Blog

Are you all set for the most dysfunctional 10 days in the UK calendar? Christmas may be the most wonderful time of the year – but it can also be an emotional minefield. Pip Weitz, of the Academy for Online Counselling & Psychotherapy, knows what a useful tool online apps can be over this period, helping people manage everything from panic attacks to alcohol use. Here, she suggests a few apps you might want to share with your clients to help them cope over the Christmas break.

Ron Taffel isn’t the same therapist he was a decade ago – and he reckons that has a lot to do with working with millennials. Today’s 18-35 year olds are outspoken and consumer-savvy. But they are also intensely vulnerable, and struggling to hang on to meaning in a world of fast-talking and fast-forgetting. In an excerpt from his Psychotherapy Networker article, Taffel explains how Millennials have helped him to re-examine many basic assumptions about therapy.

To self-disclose, or not to self-disclose? That is the perennial question. Unfortunately, the answer given in trainings and discussion groups is often a debate-dampening “it depends on the situation”. For Graham S Danzer, author of Therapist Self-Disclosure: An Evidence-Based Guide for Practitioners, this just isn’t good enough. Here, he explains how the research on self-disclosure can help us to make individual clinical decisions.

What does climate change have to do with grief work? And why are play, humour and creative imagination such important psychological tools at this time? In Friday’s Blog post, ahead of the Tavistock’s Ecology, Psychoanalysis and Global Warming conference, Paul Hoggett explained why therapists have a vital role in confronting climate change. Following a deep and exciting weekend of discussions, Chair of the Climate Psychology Alliance Chris Robertson now looks to the other side of environmental collapse.

This weekend, psychotherapists, psychologists, philosophers, scientists and activists will come together to explore the traumatic reality of climate change. What can therapists contribute to the picture? And how might global warming be permeating our consulting rooms? Paul Hoggett, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and co-founder of the Climate Psychology Alliance, thinks we can help humankind understand it’s anxiety, anger, despair and denial – and outlines three key ways therapists can contribute to positive change.

Is the spectre of Christmas showing up in your consulting room yet? For those of our clients whose culture celebrates Christmas, this can be a season of celebration, optimism and togetherness. But it can equally be a time of increased financial, family and social pressures, with associated spikes in domestic violence and suicide rates. Either way, December is a month when powerful therapeutic work can be done: not for nothing has Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol been dubbed the first act of interpersonal psychoanalysis. Here are six ways in which Christmas may be manifesting in your consulting room.