Blog

Unresolved birth trauma can lead to clients presenting with depression, anxiety and attachment issues – years, and even generations, after the event. As we mark Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week and World Maternal Mental Health Day, Kate Foster, a psychotherapist and former manager of an NHS perinatal counselling service, explains why therapists shouldn’t confine our curiosity about birth experiences to the perinatal period.

How can we support clients who are struggling with trauma, whether new or historic, during the coronavirus crisis? Schema therapist Dan Roberts discusses threat-system activation, nervous-system dysregulation and maladaptive schemas, and shares his favourite technique for helping clients to create a felt sense of safety.

How can we help children find safety, feel grounded, and express themselves during the Covid outbreak? As we mark Children’s Mental Health Week, arts counsellor Anna Atkinson shares useful creative approaches from her work in a primary school inclusion team – and reflects on when a simple online game might actually be the best intervention.

What is the role of the amygdala in maintaining wakefulness? How can we help clients to get their cortex off the ‘Worry Channel’ at bedtime? Ahead of a two-part live webcast training (1-2 October), Calming the Anxious Brain, international neuroscience and anxiety specialist Catherine Pittman shares her brain-based approach for working with clients who are struggling to sleep.

Hands up whose clients are struggling to sleep at the moment? For those with pre-existing or developing health anxiety, sleep disturbance may be greater during the current Covid-19 outbreak, and concerns over the effects of poor sleep on immunity can create a vicious circle. Insomnia Clinic founder Kathryn Pinkham is currently offering her online sleep programme free to NHS workers – and here shares 8 tips for improving the sleep of clients with health anxiety.

On Friday, UK schools will join others around the world in closing due to the coronavirus crisis. How will family life need to change? Child therapist and Clinical Professor of Psychology Kenneth Barish draws on his conversations with families who are already living through this, to suggest four key ways in which parents can be supported to help children through this time.

The UK is currently in the grip of a colossal identity crisis – something therapists know rather a lot about. With the clock ticking ever louder on the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, Professor Sarah Niblock, CEO of UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP), considers the nature of ‘Brexit anxiety’, and the vital importance of understanding ourselves before we can move forward.