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.