Blog

How can we move beyond training deficits and natural overwhelm to get to grips with cybertrauma? In the second of a pair of blog pieces on this frequently overlooked or avoided topic, psychotherapist and technology specialist Catherine Knibbs shares tips for working with trauma that has occurred while using technology – including key knowledge, helpful signposts, and what to consider when creating a safe space.

Trolling, grooming, online bullying, revenge porn… a newer form of trauma has been surfacing in our consulting rooms, one that can occur in myriad and ever-multiplying contexts, and is testing the limits of our existing trauma models. In the first of a pair of blog pieces about cybertrauma, psychotherapist and technology specialist Catherine Knibbs invites us to front up to a topic that is frequently overlooked or avoided by our profession – from the forms it can take to the emotional and clinical challenges it presents.

Children are absorbing confusing messages when it comes to the topic of bullying – and vital behavioural communications are being missed. Jeanine Connor, adolescent psychotherapist and author, greets the start of Anti-Bullying Week 2022 with an invitation to therapists to challenge reductive dichotomous thinking, refocus energies on understanding context, and relieve young people of the often unconscious pressure to ‘pick a side’.

What are the tasks for couple therapy in the wake of infidelity? How can we help clients to recover from betrayal trauma and move forward together? And what do ‘new monogamy contracts’ have to do with it? Ahead of PESI UK’s Women’s Trauma Summit this week, leading sex therapist and author Tammy Nelson outlines the crisis, integration and vision stages of this work in the light of a cultural shift from morality to transparency.

We will all encounter the impact of reproductive trauma in our client work. But we may not always know it. From intergenerational trauma to disenfranchised grief, issues related to reproduction often lie deep beneath the presenting problem, sometimes buried within a family history or silenced by social norms. In the second of two posts ahead of PESI UK’s Women’s Trauma Summit 2022, reproductive psychologist Julie Bindeman draws our attention to the huge range of ways in which reproductive trauma can show up in clinic, and be experienced by our clients.

How is the upending of Roe v Wade impacting the psychological health of women? In the first of two posts ahead of PESI UK’s Women’s Trauma Summit 2022, reproductive psychologist Julie Bindeman reflects on how the decision to limit abortion rights in the US has reverberated in her clinic, including among clients not ‘directly’ affected by the landmark decision – from the ratcheting up of existing anxieties to the awakening of new fears.

Connection and community are critical to mental health, and often missing in the lives of recently resettled refugees. Jude Boyles, the manager of a Refugee Council therapy service and co-editor of a new book on groupwork with refugees, shares her encounter with one Afghan client who struggled to communicate that it was not counselling she needed for her depression – but the chance to meet other women with similar questions and struggles.

What sorts of useful information might perinatal context afford? How might we start to explore this sensitively with a young person’s parents or caregivers? In the second of two blog posts about the importance of including perinatal history in assessment, Florence Nadaud, child and adolescent psychodynamic psychotherapist, urges us not to skip the opening chapters of our clients’ lives.

Many clients with dissociative minds get a message that they are inherently dangerous or ‘too much to handle’. Some therapist trainings unhelpfully reinforce clinicians’ fears. Ahead of PESI UK’s Women’s Trauma Summit 2022, trauma specialist and EMDR trainer Jamie Marich shares their own experience with Dissociative Disorder – and introduces a personal inventory exercise we can all use to deepen our understanding and normalise the experiences of even our most dissociative clients.

Enquiring as far back as pregnancy and birth can reveal the best path forward for therapy, regardless of our clients’ age. In some cases, clinical formulation can even hinge on it. In the first of two blog posts on taking perinatal histories, Florence Nadaud, child and adolescent psychodynamic psychotherapist, shares her work with one young person whose traumatic birth story shed new light on his current difficulties – and, just as crucially, helped her to reflect on parental and professional attitudes towards his presentation.