Blog

If an ingredient could talk, what would it tell us? If a dish had an identity, what might it be? In her latest blog about her Kitchen Therapy practice, and coinciding with Eating Disorders Awareness Week, attachment-informed psychotherapist Charlotte Hastings explains how her Kitchen Therapy practice incorporates interventions from Narrative Therapy and insights from Self Psychology to help clients with eating disorders develop new and healthier kinds of conversations.

Unattended shame can be one of the biggest obstacles in therapy – and it doesn’t always belong to our clients. How might we spot when shame is operating within us, as therapists, during a session? And what can we do about it? Susan Warren Warshow, author of A Therapist’s Handbook to Dissolve Shame and Defense, shares some typical thought patterns and bodily sensations to look out for, and offers some compassionate reflections to help hardworking but only-human therapists transcend shame.

We tend to focus on how therapy changes clients. But what about how it changes us, as therapists? To celebrate Children’s Mental Health Week 2022, with its theme of ‘Growing Together’, leading child psychotherapist Tamsin Cottis reflects on therapy as a dynamic two-way process, as she shares how one isolated young client’s interest in swimming became the key to a mutually enlivening encounter.

Being able to both self-soothe and to ask for support is a gift we can give children for life… once we adults have developed the skill ourselves. To mark Children’s Mental Health Week 2022 with its theme of ‘Growing Together’, Dr. Martha Straus, leading child and adolescent clinical psychologist and author of Cool, Calm & Connected, explains why those of us who live and work with children, or support the grown-ups in their lives, need to make a commitment to co-regulation.

Self-fulfilling prophecies can trap damaged children in cycles of exclusions and discipline. Early unsafe environments become internal worlds, which may then in turn be projected into relationships with school staff. To coincide with Children’s Mental Health Week 2022, with its theme of ‘Growing Together’, child psychotherapist and director of Your Space Therapies Emma Connor considers how child prophecies come to be fulfilled – and shares some of the relational keys she has found to this difficult but vital work.

How can we best support children’s emotional growth? What do today’s developing minds need in order to cope with tomorrow’s uncertain world? Next Friday, join world-leading specialists for PESI UK’s one-off online conference in partnership with the Anna Freud Centre, and learn key psychological and neurobiological interventions for building growth and resilience together.

What if insight and motivation are overrated when it comes to change? Peter Fraenkel, author and Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology, introduces the approach he has developed for working with clients who feel un-motivated in life and stuck and hopeless in therapy, including the importance of encouraging ‘creative experiments with possibility’ – and explains why Nike might just have got it right.