Admission:

The facilitators will hold a flexible framework for the review of individual requirements, as each person who inquires about the OPC Training Program will bring their own gifts, talents and life experience and these will be considered for admission purposes. The faculty also understands that in the future each student will conduct a practice that suits their interests and is connected to their unique talents and skills. We also hold an open attitude regarding educational backgrounds and previous related experiential life learning. The student is asked to fill out an application for a fee, to review their educational and life experience, as part of the admission process.

Learning Modules: for learning about and developing therapeutic communications

Individual Therapy- Students must be engaged in personal therapy before (or upon acceptance, depending upon the discretion of faculty) entering the program and must be active in personal therapy throughout the entire program. Their personal therapist does not have to be a part of the faculty of OPC.

Certificate Requirements: most learning modules take place on Saturday

Learning Groups - Students must participate in the OPC Training Program learning groups for a minimum of five years. Learning groups meet twice a month at 43B Madison Avenue, Toronto, which is the center for the OPC Training Program.
 
Residency Workshops - Students must attend three weekend residencies over the course of each year to move successfully through the OPC Training Program.
 
Lectures and Extra Seminars - These learning avenues are set up each year as required by new emergent developments in any given training year.
 
Fee Structure - OPC does not require an up-front tuition payment, but instead requires that you pay for each learning module, whether you attend or not, with the exception of missed residencies. Under special circumstances, we use a sliding scale and we ask the students to change this fee payment back to the full requirements as their situation changes. Special learning seminars are priced individually, as they are offered and required and are communicated to the Associates as they develop.

Areas of Learning:

The areas of learning that will be covered in the above work sectors are the following:

• Group dynamics that involve embodied learning, using relational dimensions
• Academic Studies
• Concentrations
• Case Supervision

Our bi-monthly learning groups and residency modules emphasize the need for the engagement of our bodies and feelings in the academic studies. Studies include psychoanalytic psychodynamics, child development and other psychotherapy modules, as well as sharing and working from a student's personal history.
 
We explore the inner meaning of cathartic feelings that are released intersubjectively within the therapeutic communications process and add academic dialogue along with these new meanings about our personal histories. This promotes ongoing reflection of the student's personal stories that often reveals learning blocks that have been created by deep emotional wounds in early life and by the surrounding cultural context of dualities and destructive hierarchies. We work relationally through the manifestations of these blocks layer by layer until the original wounds are reached and transformed. Transformation expands the OPC Associates into new areas of growth and development.
 
With the above working process, we hope to help the students understand the meaning of the required academic studies and reading requirements by embodied learning from the inside out and how the transformations are achieved intersubjectively. In this way, the learning groups add the element of academic dialogue within an in-depth psychotherapy learning group, and in the academic residencies students learn how to acknowledge and hold their deep emotions within the academic dialogues. The facilitators co-participate in the student's transformations by understanding that we all mutually influence one another, although not in a symmetrical or ascribed manner. Out of these emerging explorations, lectures and extra seminars will be created.
 
These groups also grow into supervision forums as students eventually take on their own clients. Furthermore, if a student has an interest in group facilitation and if the faculty support the student in this endeavour, he/she will have an opportunity to learn group facilitation by observing other group processes and leadership approaches.
 
An OPC Associate must have permission by the faculty to begin a concentration in an area of special interest to the student. In the concentration, the student reviews the literature, offers critiques, and writes about their area of interest with the goal of adding new knowledge to the field of psychotherapy and counseling.