Blog

What kind of group therapy is most therapeutic, and for whom? In the second of several blog posts about the power of group therapy, Group Analyst and Arts Psychotherapist Anthea Benjamin compares her work facilitating groups formed around sameness and those formed around difference – and considers how homogeneous and heterogeneous groups can variously function to facilitate ego development, address oppression and afford new experiences of identification.

Why group analysis? And why now? With interest on the rise amongst clients and referrers, Group Analyst and Arts Psychotherapist Anthea Benjamin offers the first of several blog posts on this powerful mode of therapy – reflecting on the role of group analysis in healing relational wounding, addressing issues related to power, privilege and oppression, emphasising the formative nature of community and bringing us back into connection.

While much contemporary therapy emphasises the importance of establishing a sense of safety, depth psychological traditions spoke instead of containment. Informed by their experience of gender transition and of kink/BDSM practices, as well as Winnicott, Bion and Jung, therapist and Trans Sex author Lucie Fielding discusses fear, risk, play and states of therapeutic chaos – and suggests clinicians should aim instead to offer clients an experience of ‘boundedness’.

When working with self-harm and suicide in the black community, we need to understand the impact of minority stress and the self-othering involved in adaptation to white spaces. Ahead of PESI UK’s live and online Working with Suicide, Self-Harm and Trauma summit next week, psychotherapist, author and activist Dr Dwight Turner shares how he uses sandplay to help clients explore the unconscious landscape of internalised systemic oppression.

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.

What if therapy’s insistence on establishing a sense of safety is paradoxically causing clients harm? Drawing on lived experience and the concept of insidious trauma, therapist and author of Trans Sex Lucie Fielding questions the helpfulness of the ‘safety axiom’ – both in the context of informed consent and within a profoundly unsafe world – and suggests it may be setting up members of marginalised groups in particular to ‘fail’ at therapy.

In 2017, a group of white therapists came together to explore ‘whiteness’. The group soon gained the interest of people from many different backgrounds. In the penultimate part of her series on exploring colour dynamics, Sonya Welch-Moring describes how her pioneering SHADES Circles are taking forward the task of creating space for ‘uncomfortable and difficult conversations’.

What role does acknowledging difference play in the establishment of a safe therapeutic space? In the third part of her series, systemic therapist and Ancestral Constellations practitioner Sonya Welch-Moring addresses therapist discomfort around discussing colour dynamics, and explains how ‘diaspora dollies’ can help start essential conversations.

The universal languages of play and creativity can be crucial to work with unaccompanied minors who have arrived in the UK seeking asylum. As we mark Children’s Mental Health Week 2021, with its theme of ‘Express Yourself’, Integrative Arts Therapist Sheetal Amin invites us to listen to some of the experiences these children share with her – and reflects on the role of creative practice in helping them externalise and make sense of their trauma.