Blog

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.

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.

The school year is drawing to a close amid reports of rising pupil absences and warnings of a ‘national crisis in education’. But what is being done to understand and address the psychological aspects of persistent absenteeism, including unmet additional needs? Suzy Rowland, CBT practitioner, autism / ADHD specialist trainer and founder of the happyinschool project, reflects on the difficult emotional dynamics around what is still unhelpfully termed ‘school refusal’ – and shares some suggestions for improving communication between school, families and children.

A link between anxiety and neurodivergence is widely observed and commented upon by mental health professionals – yet often narrowly understood. To mark the start of Mental Health Awareness Week 2023, neurodivergent therapist Angela Kelly asks us to centre an appreciation of the lived experience of being an individual who learns, thinks or processes differently in a world designed for the neuromajority, including the impact of invalidation trauma.

The unfolding climate catastrophe is a space of collective trauma, shared by both client and therapist. What qualities and capacities are required of us to work in the face of, and within, this existential crisis? How might the pandemic have prepared us for this task? Judith Anderson, Jungian Analytical Psychotherapist and Chair of the Climate Psychology Alliance, marks Earth Day 2023 with a call to therapists to carry both fearlessness and fearfulness in our clinical work – and to step beyond its borders in pursuit of systemic change.

When does child safeguarding become a safeguarding issue in its own right? When child protection procedures are implemented without cultural competence, and without listening to the experiences of the children whose family roles and values are being pathologised. Gretchen Precey, independent social worker, draws therapists’ attention to the traumatising impact of some state interventions as she shares her encounter with one Eritrean teenager whose anxiety, depression and tics told a complex story.

Institutional anxiety, unrealistic expectations around risk, and a corrosive undermining of clinical work… University counsellors are under huge pressure, argues psychoanalytic psychotherapist Alan Percy, and the emphasis on waiting lists is both compounding the problem and missing the point. As we mark University Mental Health Day 2023, the former Head of Counselling Service at University of Oxford considers dynamics at play in the university sector, including media attention around suicides – and speaks up for the vital role and proven value of short-term student counselling.

Shame is an exceedingly vulnerable state that calls for great tenderness and delicacy on the part of the therapist – as Susan Warren Warshow learned through trial and error. Here, the author of The Therapist’s Handbook to Dissolve Shame and Defense and her upcoming The Practice of DEFT: A Shame Sensitive Workbook reflects on the process of developing her shame sensitivity – including requesting feedback, reframing interventions and communicating compassion for internal conflict.

Interest in ADHD is rising, in both the wider culture and among therapy clients – with increasing numbers wishing to pursue, or to understand, a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Yet many therapists know very little about this brain-based condition, which also suffers from misleading publicity and a mis-directive name. In the first of two posts, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and ADHD specialist Phil Mollon outlines its core features, explaining how ADHD can lead to anxiety, procrastination, impulsiveness and emotional overwhelm, and cause much relational difficulty and suffering.

Family feasts, large social gatherings, travel arrangements, lurking germs… For individuals with a fear of vomiting, the festive season can feel like a stocking full of trigger points, prompting heightened anxiety, panic attacks, safety behaviours and avoidance. Anna S. Christie, psychotherapist and leading emetophobia specialist, offers a brief introduction to this debilitating condition – and shares eight challenges that our clients with emetophobia may be facing in the run up to the winter holiday.