Blog

How can we better support our neurodivergent clients to explore and make sense of their inner world? What contributions from neuroscience and insights into the mind-body union might help us? Drawing on Somatic Processing and the concept of Interoception, Psychotherapist and Brainspotting therapist Stefan Walters shares some specific questions that can help neurodivergent clients – including individuals who may have learned to cope through masking or dissociation – begin to process and relate to their own experience.

Family feasts, large social gatherings, travel arrangements, lurking germs… For individuals with a fear of vomiting, the festive season can feel like a stocking full of trigger points, prompting heightened anxiety, panic attacks, safety behaviours and avoidance. Anna S. Christie, psychotherapist and leading emetophobia specialist, offers a brief introduction to this debilitating condition – and shares eight challenges that our clients with emetophobia may be facing in the run up to the winter holiday.

What if therapy’s insistence on establishing a sense of safety is paradoxically causing clients harm? Drawing on lived experience and the concept of insidious trauma, therapist and author of Trans Sex Lucie Fielding questions the helpfulness of the ‘safety axiom’ – both in the context of informed consent and within a profoundly unsafe world – and suggests it may be setting up members of marginalised groups in particular to ‘fail’ at therapy.

When working with bereaved clients, we may sense the need for a ritual… and find ourselves reaching for a ready supply of generic prescriptions. As Paul M. Martin, clinical psychologist, assistant director of The Center for Grief Recovery and author of Personal Grief Rituals explains, therapists have an opportunity to help clients design something far more expressive, meaningful and tailored to their unique psychological needs.

What are the defining features of a crisis, and how do these illuminate what an effective therapeutic response might look like? Drawing on his Single-Session Therapy model, Windy Dryden outlines his approach to helping clients in the throes of crisis – including the importance of addressing uncertainty, identifying internal resources, and beginning always with the unique individual.

Worrying has its benefits. But clients with high anxiety tend to experience more of the painful costs. International neuroscience and anxiety specialist Catherine Pittman shares her approach for helping clients to shift away from worries, using a little psychoeducation about the role of the amygdala and a simple two-word diagram.

How can we move beyond training deficits and natural overwhelm to get to grips with cybertrauma? In the second of a pair of blog pieces on this frequently overlooked or avoided topic, psychotherapist and technology specialist Catherine Knibbs shares tips for working with trauma that has occurred while using technology – including key knowledge, helpful signposts, and what to consider when creating a safe space.

Trolling, grooming, online bullying, revenge porn… a newer form of trauma has been surfacing in our consulting rooms, one that can occur in myriad and ever-multiplying contexts, and is testing the limits of our existing trauma models. In the first of a pair of blog pieces about cybertrauma, psychotherapist and technology specialist Catherine Knibbs invites us to front up to a topic that is frequently overlooked or avoided by our profession – from the forms it can take to the emotional and clinical challenges it presents.

Children are absorbing confusing messages when it comes to the topic of bullying – and vital behavioural communications are being missed. Jeanine Connor, adolescent psychotherapist and author, greets the start of Anti-Bullying Week 2022 with an invitation to therapists to challenge reductive dichotomous thinking, refocus energies on understanding context, and relieve young people of the often unconscious pressure to ‘pick a side’.

What are the tasks for couple therapy in the wake of infidelity? How can we help clients to recover from betrayal trauma and move forward together? And what do ‘new monogamy contracts’ have to do with it? Ahead of PESI UK’s Women’s Trauma Summit this week, leading sex therapist and author Tammy Nelson outlines the crisis, integration and vision stages of this work in the light of a cultural shift from morality to transparency.