Blog

Babette Rothschild on controlling empathic imagery, tracking our autonomic arousal in-session, the dangers of facial feedback – and the simple body awareness practices that can help us stay on ‘terra firma’ in the midst of client trauma.

Many people come to therapy seeking to reduce or manage their stress, which we often think of as an unwanted product of our environment. Once work is underway, however, clients may reveal a strong attachment to being constantly on edge. Taylor M. Ham is a marriage and family therapist specialising in stress and anxiety. To mark Stress Awareness Day 2023, she digs into the subconscious beliefs that can keep individuals stuck in a habitual stress response – and shares some gentle questions to release stressed clients from a life of angst and tension.

Ruth Lanius on critical breakthroughs in trauma research, helping dissociated clients to be present with the environment and their bodies – and why we should always begin trauma therapy by honouring our client’s neurobiological adaptive responses.

Ensuring a client’s voice can be fully expressed is essential to the therapeutic endeavour. Yet for refugees engaged with UK mental health services, the channel of communication can be too readily closed. As we mark World Mental Health Day 2023, Refugee Council therapy service manager Jude Boyles reflects on two frustrating phonecalls from the past fortnight, highlighting the urgent need for mental health practitioners to be trained to work with interpreters.

According to the International OCD Foundation, it currently takes 14 to 17 years for someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to receive effective treatment. As we mark OCD Awareness Week 2023, clinical psychologist and anxiety specialist Karen Cassiday outlines the complexities around OCD diagnosis, shares ways to distinguish it from other, sometimes overlapping conditions, and explains why it is so important that clients with OCD are helped to find the right treatment path.

When supporting neurodivergent clients, increasing numbers of practitioners are looking to bridge a gap left by many counselling and therapy trainings. Ruth Williams, a psychotherapist specialising in neurodivergence, including autism and ADHD, has seen both the damage done by ill-informed therapy and the transformative power of attuned, informed, flexible practice. She shares some of the reasons therapists seek specialist supervision in the area of neurodiversity – including the experiences of neurodivergent supervisees.

One of our fundamental tasks as therapists involves establishing and maintaining boundaries. Whether we are offering therapy by video, phone, instant messaging or email, the online space brings with it fresh boundary considerations and complications. Sarah Worley-James, a counsellor and author specialising in online therapy, supervision and training, identifies some common boundary pushes and suggests how we might preempt these in contracting or work with them in-session.

When it comes to bodily difference, how many therapists – both in and outside our client work – may be acting as unconscious agents of an assumed ‘normal’? Marking the publication of his landmark book Different Bodies: Deconstructing Normality, leading body psychotherapist Nick Totton calls on fellow practitioners to question our assumptions about what is an ‘ordinary’ body, from skin colour and gender to neurological makeup and bodily capacities, and reminds us that justice is indivisible.

Advances in neuroscience mean most general therapists understand the importance of working with the body, especially at the intersection of addiction and trauma. But how many of us lack confidence when inviting clients to safely connect with their embodied experience? Ahead of a PESI UK training in Autumn 2023, Jan Winhall introduces her Felt Sense Polyvagal Model – a foundational framework based on ‘Six Fs’ that integrates insights from Gendlin and Porges, and uses playful imagery to help clients track their own autonomic nervous systems.

Clients with addiction issues too often feel cast adrift from general therapy. What can non-specialist psychotherapists do to better support such individuals? Cece Sykes is an IFS senior trainer and consultant specialising in recovery from trauma and addiction. Ahead of a PESI UK training in Autumn 2023, she explains how a parts-based perspective on addictive processes can offer empowerment and hope to both clients and therapists – and outlines an understanding of the addictive cycle as a battle between inner teams of protectors rather than a self-destructive pathology.