Blog

Next month, PESI UK invites you to connect with Dr Rachel Yehuda, Dr Peter Levine, Dr Pat Ogden, Dr Stephen Porges, Dr Dwight Turner and other key voices in working with transgenerational trauma. Taking place from October 7-8 2021, this special two-day conference will take in the latest insights from epigenetics to IFS – and feature a very personal keynote from Baroness Floella Benjamin – as we consider how therapists can best support our clients to transform long legacies of pain.

What happens when we bring our food selves into the therapy room? How might food-related disclosure feed the relational dynamic? Attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist Andrea Oskis explains why she began creating recipes inspired by clients’ memories – and recalls how her own therapy was transformed when the therapist spotted her cookbooks.

The deep connection between body psychotherapy and ecopsychology is engaging a new generation of clients. Emma Palmer, a relational body psychotherapist and wild therapist, contemplates the continuum between these two practices from her green(ish) corner of Bristol.

How do we work when impending legislation is engendering a sense of threat? As the Nationality and Borders Bill passes through Parliament, Jude Boyles, manager of a Refugee Council therapy service based in South Yorkshire, shares how both this Bill and the wider context are impacting the lives – and the therapeutic conversations – of refugee clients.

How is the world of dating changing in the wake of the pandemic? In what ways might vaccine status be interacting with relationship values and attachment patterns? Psychosexual and relationship therapist and author Silva Neves surveys the new preoccupations facing single clients, and considers how core dating concerns around safety and autonomy have been further complicated by Covid-19.

Using stones and flowers to symbolise negative and positive events, NET is a narrative therapy intervention that allows clients to reflect on their life in its nuanced entirety. Integrative Arts Psychotherapist Sheetal Amin talks us through her use of this approach with refugee clients, explaining how it helps individuals to process the past and hold hope for the future.

For complex reasons, therapeutic support is often inaccessible or poorly attuned to the needs of parents caring for children with a disability. Joanna Griffin, author, counselling psychologist and parent carer, shares insights from her research – and her lived experience – of what counselling can be doing to help.

Clients who were neglected as children are likely to have fewer psychological resources, leading to a life of constant overstretching. How can we help such individuals to build ‘psychological muscle’ and experience a felt sense of achievement – without risking overwhelm? Body psychotherapist and author Kathrin Stauffer introduces the concept of ‘dosing down’.

Stephen Porges on the intimate connection between our social world and our visceral organs, the impact of stress and trauma on physiological state, and why the pandemic has left even the founder of Polyvagal Theory struggling “to feel comfortable in the presence of others”.

New windows on risk have been opened by online therapy with children and young people. In her third occasional blog about her work, independent social worker Gretchen Precey shares some of the emerging dilemmas with which our safeguarding procedures and trainings need to keep pace – from the unseen presence of family members to what we might glimpse on the mantlepiece.