Blog

Conducting online therapy during the pandemic comes with particular challenges – and benefits – when your clients are refugees. Jude Boyles is the Manager and a therapist of a Refugee Council therapy service based in South Yorkshire. In her sixth occasional blog about this work, she reflects on trauma, resilience and the need for some deep therapeutic conversations to continue despite the radically altered context.

When families function well, they provide a secure base for members to explore beyond the family’s own boundaries. But what has lockdown done to our sense of safety and threat? In her final blog about family systems during the coronavirus crisis, psychotherapist and author Annette Byford observes the sense of creative togetherness that has been fostered among some families – and wonders whether the relaxing of restrictions will be experienced with relief, or a sense of loss.

The current crisis is a chance for us all to rethink our values. Earth Day, which has its 50th anniversary today, reminds us to include our relationship with the planet. Taking a holistic perspective, psychotherapist, ecotherapist and lecturer Dr Joe Hinds explains why we need to rediscover community and our environment, and calls on therapists to ensure we don’t let empathy become a myopic activity confined to the consulting room

How does grief affect us when it relates to an animal companion? An animal enthusiast himself, therapist and author Ken Dolan-Del Vecchio led pet loss groups for over a decade. To mark National Pet Month in the UK, he urges practitioners to appreciate the intensity of a grief that can often leave clients feeling isolated and stigmatised.

Many pathological defence mechanisms are being activated in family members at the moment in response to feelings of loss and being under attack. Psychotherapist and author Annette Byford continues her blog series on the family system during the coronavirus crisis by considering our role in helping clients develop alternative ways of coping – including the importance of hitting the pause button.

How does supervision differ when it goes online? Therapist Suzie Mosson, a director of Online Training for Counsellors, discusses parallel process, online disinhibition, and the odd combination of both distance and intimacy that technology can bring to the supervisory relationship.

For many families, Covid-19 has created a pressure cooker of uninterrupted togetherness. But often the flashpoints are not new ones. In the third instalment of her weekly blog series about family systems during the coronavirus crisis, psychotherapist and author Annette Byford considers how we can support clients in lockdown to anticipate likely points of conflict.

How might social distancing and social-isolation be affecting clients depending on their attachment patterns? In her fourth blog about working with highly defended clients, Attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist Linda Cundy spots an opportunity for therapists to explore issues around intimacy, need, contamination, intrusion and self-protection.

How are those of us who work with young people adjusting to conducting sessions online? Deirdre Dowling, a child, adolescent and adult psychoanalytic psychotherapist, reflects on the first 10 days of taking her practice online during the Covid-19 pandemic, observing the profound impact on the children, teenagers and supervisees she works with – and on herself.

How might family systems be responding to enforced distance between members of the family? In the second instalment of her weekly blog series about family systems during the coronavirus crisis, psychotherapist and author Annette Byford observes feelings of abandonment, guilt and uselessness, reflects on the importance of therapeutic reframing, and anticipates shifts in generational power.