Blog

Teenagers need to individuate, create, get active… and still feel the constancy of home. In her fifth blog about her Kitchen Therapy practice, attachment-informed psychotherapist Charlotte Hastings explains how cooking can help teenagers to renegotiate their place within the family and the wider world – and shares how teaching her own teenage daughter to bake bread helped calm their mutual anxieties around change.

An increasing number of us are working both in-person and online. What factors might we need to consider when mixing mediums with clients? Kate Dunn, a psychotherapist, supervisor and trainer who has been practising online since 2008, calls for therapists to hold on to our relational curiosity during this time of breathtakingly rapid change.

How might collective memories of persecution, famine and conflict be influencing our clients’ experiences of the current pandemic? How can we guide clients to find a source of present day support in their ancestral lineage, too? In the final part of her blog series, clinical physicist turned constellation therapist Nicola Mackay suggests how constellation work might transform an Achilles heel into a superpower.

Over half a century after Bowlby, the impact of loss in children is still far too frequently overlooked. To mark Children’s Grief Awareness Day, child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist Deirdre Dowling discusses different forms of grief that children may experience, and different ways in which they might express these – and shares the story of one eight-year-old boy who was referred for stealing from lunchboxes.

Learn direct from some of the foremost female originators and innovators in trauma therapy this November at PESI UK’s international Women, Trauma and Mental Health conference.

Invisible influences from our ancestral pasts can prevent us from really seeing our children in the present. In the seventh part of her blog series, Nicola Mackay, a clinical physicist turned constellation therapist and researcher, discusses how one client’s ruptured relationship with her adult daughter began to heal when she confronted her family history of anger and sacrifice.

A recent experience in her own home has forced Anthea Benjamin to re-confront women’s vulnerability in the presence of male privilege – and how suddenly our sense of safety may be stolen. Ahead of PESI UK’s Women, Trauma and Mental Health conference next week, the psychotherapist reflects on oppression as trauma, the key concept of misogynoir, and the collective work needed in the face of an epidemic of violence towards women and girls.

What can we do to help women befriend their bodies? How might we invite self-disclosure around race-based trauma? What are the latest insights into traumatic grief? How can we be truly present with our female clients – while avoiding vicarious trauma? Join world-leading trauma innovators live and online from November 18-19 to get the whole picture on women and trauma.

The notion of inherited ‘relationship promises’ can shed a helpful light on difficulties within couples – including a common experience for many women of feeling ‘unseen’ within their relationship. In the sixth part of her blog series, Nicola Mackay, a clinical physicist turned constellation therapist and researcher, shares how constellation work with one couple helped them to remove an invisible barrier to commitment.

Unless we have taken training in nutrition, or are working with eating disorders, we may never broach the topic of food with our clients. This is a shame, suggests attachment-informed counselling psychologist Julie Friend, because such conversations can provide a feast of helpful therapeutic insights – even when a banana is just a banana.