Online Seminar
Psychotherapy for Voice 🇬🇧
A four-week experiential course introducing psychotherapeutic thinking for professionals working with voice, particularly where voice difficulties intersect with emotion, identity, relationships, trauma, functional neurological symptoms, psychogenic presentations and persistent physical symptoms.
The course is not designed to train participants to become psychotherapists. Instead, it develops the capacity to think psychotherapeutically within an existing professional role: to notice what is happening relationally, psychologically and somatically during voice work, to ask better questions, and to recognise when the voice problem may be communicating something that cannot be understood through vocal mechanics alone.
Each three-hour session combines theory, clinical discussion and supervised practical work in breakout rooms.
Week 1 — Thinking Psychotherapeutically
From voice problem to person
The opening session establishes the basic architecture of psychotherapy and considers what can be borrowed safely and ethically by voice practitioners.
Core principles include the therapeutic relationship, therapeutic frame and therapeutic contract. Particular attention is given to boundaries, confidentiality, consent, role clarity, scope of practice and the difference between doing psychotherapy and working psychotherapeutically.
Practical: Participants work in breakout rooms to practise beginning a voice consultation psychotherapeutically. This includes contracting, establishing safety, taking a psychosocial voice history, using open questions, tolerating silence, listening for meaning rather than immediately problem-solving, and noticing what happens in their own body while listening.
Week 2 — The Relationship in the Room
Transference, countertransference and what happens between people
This session introduces the development of psychoanalytic and relational thinking, moving from Freud through object relations and contemporary relational approaches.
Participants explore transference: how previous relational experiences can become organised within present clinical relationships. Alongside this, countertransference is considered not simply as interference from the practitioner, but as potentially useful information about the interpersonal field.
Applied to voice practice, this raises important questions. Why might one patient make us want to rescue them while another makes us feel ineffective? What happens when a patient desperately wants the practitioner to fix their voice? What happens when improvement itself feels threatening? How might dependency, authority, performance, shame, compliance or resistance enter the clinical encounter?
Practical: Breakout-room exercises explore relational dynamics within simulated voice consultations, including rescuing, reassurance, silence, resistance, dependency and practitioner discomfort.
Week 3 — The Body in Psychotherapy
Thinking somatically about voice
The third session moves explicitly into body psychotherapy and somatic approaches.
Participants consider the body not merely as the location in which psychological distress produces symptoms, but as an active component of emotional regulation, perception, memory, defence and interpersonal communication.
The session introduces embodiment, autonomic regulation, interoception, muscular guarding, breath, posture, movement and bodily patterns of protection. These concepts are related critically to contemporary understandings of functional neurological disorder (FND), functional voice disorder, psychogenic voice presentations and persistent physical symptoms.
Rather than assuming that symptoms are either physical or psychological, participants develop a biopsychosocial formulation in which nervous-system processes, attention, expectation, learning, relationships, emotion, bodily experience and social context can interact.
Practical: Participants practise a somatically informed consultation, including noticing bodily responses, inviting description rather than interpretation, tracking changes in voice and body, and exploring symptoms without imposing psychological meaning upon them.
Week 4 — Psychotherapy for Voice
Bringing the model together
The final session integrates relational, psychological and somatic thinking into a coherent approach to complex voice presentations.
Participants explore functional and psychogenic voice disorders through formulation rather than simplistic psychological causation. Particular consideration is given to identity, performance, threat, loss, shame, interpersonal conflict, occupational demands, trauma, symptom meaning and the possibility that patterns which once served a protective function may become maladaptive.
The session also addresses an essential clinical distinction: when to explore, when to remain with the voice, and when to refer.
Participants consider multidisciplinary working with ENT, speech and language therapy, singing voice rehabilitation, psychology, psychotherapy and other healthcare professionals.
Practical: Participants conduct an extended case consultation in breakout rooms, moving from contracting and history-taking through relational and somatic observation to a provisional biopsychosocial formulation and appropriate plan.
By the end of the course
Participants should be able to establish a clearer therapeutic frame within voice work; undertake a more psychologically and relationally informed voice history; recognise elementary transference and countertransference processes; use basic somatic enquiry appropriately; formulate functional or psychogenic presentations without reducing symptoms to “all in the mind”; recognise the limits of their professional role; and make more appropriate decisions about onward referral and multidisciplinary care.
The course is delivered in English by Stephen R King MSc, Body Psychotherapist specialising in voice problems.
Stephen King
Im Rahmen seiner Arbeit als manueller Therapeut hat Stephen bereits mehrfach Kurse und Seminare in ganz Europa, China und Japan gehalten. Stephen hat mit vielen Hollywood-Schauspielern gearbeitet und ist Inhaber des VOICE CARE CENTRE in London. Autor des Buches "HELP! Ive got a VOICE PROBLEM - a bio psychosocial approach (Lydia Hart & Stephen R. King)
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