Skip to content

Blog

Our lively editorial platform, serving you with enriching and engaging reads from world leading therapists, psychologists and other key voices several times a week.

Filter by
Sort by

Schema Therapy for Trauma (2/5): Schema and Modes

  • 20th Dec 2019
  • Dan Roberts

Schema therapy identifies 18 different schemas and a number of modes. These can help us to understand a client’s core unmet needs, and the ways in which these have been responded to by parts of their personality. In the second blog of his series on using schema therapy to work with complex trauma, Dan Roberts outlines the assessment process and introduces us to ‘Emma’, a client whose painful schemas developed in response to early emotional deprivation.

Crisis Support for Clients at Christmas

  • 17th Dec 2019
  • Fiona Pienaar

Many therapists will be gearing up for a break from the consulting room this week. But the Christmas and New Year holidays coincide with what, for many clients, is one of the most testing times of the year. Planning for this period together could include ensuring clients are aware of 24/7 services such as Shout, the UK’s first crisis text line. As Chief Clinical Officer Dr Fiona Pienaar explains, reaching out to this free, confidential service can help those who are struggling to navigate their flashpoints this festive season.

Schema Therapy for Trauma (1/5): What is Schema Therapy?

  • 13th Dec 2019
  • Dan Roberts

How can schema therapy help us to work with complex trauma? In the first of a five-part series, Dan Roberts introduces a model that developed in the wake of CBT, yet integrates elements of Object Relations, Attachment Theory and experiential Gestalt techniques – and gives an overview of the approach for complex trauma.

How CFT can help clients survive Christmas

  • 10th Dec 2019
  • John-Paul Davies

Compassion Focused Therapy isn’t just for Christmas. But its identification of the ‘threat’, ‘drive’ and ‘contentment’ systems, and emphasis on empathy and compassion, can certainly help clients to navigate festive time with the family when tensions are running high. Psychotherapist, life coach and author John-Paul Davies shares some CFT survival strategies for the Christmas dinner table.

Tackling Child Sexual Abuse (5/5): One Therapist’s Experience of Working with Sexual Offenders

  • 6th Dec 2019
  • Juliet Grayson

Psychotherapist Juliet Grayson works at the root of sexual offending. Her client base includes those people who are at risk of committing a sexual crime, as well as those who have already done so. She is passionate about encouraging more therapists to work with this client group, in order to ‘Stop the First Offence’ rather than wait until a crime has been committed. In her final blog about her work, she shares her personal experiences of this work.

Working with Avoidant Attachment

  • 2nd Dec 2019
  • Linda Cundy

Could we be doing more for highly defended clients? Attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist Linda Cundy believes so. Embarking on a monthly blog series on working with avoidant attachment, she introduces some common characteristics among avoidant clients, and suggests four key ways in which therapists can help to engage them in therapy.

Tackling Child Sexual Abuse (4/5): Therapists wanted!

  • 29th Nov 2019
  • Juliet Grayson

Psychotherapist Juliet Grayson works at the root of sexual offending. Her client base includes those people who are at risk of committing a sexual crime, as well as those who have already done so. She is passionate about encouraging more therapists to work with this client group, in order to ‘Stop the First Offence’ rather than wait until a crime has been committed. In the fourth of five blogs about her work, she discusses the StopSO approach, and offers pointers for those wanting to practice in this area.

“I Wonder If…” : How Our Gentle Curiosity Can Confuse Refugee Clients

  • 27th Nov 2019
  • Jude Boyles

We are trained to pace our interventions and couch questions in tentative reflections. But this indirectness can be baffling – and actively misleading – for refugee clients. Jude Boyles is the Manager and a therapist of a Refugee Council therapy service based in South Yorkshire, offering therapy to Syrian refugees resettled via the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Programme (VPRS). In her fourth occasional blog about this work, she explores the challenge of making the therapeutic dialogue accessible across cultures.

Postnatal Depression… in Men

  • 25th Nov 2019
  • Olivia Spencer

The mental health of new mothers has come under increasing focus. Yet the psychological pressures of fatherhood are often overlooked. In fact, as Olivia Spencer has discovered, postnatal depression is not confined to women. To coincide with Movember, the author and researcher shares some of the social and psychoanalytic factors at play for new fathers – and explains why male postnatal depression is in danger of passing under even the therapist’s radar.

Tackling Child Sexual Abuse (3/5): Harmful Sexual Behaviour in Children

  • 22nd Nov 2019
  • Juliet Grayson

Psychotherapist Juliet Grayson works at the root of sexual offending. Her client base includes those people who are at risk of committing a sexual crime, as well as those who have already done so. She is passionate about encouraging more therapists to work with this client group, in order to ‘Stop the First Offence’ rather than wait until a crime has been committed. In the third of five blogs about her work, she tackles the difficult issues surrounding children who commit a sexual offence.