Blog

Previously secure relationships can fall into anxious patterns, especially when life events render an attachment figure suddenly emotionally unreliable. How can we help clients to understand their own or the other’s escalating reactions, and regain both trust and independence? Stefan Walters shares a useful, destigmatising framing.

Understanding the interrelationship between trauma and attachment has never been more important than in this time of global stress. In April, PESI UK will be gathering together world leading attachment specialists and trauma experts as part of a special two-day conference. Join Dr Pat Ogden, Dr Stephen Porges, Professor Jeremy Holmes and other key voices for the latest insights and innovations in working with trauma and attachment.

Just because therapists don’t prescribe psychiatric drugs, doesn’t mean we can’t support our clients to explore their impact. Ahead of a live PESI UK webcast training in April, psychiatrist turned Person-Centered Counsellor Rachel Freeth draws our attention to the various ways in which drugs may affect our clients and the therapy – and suggests we have a key role to play in holding space for subjective meaning.

If clients have become slower to answer session calls or engage in dialogue during the pandemic, how might we respond? Drawing on her work with resettled refugees, Jude Boyles reflects on the importance of continuing to offer that weekly call – while finding ways to explore how individual clients experience our persistence.

We are all impacted by xenophobia and racism, whether we are the ones being wounded, or the ones intentionally or unwittingly doing the wounding. Ahead of a free PESI UK Clinical Spotlight webcast on 1st April, author, psychologist and yoga therapist educator Dr Gail Parker explores the implications for our psychological health and wellbeing of living in a culture of unhealed ethnic and racial trauma – and the importance of self-care practices for promoting post-traumatic growth.

International Women’s Day arrives this year amid a crisis in women’s mental health – one that has been exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis, but has its roots in enduring gender inequality. Tracy Jarvis, Director of PESI UK and a psychotherapist specialising in trauma, explores the intensifying pressures on women’s mental health, from gender-based violence to socio-economic disparity.

Single sessions are one way of responding to the intensifying demand for student counselling. To mark University Mental Health Day, Dr Windy Dryden sets out the case for offering them, outlines the characteristics of the all-important ‘single-session mindset’, and suggests there may be more to this approach than simply reducing waiting lists.

When clients have the impulse to self-harm, what helps them stop? Not safety contracts, argues Lisa Ferentz, but help finding alternative ways to cope, self-soothe and communicate. To mark Self-Injury Awareness Day, the specialist in trauma and self-destructive behaviours shares her empowering alternative intervention, ‘CARESS’.

Rates of self-harm among children and young people are on the rise. Yet, as Brad E. Sachs has experienced, clients can be less likely to share this aspect of their experience than any other. As we mark Self-Injury Awareness Day, the psychologist, author and family therapist suggests why self-harm is so often the ‘missing piece’ in the therapeutic conversation – and shares a three-stage framework for raising the subject.

How can we support highly defended clients to explore the past and their internal worlds? In her seventh blog about working with avoidant attachment, Attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist Linda Cundy looks at constructing meaningful self-narratives and encountering defences – including the common defence of over-identifying with caregivers