Blog

Should clients keep their phones on or off during sessions? For a therapist working with refugees, this is a particularly pressing and complex question. 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 third occasional blog about this work, she discusses the role of mobiles in the lives of refugees, and the dilemma for the therapist when a client wishes to share images.

NHS treatments for medically unexplained symptoms tend to focus on either the physical or the psychological aspect. This has led Professor Helen Payne, one of the leaders in embodied psychotherapy, to devise the BodyMind Approach, which uses creative expression to help people listen to their body’s signals and self-manage symptoms. In the first of four blogs, she introduces this ‘bottom up’ method.

The focus of World Mental Health Day this year is suicide prevention. But when it comes to the accepted mainstream practice of risk assessment tools, are tick boxes and questionnaires getting in the way of potent therapeutic discourse? Dr Andrew Reeves, who has written extensively about working relationally with risk, calls for therapists to be brave, step forward, and really meet clients in their suicidal place.

The practice of existential therapy has often been reserved for those ‘in the know’. But at this time of global turmoil, it may well be coming in to its own. Emmy van Deurzen, founder of the Existential Academy and editor of the new Wiley World Handbook of Existential Therapy, invites us to have our minds blown – in a good way.

What does a poetry therapy session consist of, and what can the trained practitioner bring to the creative encounter? To mark National Poetry Day in the UK, writer and trained poetry therapist Victoria Field considers how both reading and writing poems can promote health and wellbeing – and suggests we psychotherapists pick up our pens.

The way in which the CBT model is presented to clients is integral to positive outcomes. Ahead of an intensive two-day Psychotherapy Excellence training in November, John Ludgate, Ph.D., Founding Fellow of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy, sets out the essentials for introducing your clients to CBT.

What therapeutic challenges and opportunities arise when a client with dementia enters nursing or palliative care? In the concluding part of her blog series coinciding with Alzheimer’s Month, psychotherapist and author Dr Esther Ramsay-Jones discusses working through this latter stage in the trajectory of dementia.

What do people who engage in emotional eating really crave? To mark the publication of his new book on the subject, clinical psychologist Howard S. Farkas, PhD, discusses the role of intuition, judgment and unconscious motivations in eating, and reveals how reframing the notion of ‘self-control’ can liberate clients to eat what they (actually) want.

How does grief counselling differ when the client has dementia? In the fourth part of her blog series coinciding with Alzheimer’s Month, psychotherapist and author Dr Esther Ramsay-Jones explores the experience of bereavement through the lens of dementia, including working with hallucinations, metaphor and felt-absence.

Meriel Whale specialises in counselling clients who are childless not by choice, an area of growing relevance for therapists. To mark the start of World Childless Week, she shares key insights drawn from personal experience, from the prevalence of painful triggers to the possibility for profound personal growth