Blog

If the shaping of experience in therapy is a creative act, then what part is played in this by primary and fundamental movements – both the therapist’s and the client’s? Ruella Frank is a gestalt psychotherapist, founder of the Center for Somatic Studies in NYC, and author of a new book about the bodily roots of experience. Here she explains how therapists of all modalities can begin to integrate the dynamics of movement into our work – starting by noticing our own subtle bodily engagements in the world of the session.

How can we help more refugees to access therapy? Is language really one of the biggest barriers – or is it rather our reluctance as therapists to work with interpreters? As we mark Refugee Week 2022, Refugee Council therapy service manager Jude Boyles addresses popular misconceptions about this way of conducting therapy – and shares three moving moments in which client work has been powerfully progressed by the containing partnership between therapist and interpreter.

Therapist or witness, clinical notes or criminal evidence? The Crown Prosecution Service has just revised its guidelines on pre-trial therapy, and Erene Hadjiioannou has been reading them closely. A member of an independent steering group, psychotherapist and author specialising in therapy with survivors of sexual violence, here she weighs up the implications – what’s changed, what’s been retained, and what this is likely to mean for clients’ recovery from trauma.

How can we help clients to access and attend to intense and difficult feelings that may be deeply buried? Susan Warren Warshow, author of The Therapist’s Handbook to Dissolve Shame and Defense and its forthcoming sequel, shares 10 ways in which we can support our clients to turn towards their unconscious affect, from clarifying the nature of feelings to expressing care for these ‘children at the door’.