Pouring from an Empty Cup: Exploring the challenges when reflective capacity is impaired in early relationships.

Pouring from an Empty Cup: Exploring the challenges when reflective capacity is impaired in early relationships.

Thursday 24th March, 10am-12.30pm, online via Zoom
Working with babies, young children and parents is particularly challenging when the parent’s capacity to care is impaired and the baby and/or small child’s basic emotional needs are not being met. Join our webinar to hear from Dr. Amanda Jones and Catherine Maguire on the challenges working with families when caregiving capacity is impaired, how to intervene and how reflective practice leads to better understanding of oneself in the work.

Guest Speakers

Dr. Amanda Jones is strategic and clinical lead and consultant perinatal psychotherapist for NELFT NHS Foundation Trust’s Perinatal Parent Infant Mental Health Service (PPIMHS). This is the largest community perinatal service of its kind in the UK and offers psychiatric and psychotherapy treatment to pregnant women and their partners experiencing serious mental/emotional illness during pregnancy and up until the baby reaches three years of age. The team is made up of perinatal psychotherapists, perinatal psychiatrists, and perinatal community mental health practitioners. Amanda trained as a systemic therapist. Her doctoral research at the Tavistock Centre/UEL studied how mothers’ use of maladaptive defensive processes can derail their baby’s development. In collaboration with Channel 4 and the Anna Freud Centre, Amanda was the therapist in the series Help Me Love My Baby, winner of the Royal Television Society’s best educational programme. Amanda speaks nationally and internationally on the subject of understanding and helping perinatal mental/emotional illness.

Catherine Maguire co-founded I-AIMH in 2009 and was its inaugural President. She is a Chartered Senior Clinical Psychologist, an Endorsed Infant Mental Health (IMH) Mentor® and PhD Candidate at the School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork. Her work is based in the Parent and Infant Unit at The Bessborough Centre. She is passionate about advancing IMH workforce capacity, disseminating scientific knowledge to progress IMH services, and reflective practice supervision. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the World Association for Infant Mental Health (WAIMH) Board, and is supporting preparations to host the WAIMH World Congress, Dublin, July 2023.