Blog

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.

For therapists and our clients, it may feel as though the whole world is out of balance at the moment, let alone our nervous systems. How can we optimise our wellbeing at a time of such unprecedented stress? To mark the start of National Stress Awareness Month, Tracy Jarvis, Director of PESI UK and a psychotherapist specialising in trauma and neuroscience, shares her ‘ACCESS’ acronym to help us cope, reduce stress and regulate our nervous systems.

Hands up whose clients are struggling to sleep at the moment? For those with pre-existing or developing health anxiety, sleep disturbance may be greater during the current Covid-19 outbreak, and concerns over the effects of poor sleep on immunity can create a vicious circle. Insomnia Clinic founder Kathryn Pinkham is currently offering her online sleep programme free to NHS workers – and here shares 8 tips for improving the sleep of clients with health anxiety.

Families are now facing one of two highly pressurised new realities: not seeing each other at all, or seeing each other all of the time. How might our clients’ families be responding to the imposed changes, and how can we help them adjust? Psychotherapist and author Annette Byford begins a five-blog series on the family system during the coronavirus crisis with a consideration of coping mechanisms, and how separateness and togetherness have individual meanings for each of us.

Denial, anger, depression, bargaining… we are likely to be encountering all of these reactions to the current covid-19 pandemic in our clients, as well as in ourselves. Dr Esther Ramsay-Jones, a psychotherapist and lecturer in Death Dying and Bereavement, suggests how the concept of anticipatory grief might help us to understand our shifting emotional positions at this time – and begins to imagine what acceptance might look like.