Tomkins Relational Educators

Our Principles

We adults get so upset by the very idea that a newborn baby's cry might go unheard that we have always taken for granted infancy requires a basic and specific connection between baby and caregiver. It's easy to assume that mother and baby are linked by an innate program for love, something that makes a woman accept the demands of motherhood and thus sacrifice her own needs for the baby. Yet it is not through some theoretical attachment force that the mother responds, but rather in reaction to the raw, unmodulated affect expressed by the infant. Most of what we understand as individual development is actually the result of interactions based on the way we manage our own affects and the affects of those around us.

Wherever the members of the Tomkins Institute teach, we carry with us not just our ideas about the importance of affect, feeling, and emotion within the individual, but about the role of affect in the development and maintenance of interpersonal intimacy and in the life of a community. We are not just educators about human emotion, but about the role played by emotion in every aspect of our lives.

Similarly, we see the training of psychotherapists as only one part of our responsibility to teach and help others. (Only a tiny fraction of any population ever "gets into" therapy.) Yet everybody goes to school, and a large fraction of the population participates in some sort of religious worship. Our educational programs are therefore aimed at clinicians, schoolteachers, the clergy, and business or governmental leaders. We honor and respect the history and structure of each discipline, but also believe that it is useful to know as much as possible about emotions in us and those who depend on us.

Clinicians

Beginning in 1993, the Silvan S. Tomkins Institute has presented conferences for practicing clinicians. We teach our work on human emotion and show new ways to assist clients/patients based on the psychology of affect and script. Click here for a list of our past conferences and the albums of audiotapes from each conference. Click here for a description of a course prepared and given by Training Director Jonathan Grindlinger, MD, and Chief Psychologist Brett Schur, PhD. This highly rated course can be given in your area for several types of continuing education credit. Vernon C. Kelly, Jr., MD, gives courses about the new form of couples therapy based on the Tomkins-Kelly blueprint for interpersonal intimacy. We provide a wide range of courses and educational opportunities on demand. Write grindlinger@tomkins.org for more information.

Clergy

The responsibilities heaped on our Clergy seem to grow daily. Not only must they know how to manage groups of adults and young people, but they're constantly asked about matters never covered in divinity school. Faith based initiatives now provide funding for Clergy to provide a needy public with an increasing number of services. For many years, the Tomkins Institute has been concerned about certain shifts in the public display of emotion, including rudeness, incivility, public displays of sexual activity, and explosive violence against individuals and public structures. Our research has led to the conclusion that these disturbing changes in social mores can be traced to a shift in the way our population has learned to manage the shame family of emotions. A generous grant from the Carpenter Foundation has allowed us to produce and distribute on DVD English and Spanish versions of the video "Managing Shame, Preventing Violence: A Call to Our Clergy." Through it we teach working Clergy of all faiths how to recognize the nine families of emotion, understand the Compass of Shame, and to develop programs capable of altering this increasingly dangerous shift in our society. Click here for the manual that accompanies this video, and here to purchase the DVD itself.

Even though we've packed a lot of information into this hour-long production, any reasonable viewer will want more details about programs that can be offered by a religious institution. Click on Clergy to learn more about the programs through which we'll show you how to teach this material in greater detail, and how to incorporate it into sermons, homilies, marriage encounter groups, and pastoral counseling. Contact Bruce Murray, director of Tomkins Relational Educators (brucemurray@tomkins.org) for additional information.

Schoolteachers

Likely there is no place in our society where so many people are exposed to shame so constantly as school. Teachers are surrounded by young people filled with tension about making mistakes in public and also afraid that appearing too much better than their peers will trigger rejection or outright abuse. Every stage of child development is fraught with entirely different hot buttons for humiliation, and the skillful teacher is expected to understand all of them! We're working hard to get grants that will allow us to provide sensible programs for school use, but none of these is ready for prime time. Schoolteachers have recognized that the DVD "Managing Shame, Preventing Violence: A Call to Our Clergy" is equally applicable to their work and begun to change their style of pedagogy in terms of this new understanding of shame. We've developed a set of seminars through which we can help teachers and school administrators put these ideas into practice. Contact Bruce Murray, director of Tomkins Relational Educators (brucemurray@tomkins.org) for additional information.

Leadership Training

The most successful leaders in all walks of life seem to have a nearly magical ability to understand and connect to the inner world of others. We provide seminars through which upwardly striving individuals (the leaders of tomorrow) may learn how to read the facial and bodily displays of affect that give clues to what others may feel but not say, and ways of getting others to reflect on their job performance without undue shame. We teach systems of community management that lead to Fair Process changes in both small and large groups. Click here for an outline of sample courses, and contact Bruce Murray, director of Tomkins Relational Educators (brucemurray@tomkins.org) for additional information.

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