Blog

Learning to talk with a partner about sex and intimacy is an important skill, and one we can help clients develop through individual therapy. In the fourth part of her series, couples therapist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author Anne Power explores various challenges and transitions that couples may experience in their sexual lives together – including aging, parenthood, and legacies of child sexual abuse – and shares how she learned as a therapist to broach the topic of sex.

Clients exploring their relationship difficulties in individual therapy are often preoccupied with one of two questions: ‘Is this really the person I married?’ or, ‘Is this truly The One?’ In the third part of her series, couples therapist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author Anne Power observes the various ways in which relationships may begin, including through dating sites – and considers the role of the individual therapist in helping clients work through the fears, doubts, regrets and feelings of loss that can ensue.

When we fall in love, we may be reuniting with undeveloped, feared or even hated parts of the self. In the second instalment of her series about how insights from couple therapy can enrich work with individual clients, couples therapist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author Anne Power looks at developmental and defensive relationship spirals, and shares her concept of ‘the fascinating and the familiar’ as a way to understand what we unconsciously look for in a partner.

How do insights from couple therapy enrich work with individual clients? In her new six-part series, couples therapist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author Anne Power will share what she has learned about couple dynamics and suggest how these understandings and concepts can contribute to individual therapy – starting with the link between attachment strategies and escalating relationship cycles.

Taking a holiday from client work is an important practice that many therapists have difficulty with. As the traditional August break approaches, Dr Chris Irons, a clinical psychologist, specialist in Compassion Focused Therapy and creator of the Self-Compassion App, explains how insights and tips from CFT can help therapists to prepare ourselves – as well as our clients – for holiday season.

Understanding how our individual wellbeing is impacted by the people around us, and by wider systemic and structural forces, can be useful for all clients – and may be particularly powerful for LGBTQ+ individuals who experience self-blame. Brendan Dunlop, author of The Queer Mental Health Workbook, shares a conceptualisation for helping clients to understand the aetiology of some difficulties.

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’.