Unmitigated Agency:
Managing Over-Control and Relational Dominance

Live Online 3hr CPD Workshop for Mental Health Professionals

Course Overview

This 3-hour interactive training workshop supports practitioners to work more effectively with clients who appear highly driven, dominant, intensely solution-focused, or resistant to emotional depth.


Rather than mislabelling over-control as confidence, arrogance, or narcissism, this workshop introduces a psychologically informed framework that understands unmitigated agency as a threat-based protection response.

You’ll learn how perceived loss of control, autonomy threat, and subtle power dynamics shape engagement and defensiveness. The focus is practical, ethical, and clinically grounded — helping you recognise early signs of control-based withdrawal, prevent power struggles, and foster emotional flexibility without undermining autonomy.

What will this training give you? 

• A clearer understanding of why over-control and dominance emerge in therapy

• Practical ways to prevent competitive or power-based ruptures

• Greater confidence working with clients who interrupt, correct, or take control of sessions

• Skills to validate competence without reinforcing over-functioning

• Tools to gently expand emotional tolerance without triggering defensiveness

• A framework to differentiate healthy agency from control-based protection

Teaching Methods    

This training is delivered live online and uses a mix of brief expert instruction, facilitated discussion, live demonstration, and supported practice.

Participants engage in:

• Guided reflection on clinician countertransference

• Clinical vignette analysis

• Structured role-play scenarios

• Power-dynamic awareness exercises

• Micro-repair practice

Downloadable worksheets and participant reference materials are provided to support integration into clinical practice.

Assessment / Evidence of Learning
                                

Learning is evidenced through active participation in guided reflection activities, clinical discussion, and practical exercises during this live workshop.

Participants demonstrate learning through:

• Identification of coping patterns in vignette material

• Appropriate formulation of control-based regulation

• Use of autonomy-protective language in role-play

• Demonstration of de-escalation skills

Participants receive a statement of attendance for 3 CPD hours.

Please note, to fulfill the learning outcomes, this course does require active participation and contribution in activities and exercises. Participants are expected to have their camera on, especially in breakout rooms. 

If the above is not possible on the day, a certificate of attendance may not be awarded and participants will have the option to attend the training at a later date where available.

About the Presenter

Karen Bartle is a postgraduate in Health Psychology, Advanced Clinical Hypnotherapist and coach, clinical supervisor, educator, and consultant. She co-founded the Academy of Advanced Changework in 2006, and is the founder of HealthTalk Psychology: The psychology of patient/client change.

For over 25 years, Karen has worked with individuals, caregivers, and health professionals navigating behavioural, lifestyle, and psychosocial challenges. She has seen first-hand how caring practitioners can feel stuck when empathy, education, coaching and even motivational interviewing can’t shift engagement — and how reframing avoidance can transform therapeutic outcomes.

Karen’s teaching style blends clinical depth with clarity and compassion. She is known for translating complex psychological concepts into language practitioners can use immediately, and for creating learning environments that feel safe, reflective, and practical.

Who is this course for?

This training is designed for practitioners who want to feel more confident working with clients who:

• Appear highly controlling or dominant

• Resist emotional inquiry

• Trigger competitive or power dynamics

• Over-function and struggle with vulnerability

• Present with stress-related or performance-based difficulties

It is especially suited to practitioners working with high-achieving professionals, burnout, health behaviour change, anxiety, and control-based coping patterns.