Presented by Pre-Therapy International Network and Heart Wood Charity
Pre-Therapy: a person-centred way of offering reconnection in moments of contact loss
A masterclass by Dion Van Werde
“A workshop with Dion Van Werde is your ultimate experiential dive in the foundations of the person-centered paradigm. Saddle up for a journey into heartfelt contact work and pre-therapy,with an honest, caring assistant who has tons of experience.“
Friday 12 September 2025
10.30am – 5.30pm
Minsteracres Retreat Centre, Northumberland, DH8 9RT
£75 – includes lunch
Dion Van Werde presents Pre-Therapy as developed by Garry Prouty (1936-2009). During this one day in-person masterclass, he will first briefly situate Prouty in the world of Person-Centered Psychotherapy and summarize Pre-Therapy. He will then demonstrate this way of working with people who are out-of-contact - due to reasons of psychosis, mental illness, onset of dementia or moments of contact loss - in everyday life or in ongoing psychotherapy or counselling.
He will then work interactively, using situations and cases the masterclass participants bring, offering role-play, demonstration and supervision to further explore the philosophy, values and practice of Pre-Therapy.
Pre-Therapy
In Pre-Therapy, “contact” and “pre-expressive functioning” are key concepts. They help to define a framework in which all unusual, out-of-contact, so called “symptomatic behavior” (as in psychosis for example) is seen as meaningful and is taken as a starting point for empowering interaction.
The phenomenological method of giving “reflections” means to empathically name and describe the present reality, in a very concrete and non-directive way. The way this kind of contact is offered invites the person who is imprisoned in his/her idiosyncratic world and suffering from it, to reconnect again with the surrounding world, to get in touch with his/her feelings and relate to others in a socially understandable way.
Coming out of the isolated private reality by increased awareness, means more contact-functioning and vice versa. This results in the step from pre-expressive to expressive functioning. Contact is re-established. Contact proves hereby to be reconnection, being an antidote to existential alienation.
Dion Van Werde
Dion Van Werde is a Belgian clinical Psychologist M.A. and Person Centered / Experiential (PC/E) Psychotherapist now living in Germany. He is the Supervisor of the Flemish Association for PC/E Psychotherapy and Counselling and Member of the editorial board of the World Organization for PC/E Psychotherapy. He is a Certified Trainer and Coordinator of the Pre-Therapy International Network, having been trained by Prouty in Chicago, USA.
Van Werde worked for over 30 years in residential psychiatry in Belgium with people suffering psychotic functioning, where he and his team translated Prouty’s Pre-Therapy into a multidisciplinary therapeutic contact-ward milieu. (“Pre-Therapy” a PCCS-book by Prouty, Van Werde & Pörtner). Afterwards, he worked for five years in Germany in the field of occupational rehabilitation for clients with multiple problems.
He publishes on Pre-Therapy (http://www.pre-therapy.com/references), trains and supervises practitioners and teams, and gives lectures and workshops in four languages.
