Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Psychotherapist Julia Samuel MBE has spent 25 years working with bereaved families. Over the last eight weeks, the author of Grief Works has been sharing her concept of the ‘pillars of strength’, which we can use to help clients grieve and rebuild their lives. In her final blog of the series, Samuel introduces the eighth pillar – focusing.

Dominic Davies founded Pink Therapy in 1999. Twenty years on, and on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, he addresses the question of whether specialist training is still needed to work with gender, sexual and relationship diversity. Whether you are a GSRD-identified therapist, or a cisgender and heterosexual therapist, what might be the essentials for working with GSRD clients?

Attending to the body in psychotherapy is important whatever your therapeutic modality. Professor Helen Payne is the leading editor of the new Routledge International Handbook of Embodied Perspectives in Psychotherapy. Here she explains the meaning of embodiment, the difference between body psychotherapy and dance movement psychotherapy, and how we can all develop a deeper connection with our bodies.

Psychotherapist Julia Samuel MBE has spent 25 years working with bereaved families. In this weekly blog series, the author of Grief Works is sharing her concept of the ‘pillars of strength’, which we can use to help clients grieve and rebuild their lives. Today, Samuel introduces the seventh pillar – structure.

Kundalini awakening is an intense psychophysical experience that is rarely recognised, and often mistaken for psychosis. Duncan Barford, a psychodynamic counsellor with a special interest in spiritual crises, identifies its features, and explains how psychotherapeutic intervention might help.