This website gives information about the education events facilitated and taught by me, Vivian Broughton.

I have been learning with Franz Ruppert since 2004, nearly 20 years, and now my interest is in supporting IOPT practitioners to develop a deeper understanding of IOPT theory and to become more skilled at facilitating the IOPT enquiry process, The Intention Method, also known as The Self-Encounter Method.

We are all students of IOPT, of ourselves and of life in general. We never stop learning, and my aim is to support our community of student practitioners as best I can to continue our learning together.

The future of IOPT will be grounded in practitioners who strive for the best they can do, and who remain realistically aware of the gaps in their knowledge, and continually determine to improve their skills. I aim to help as best I can as we move into an IOPT-Informed future. 

Let us not settle for anything less than continued learning and working together for increasing competence to offer those who come to work with us.

The following is from my book, Trauma and Identity: IoPT Theory and Practice, on the topic of the IoPT facilitator.

It is the practitioner who, against all the survival defences of the enquirer, must hold in their vision the truth of trauma, and the underlying devastation of the fragile psyche of the infant, the impossibility of fighting the forces of the parents, the adults, for many years; how much of the person in front of them has had to be locked away and forgotten in order to get to adulthood, and how much pain there is underneath the superficial, perhaps even irritating, survival construction of the enquirer. I tell my students that the next time they see a very newly born baby they take the opportunity to look and see this infant’s fragility and vulnerability. As adults it is hard for us to remember that we, too, were that fragile and vulnerable, and that those we work with were also that fragile and vulnerable.

The IOPT practitioner has to hold in her vision this truth as she looks at the present person attempting to explore his or her trauma. The reality is that all that is unhealthy in anyone has come in from the outside. No one traumatises themselves. The fact of trauma, expressed in the desire to set an intention, means that there is a perpetrator, and that perpetrator is someone else. It is against the forces of nature for anything to intentionally harm itself. No oak tree sets out to cause harm to itself; no insect would intentionally hurt itself. Life’s desire is simply to be alive, and that is our healthy desire too, from the start. The person in the beginning of their life can be nothing but perfect, perhaps a simple potential of love. It is the devastating trauma of not being wanted in this world by those on whom the newly created child must depend, and for whom he has, in the beginning, only love and trust, that is the greatest betrayal of life. Life wants life. As the Lebanese poet, Khalil Gibran, puts it:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you.

And though they are with you, they belong not to you.

(The Prophet, Gibran, 1971)

The IOPT practitioner has set herself on her own continual journey of self-knowing. Given her commitment to her work, she too will learn something about herself with every process she facilitates. Learning is life, whether through one’s own explo- ration or through witnessing and engaging in the exploration of another.