Blog

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.

Time-Limited therapy isn’t the poor relation of open-ended work, but rather a distinct model with its own clinical advantages, theoretical emphases and therapeutic rigour. But working with the ending from the beginning is crucial, and something therapists initially trained in open-ended work may not be prepared for. Here counsellor and supervisor George Leach shares 19 hard-won lessons about the most common ways in which we get time-limited counselling wrong.

Good sleep and psychological health are intimate bedfellows. Many clients seeking therapy will also complain of disturbed sleep, and when worrying about lack of sleep becomes a trigger for anxiety in itself, a vicious circle sets in. Kathryn Pinkham takes sleep so seriously that she founded The Insomnia Clinic, which uses CBT techniques to help people improve sleep patterns and manage anxiety around sleep. To mark World Sleep Day, she shares some tips for working with sleepless clients.

Dreams can help our clients to uncover blocked or unconscious feelings, access a form of guidance, and apprehend the relationship between their mind and their everyday life. But therapists have to know how to work with them, first. Ahead of World Sleep Day tomorrow, Nigel Hamilton, transpersonal psychotherapist and co-founder of the Dream Research Institute, shares his approach to exploring dreams via the Waking Dream Process

Some therapists prefer to leave the world of the brain to psychiatrists and medical professionals, while we concentrate on subjective experience. But advances in neuroscience, and particularly the field of interpersonal neurobiology, have shown just how intertwined our brain and our mental wellbeing really are. To mark Brain Awareness Week, Tracy Jarvis explains why psychotherapists and counsellors should be paying more attention to the brain, and shares some tips for helping regulate our nervous system.

Today is University Mental Health Day, with a focus this year on ‘the power of using your voice’. Student counselling services can be central to this endeavour, especially when the approach empowers young adults to find their own language, make their own interventions, and express their internal worlds via their own fields of reference. Here, psychodynamic psychotherapist Roger Lippin shares some tips for approaching short-term therapeutic work with students, including why Netflix is the royal road to the unconscious.

What do all the different therapies have in common? More than you might think, argues Mick Cooper. Whether we call ourselves person-centered, psychodynamic, existential or CBT practitioners, what unites our work, he suggests, is that it’s all about helping clients go somewhere. In his new book, published today, the Chartered Psychologist and Professor of Counselling Psychology proposes directionality as an integrating concept for psychotherapy, counselling, and beyond. Here, he explains how directionality offers not just therapy clients, but therapy itself, a way forward.

According to a new survey commissioned by Self-Harm UK, The Mix and YoungMinds, a third of 16-25 year-olds in Britain have at some point self-harmed. Despite these rising numbers, confusions and contradictions persist in the way we define and conceptualise self-harm. To mark Self-Harm Awareness Day on March 1, Professor Stephen Briggs addresses the link between suicide and self-harm, and explains why they need to be understood in the context of core developmental struggles.

Eating disorders don’t really have anything to do with food or bodies – that is the contention of Barbara Pearlman, a clinical psychologist who has developed an innovative, neuroscientifically-based treatment. Why is eating disordered thinking so hard to shift? For Pearlman, who has worked in this area for over 30 years, the answer lies in neurological deficits, and the difference between symbolic and concrete thinking. To mark the start of Eating Disorders Awareness Week, she explains how Internal Language Enhancement Therapy (ILET) helps the sufferer reconnect with overwhelming or incomprehensible thoughts that have become ‘lost’ in the bod...

Countless articles have been written on ‘How to get the most out of supervision’. After all, we pay for our supervisory hour, and the time is precious. But does this transactional stance towards supervision mean we sometimes overlook the real issue? For Robin Shohet, good supervision – like therapy itself – is all about the relationship. So he has devised a set of questions to help supervisees reflect on their supervisory relationship – and perhaps kick-start a few important conversations.