Psychoeducation: Emotions, Relationships and Mental Health

Overview

While physical education teaches how the body works, psychoeducation explores how your life experiences shape how you are in the world: emotionally and relationally. This day goes way beyond information, offering insight that reduces fear and confusion, and helping you understand persistent struggles – like recurring panic attacks, relationship struggles or fear of judgment. Whether you’re attending for personal reasons or as a mental health professional, you’ll gain a wealth of knowledge laying the groundwork for important life changes.

Content (all evidence-based research) includes:

Emotions

What are emotions, and why using them well, is key to good mental health?
Why is emotional pain so painful and what you can do to lessen it?
Why trying not to feel emotional pain causes emotional pain?
Why being shamed is so bad for your mental health and how to stop people shaming you?
Understand your brain’s anti-anxiety chemicals, what blocks them, what activates them.
How stress hormones colour perception and recognising when it’s happening.
Why bottling up feelings impacts on how long you’re going to live.
What Freud was right about and how to use his wisdom to enhance your life.

Relationships

Why some conversations just flow, whereas others stumble from the start.
Key relational skills that bring lovely connections with people who matter.
What damages and destroys important relationships and how to stop it.
How to stop the rows and engage in sophisticated conflict resolution instead.
What are psychological games and how they mess up relationships?
Skills for relationship repair after an argument.
Why falling in love doesn’t mean happy ever after, but sometimes, something really good instead.

Mental Health

What does good mental health feel like?
How does a painful life event become a mental health problem?
Mental health problems are emotional processing problems – what does processing mean?
Causes of anxiety and depression: How to heal.
How to know the difference between healthy and unhealthy anxiety.
Why mental health problems are not a disorder but an understandable response given what’s happened in your life.
Cognitive distortions e.g. catastrophising, black-and-white thinking and reframing.
Why being able to name your emotions is key for good mental health.
Emotional regulation, over-regulation and the window of tolerance.
Self-help versus seeking help: how both impact on health and happiness.
What’s a trauma trigger and how to recognise when you’re having one?
How therapeutic relationships shift mind in torment to mind in peace.
The importance of assertiveness and how to feel it in your gut.
Self-esteem: impact of how you were parented, school experiences, social media.
Good stress and bad stress: their impact on your mental and physical health.
The causes of negative self-talk and how to stop it.
Not why the addiction but why the pain. (Gabor Mate)

About the presenter

Dr. Margot Sunderland

Neuroscience scholar and psychotherapist with over 30 years experience. Author of more than 20 books on mental health. Founding Director of IATE, higher education college training psychotherapists. Her acclaimed work makes complex neuroscience and psychology accessible for both personal use and therapeutic practice.