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

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How ‘Anxiety Disorders’ Trick Us

  • 29th Jul 2019
  • David Carbonell

Why does anxiety hold such a powerful grip on our clients? Because, argues clinical psychologist David Carbonell, Ph.D, anxiety tricks us in to responding to it as a danger when it is actually a discomfort. Ahead of a special London workshop on 21st September 2019, the anxiety specialist explains why ‘anxiety disorders’ are better understood and worked with as ‘disorders of excessive self-protection’.

Sex Addiction 3/7: Paraphilia

  • 26th Jul 2019
  • Thaddeus Birchard

What is non-normative sexual behaviour, and how should we work with it? In the third part of his blog series, psychosexual therapist Dr Thaddeus Birchard discusses paraphilia, including the role of societal constructs and importance of ethical considerations

Facing the Spectre of Suicide

  • 24th Jul 2019
  • Jamie Smith

Suicide will be a national topic of conversation today, as the Samaritans conducts its annual The Big Listen campaign. While therapists well understand the transformative power of listening, expressions of suicidality can challenge our capacity to accept and sit with a client’s feelings. And, as counselling lecturer Jamie Smith reminds us, therapists aren’t immune to societal misconceptions about suicide – or the pressures of our own motivations

Working with Goals in Psychotherapy

  • 22nd Jul 2019

What are the advantages, and disadvantages, of using goal setting with clients? Are goals energising and empowering – or can they be dehumanising, and distract us from deeper needs? The answer lies with the individual, as Professor Mick Cooper talks us through the good, the bad, and the better of goal-oriented practice

Sex Addiction 2/7: Treatment

  • 19th Jul 2019
  • Thaddeus Birchard

Psychosexual therapist Dr Thaddeus Birchard founded the first UK centre for sex addiction treatment, and pioneered training for therapists working with compulsive sexual behaviour. In the second part of his blog series on this still stigma-ridden issue, he outlines his treatment programme for sex addiction, and emphasises the importance of ‘restoring the self

Therapy with Refugees: A Question of Interpretation

  • 17th Jul 2019
  • Jude Boyles

When the women interpreters started sighing deeply during her sessions with Syrian refugees, psychological therapist Jude Boyles found herself unsure how to respond. How might this affect the clients? And what did the sighs signify about the impact of therapy on the interpreters? A Therapy Service Manager at Refugee Council Sheffield, here Boyles considers the prevalence of our cultural assumptions, and the power of therapist curiosity.

Sex Addiction 1/7: What is Sex Addiction?

  • 12th Jul 2019
  • Thaddeus Birchard

Psychosexual therapist Dr Thaddeus Birchard founded the first UK centre for sex addiction treatment, and pioneered training for therapists working with compulsive sexual behaviour. In this new seven-part blog series, he summarises what he has learned about this still stigma-ridden issue – beginning today with how we might define and conceptualise sex addiction.

Having a Trauma Lens: Why Multifocals are Essential

  • 8th Jul 2019
  • Tracy Jarvis

Now the word ‘trauma’ is in such common usage, it is even more crucial for therapists to be able to differentiate between different types of trauma, and non-traumatic experiences. As Tracy Jarvis, trauma specialist and director of Psychotherapy Excellence, suggests, a ‘multifocal’ trauma lens can help us track the key categories and choose the right therapeutic path.

Ecotherapy: Don’t forget the ‘therapy’

  • 5th Jul 2019
  • Joe Hinds

While ecotherapy is on the rise, many eco-therapists don’t have a clinical training. Yet, explains Dr Joe Hinds, working in nature is no soft option. Taking client work outside taxes our attentional capacities, necessitates a solid theoretical frame, and often – as the co-editor of Ecotherapy has discovered – demands deep reflexive practice.

Privilege and Otherness: What Our Trainings are Failing to Teach

  • 1st Jul 2019
  • Dwight Turner

From our courses to our consulting rooms, we are always encountering tensions between compliance and otherness, sameness and difference. So why do trainings continue to marginalise issues of otherness, and discourage explorations of privilege? Dr Dwight Turner explains why intersectional understanding is a tool no trainee or psychotherapist can do without.