Blog

It was trauma that first led Counselling Psychologist Cleandra Waldron to yoga. During the pandemic, avoidance and burnout were her signals that she needed to throw down the yoga mat and re-embrace it. In the final part of her series, she describes the place of yoga in her life as a therapist today – from strengthening core therapeutic skills and tolerating discomfort to honouring her clients’ courage.

Yoga can enter ‘talk therapy’ in many ways – from one client’s committed practice to another’s curiosity to ‘try it out’, and from transformative experiences to triggering ones. Counselling Psychologist and former yoga teacher Cleandra Waldron embarks on a five-part series about the interconnections between therapy and yoga, including the therapist’s own experience or assumptions – beginning with how she found her professional ‘yoga lens’ through personal trauma

When personal trauma feels unspeakable, collective stories can lend it voice. And when fairytales are offered up for the retelling, individuals can find their own narrative agency and their own creative path through the woods. To mark National Storytelling Week 2024, Transpersonal Art Therapist and Place2Be School Project Manager Anna Atkinson shares a formative experience running a storytelling group for traumatised women.

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.

For many clients who are trapped in the past by trauma, December is the most triggering time of the year. Sensory stimuli seem to be everywhere, relational pressures mount and anniversary reactions abound, while the contrast between the idealised picture of Christmas and the trauma survivor’s internal reality only compounds the sense of isolation. Andy Cottom, a psychodynamic psychotherapist who specialises in working with the impact of war and violent crime, contemplates the timelessness of PTSD – and reminds us of the true meaning of trauma.

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.

How can we better support young people through the complex processing of grieving? Shelley Gilbert is a consultant psychotherapist and child and adolescent grief specialist whose work is informed by her own experience of being orphaned at the age of nine. To mark Children’s Grief Awareness Week 2023, she guides us through the Upward Spiral of Grief – a trauma-informed model that speaks to young peoples’ lived experience of loss.

Deb Dana on befriending our own nervous systems, what to do if we arrive for a session feeling dysregulated – and the real reason she believes some clients suddenly leave therapy.

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’.

Susie Orbach, leading psychoanalyst and women’s therapy pioneer, discusses the huge structural forces attacking contemporary women and their bodies – and reflects on how therapists might help to fight back.