Blog

The Society for Existential Analysis has just marked its 30th anniversary with a forward-looking conference. What might existential therapy, and therapy in general, look and feel like in 2048? As existential psychotherapist Cristalle Hayes reflects, change is both an important evergreen theme in therapy, and a pressing reality for the profession itself. Here she passes on ten key messages from the weekend’s SEA conference, which might just help therapists of all modalities face, and embrace, the future.

Authoritarian personalities have preoccupied researchers since the Fifties. But until recently, a vital part of the story was overlooked: the psychological impact of authoritarian people on those they came into contact with. As Anti Bullying Week begins, American psychotherapist Eric Maisel explains why he created the Authoritarian Wound Questionnaire – and how therapists can help to address this important area of client experience.

The spoken word is considered the quintessential vehicle of psychotherapy. Yet, when it comes to auditory processing, we all have our limitations. In fact, our brains devote more resources to visual processing than all other senses combined. Charles M. Boisvert, the co-creator of Visually-Enhanced Therapy, thinks diagrams can serve the therapy session on many levels – and help us engage with harder to reach clients.

Today is the 20th annual National Stress Awareness Day, created by mental health charity Mind to encourage us all to stop and think about the impact of stress on our lives. That shouldn’t, of course, exclude therapists. We work with our clients' stress. But do we make time to notice our own stress levels? A specialist in trauma, stress and neuroscience, psychotherapist and Director of Psychotherapy Excellence, Tracy Jarvis, recaps the science of stress and the neurology of noticing, and offers some simple suggestions for reducing and regulating stress in your system.

If Martin Pollecoff didn’t already have a moustache, he would be growing one for Movember. The psychotherapist and Chair of UKCP has much experience to share about the importance, and challenges of, engaging men in therapy. He started his counselling career at an Alcohol and Substance abuse clinic in Wrexham, and founded The Long Boat Home for ex-services personnel and their families. This November, men’s mental and physical health will once again be in the spotlight. But, argues Pollecoff, outside the consulting room, it is harder for men to talk honestly than ever before.

Thirty years ago, Dr Farhad Dalal published his landmark paper, ‘Jung: A Racist’. On October 13, the London conference of the Confederation for Analytical Psychology invited two African American Jungian analysts to speak about key issues in US politics, law, culture and therapy, including racism encountered in their training. Jungian analyst Heather Formaini asks, what took us so long?

Anxieties and panics aren't merely neurobiological dysfunctions. By heading straight into the core of meaning at the heart of symptoms, therapy becomes a place where a deeper sense of order replaces the apparent senselessness of presenting complaints, and clients awaken to areas of self that have control over what previously seemed utterly out of control.

A New Wave of Systems Theory and Therapy Now Includes Scientific Inquiry. A second revolution is quietly taking shape—a new wave of systems theory and therapy—that marries the wisdom of clinical intuition with the rigors of scientific inquiry. With more precision and accuracy, we can now begin to answer two key questions about relationships: what causes trouble between people and what helps them not merely survive together, but actually rekindle love and delight?

Are therapists more like shamans or family doctors? Explorers of human depths or more like Siri on your iPhone, just directing you from one place to another? I'm a skeptic about whether any clinical approach is good at getting clients consistently to the promised land of transformation. Maybe therapy is better understood as being about breakthroughs—small, medium, and large—rather than about transformation.

I used to get very excited when I thought that clients were about to embark on what I called a project—a course of action that crystallized a problem into a unifying undertaking. But however valuable creativity can be in setting up the conditions in which transformation may take place, change itself requires repetition and commitment to altering habits.