How do we work with existential anxiety, grief and despair; our own and that of those with whom we work in an age of multiple threats?

SATURDAY 14TH NOVEMBER 2026
10am  – 2.15pm

In person: NCVO, Regent’s Wharf, 8, All Saints Street, London N1 9RL
Or online via Zoom

Members please email administrator@fip.org.uk to book your place.

Non Members:
In person (with lunch) £35
Online: £25
Click here to book tickets

We will be glad to welcome you at our forthcoming event.

We will be sharing our experiences to consider how the threat to hope and real threats to life and wellbeing affect our patients, ourselves and how we practise, alongside how psychoanalytic reflection, relationship and connection can help us.

How do we work with hopelessness in our patients when it may be mirroring our own? Within the last 10 years we have been subject to a succession of shocks and upheavals: Brexit, a global pandemic, wars in Ukraine, Gaza and now Iran and the Gulf which remain unresolved, as well as ongoing conflict in other parts of the world.

These identifiable and interconnected threats sit against a background of the changing climate, growth in artificial intelligence, cost of living challenges and growing wealth disparity, a rise of nationalism and associated loss of safety for many of us. We are so inescapably connected to the suffering of others, to death in unimaginable numbers, and the destruction of peoples’ homes and the environment that we can become numb.

When we are overwhelmed by fear, sadness and a sense of helplessness, we can become angry and even violent, but we might also deny, repress, avoid and distract ourselves in order to function.

In the midst of our individual challenges, we might normally take some small comfort from saying to ourselves, “never mind, this will pass and things will get better again in time.” Are we struggling to find this small comfort personally at the moment, as well as to hold it in the therapeutic space? How do we maintain our capacity to reassure, to think and to symbolise with and for those we work with if our anxieties are shared?

To be active in thinking about the meaning of what is happening and how it affects us in therapeutic conversations, connecting with each other can help us to acknowledge and process the otherwise unthinkable, and to help those with whom we work sit with their feelings, even when mourning loss. 

The Forum for Independent Psychotherapists invites you to take part in the conversation in Thinking Groups followed by a large group plenary after lunch as we reflect on the therapeutic relationship, human kinship and the need to connect with others in an age of existential challenge and polycrisis.

Further information including pre-reading on polycrisis will be sent once bookings are confirmed prior to the event.

Introducing the discussions:

Sarah Fahy, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist (Forum for Independent Psychotherapists and CPJA)

Ishtla Singh, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist (Cambridge Society for Psychotherapy and CPJA)