar,
hanging damp tea-towels over the pumps.
I’m sitting in the inglenook, feet against the fire,
gripping a book entitled “Disasters For Boys”,
and wishing I hadn’t come in for lunch.
Something has been said, some wounding truth,
about money or love or the lack of both..
My father has taken it on the chin, he’s reeling,
while my mother has a frozen look about her,
a blend of defiance and appalled realization.
She’s gazing down at her work-scarred hands
as if they were holding a smoking revolver.
My dad looks down at the rich, chestnut beer,
hoping for a kindness or a sudden inspiration.
I look down too, because that’s what we do
in our diffident, demoralised, defeated clan.
There’s a faint scent of beeswax on my fingers
and the musty library smell of the book.
The logs stop their spitting and, outside the window,
the sparrows give up their incessant bickering.
My mother stays scared. My father stays empty
and I am learning to stay invisible. In the silence
our sad, exhausted family, is scattered to the winds.
© William Ayot
Published in ‘Small Things “That Matter”
FIVE STAR CONSCIOUS RELATING: Module 5
from Juliet Grayson’s book Landscapes of the Heart: The Working World of a Sex and Relationship Therapist
www.landscapesoftheheart.co.uk
SEXUAL SURROGACY: Module 5
“Sexual healing in the Israeli military” From BBC Radio 4 programme Crossing Continents
To listen go to https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v2wh
Soldiers returning from the line of duty with injuries affecting sexual performance are universal to all militaries around the world, but Israeli psychologist Dr Ronit Aloni set about making hers the only nation that offers a unique therapeutic approach to restoring the sexuality of their troops as a matter of course: surrogate partner therapy (SPT), or sexual surrogacy. After studying the niche treatment in the US in the early nineties, Dr Aloni conducted studies, lobbied the government and met with religious leaders in order to make this therapy, considered fringe and often taboo in other nations, available to those who need it via Ministry of Defense funding. But why is Israel alone in this? The therapy is best described as traditional psychotherapy combined with intimate sexual therapy with a surrogate lover, in every form that can mean, and it was Dr Aloni’s dogged belief in its life-changing benefits for her clients that caused her to pursue provision for the troops. For Crossing Continents, Yolande Knell tells the story of that policy through Dr Aloni’s work and her Tel Aviv clinic, the work of surrogate partner Seraphina, and two military veterans who have accessed the service: one of the first to be offered it on the MoD’s time in the late nineties, and one a conscripted young man paralysed by his injuries who after years of begging for death, says the therapy “restored his humanity”.
Produced by Philip Marzouk.
Editor, Bridget Harney