Blog

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.

Taking a proactive stance against racism means engaging our minds, bodies and interpersonal selves. How can we develop the capacities we need for this essential and often deeply challenging work? Psychotherapist Eugene Ellis, founder of the Black, African and Asian Therapy Network, author of The Race Conversation and co-editor of the new book Therapy in Colour, outlines three core resources to help therapists stay on – or come to – the path of anti-racist practice.

How can we determine readiness for trauma processing? What skills and capacities need fostering in our traumatised clients before we take the next step? Rebecca Kase, leading EMDR consultant and author of a forthcoming book integrating Polyvagal Theory and EMDR, introduces the Preparation Hierarchy – a simple, neuro-informed framework that can help all therapists to pace, and prepare clients for, deep trauma work.

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.

Far from the wishy-washy passivity with which it is sometimes associated, person-centered therapy has in fact been busy taking on new and exciting forms. Ahead of a FREE live workshop this Friday (March 17 2023), leading author and trainer Mick Cooper outlines key developments in this dynamic contemporary field, including shifts around process direction and relational depth, and some proactively person-centered approaches to research.

Interest in ADHD is rising, in both the wider culture and among therapy clients. Yet many therapists know little about the real nature of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and many people with undiagnosed ADHD do not realise it is a central part of their problems. In the second of two posts, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and ADHD specialist Phil Mollon sets out four key tasks for therapy when a client is struggling with this brain-based condition, suggests how we might spot its presence early in the therapeutic encounter, and draws our empathic attention to the central and ever-spiralling experience of shame.

Courage, hope, determination, even aggression – such traits drive us forward, and are allied to the fight rather than the flight, freeze or flop responses. Yet they have also been cut out of many contemporary rewards. Drawing on his recent work around ‘resparking’, Graham Music considers the role of the dopaminergic system, the nature of the ‘internal lifegiver’ and the centrality of risk in therapy as he stands up for the often misunderstood or miscategorised fight response.

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.

How is the upending of Roe v Wade impacting the psychological health of women? In the first of two posts ahead of PESI UK’s Women’s Trauma Summit 2022, reproductive psychologist Julie Bindeman reflects on how the decision to limit abortion rights in the US has reverberated in her clinic, including among clients not ‘directly’ affected by the landmark decision – from the ratcheting up of existing anxieties to the awakening of new fears.