Beyond A Story of Separation – NVC Foundation with Restorative Practice and a Systemic Lens IN PERSON
5th Mar 2025 - 2nd Apr 2025
5 consecutive Wednesdays evenings 6pm-8.30pm
Sliding scale £125-£345 for individuals and £145-£445 for organisations
Led by: Sophie Docker | Contact Sophie


Beyond a Story of Separation: A Foundation in Nonviolent Communication with a Systemic Lens
Nonviolent Communication (NVC) offers a clear pathway to move beyond the story of separation that shapes our lives—where we are in a competitive struggle for rightness, resources, and belonging – towards greater togetherness, in our relationships and with our living world. Moving us from a polarized, either/or way of thinking, toward a both/and reality with space for multiple different experiences of life.
In this course, Sophie will introduce a framework, tools, and consciousness that support this shift, through compassionately connecting with yourself and others. Instead of making people the problem and making ourselves or others wrong, I can develop ways of expressing how I am, connecting with how you are and looking at how we can attend to our interdependent needs with boundaries and care.
Over the course of these sessions, you will:
- Move beyond right/wrong, deficit thinking, and the blame game, to cultivate compassion for yourself and others.
- Learn practical tools to express yourself with authenticity, power and care, while holding compassionate boundaries.
- Explore the systemic nature of individual experiences and develop the ability to use power “with” rather than “over”.
- Strengthen your capacity to meet what arises in yourself and others with resonance, empathy, and presence, even in moments of disagreement.
- Engage constructively with conflict, identifying what truly matters while taking accountability and responsibility.
- Uncover and transform limiting beliefs and behaviours that you may have inherited and internalized, freeing up space for greater aliveness.
- Align your actions and behaviours with your deeper longing for a more meaningful and connected life.
By the end of this course, you will be empowered to shift the patterns that limit your possibilities and contribute to harm, while growing the muscles needed to walk towards the world your heart is longing for.
This course is facilitated by Sophie Docker:
An embodied, relational, interdependent needs consciousness, as offered within the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) framework, underpins the work Sophie does. She shares her particular flavour of NVC, focusing on bringing a systemic lens to personal experience, looking at how the principles of NVC support change at an individual, relational and systemic level.
She is a certified trainer with the Center for Nonviolent Communication and is a Restorative Practice and Transformative Justice practitioner. She works coaching individuals, training groups, facilitating people through tension and consulting on non-punitive ways of organising. Most of her learning and unlearning has come through experience and wide and wild experiments living in community and exploring how to be human.
She works in various collaborations including as a director of charity OpenEdge Transforming Conflict, whose focus is power, identity and difference; and The Restorative Engagement Forum, working with organisations to embed restorative ways of working and train conflict facilitators to engage with conflict across a range of sectors.
Who is it for?
- Individuals who would like to grow their personal and professional skills and capacities to meet what emerges in their lives transformatively.
- People who are keen to embed these ways of being in their lives, organisations, groups or communities.
This is a certificated NVC Foundation Course. On completion, you will get a certificate and have completed 14-hour training with a certified trainer.
“Your workshop has been truly transformative for me. As emotions, feelings and inner voices flow through me, exposing unmet needs and desires I feel like I’m waking up from a long sleep.”
For more details: Please contact Sophie, sophiedocker@gmail.con 07837570940
Or visit www.sophiedocker.com or www.openedge.org.uk
Listen to Sophie chatting with Manda Scott here