Blog

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.

We will all encounter the impact of reproductive trauma in our client work. But we may not always know it. From intergenerational trauma to disenfranchised grief, issues related to reproduction often lie deep beneath the presenting problem, sometimes buried within a family history or silenced by social norms. In the second of two posts ahead of PESI UK’s Women’s Trauma Summit 2022, reproductive psychologist Julie Bindeman draws our attention to the huge range of ways in which reproductive trauma can show up in clinic, and be experienced by our clients.

How is the upending of Roe v Wade impacting the psychological health of women? In the first of two posts ahead of PESI UK’s Women’s Trauma Summit 2022, reproductive psychologist Julie Bindeman reflects on how the decision to limit abortion rights in the US has reverberated in her clinic, including among clients not ‘directly’ affected by the landmark decision – from the ratcheting up of existing anxieties to the awakening of new fears.