Blog

Deb Dana on befriending our own nervous systems, what to do if we arrive for a session feeling dysregulated – and the real reason she believes some clients suddenly leave therapy.

What are the keys to maintaining self-care while working as a therapist? How can supervision practice centre a commitment to practitioner wellbeing? Sarah Worley-James is a supervisor, trainer and manager of a university counselling service. She marks Self-Care Week 2023 with a look at three key elements that can support supervisees to consider their own needs as well as their clients’ – context, variety, and valuing ourselves.

While much contemporary therapy emphasises the importance of establishing a sense of safety, depth psychological traditions spoke instead of containment. Informed by their experience of gender transition and of kink/BDSM practices, as well as Winnicott, Bion and Jung, therapist and Trans Sex author Lucie Fielding discusses fear, risk, play and states of therapeutic chaos – and suggests clinicians should aim instead to offer clients an experience of ‘boundedness’.

Susie Orbach, leading psychoanalyst and women’s therapy pioneer, discusses the huge structural forces attacking contemporary women and their bodies – and reflects on how therapists might help to fight back.

When working with self-harm and suicide in the black community, we need to understand the impact of minority stress and the self-othering involved in adaptation to white spaces. Ahead of PESI UK’s live and online Working with Suicide, Self-Harm and Trauma summit next week, psychotherapist, author and activist Dr Dwight Turner shares how he uses sandplay to help clients explore the unconscious landscape of internalised systemic oppression.

Babette Rothschild on controlling empathic imagery, tracking our autonomic arousal in-session, the dangers of facial feedback – and the simple body awareness practices that can help us stay on ‘terra firma’ in the midst of client trauma.

Many people come to therapy seeking to reduce or manage their stress, which we often think of as an unwanted product of our environment. Once work is underway, however, clients may reveal a strong attachment to being constantly on edge. Taylor M. Ham is a marriage and family therapist specialising in stress and anxiety. To mark Stress Awareness Day 2023, she digs into the subconscious beliefs that can keep individuals stuck in a habitual stress response – and shares some gentle questions to release stressed clients from a life of angst and tension.

Ruth Lanius on critical breakthroughs in trauma research, helping dissociated clients to be present with the environment and their bodies – and why we should always begin trauma therapy by honouring our client’s neurobiological adaptive responses.

Ensuring a client’s voice can be fully expressed is essential to the therapeutic endeavour. Yet for refugees engaged with UK mental health services, the channel of communication can be too readily closed. As we mark World Mental Health Day 2023, Refugee Council therapy service manager Jude Boyles reflects on two frustrating phonecalls from the past fortnight, highlighting the urgent need for mental health practitioners to be trained to work with interpreters.

According to the International OCD Foundation, it currently takes 14 to 17 years for someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to receive effective treatment. As we mark OCD Awareness Week 2023, clinical psychologist and anxiety specialist Karen Cassiday outlines the complexities around OCD diagnosis, shares ways to distinguish it from other, sometimes overlapping conditions, and explains why it is so important that clients with OCD are helped to find the right treatment path.