CPD Workshop: "How to work when therapy isn't working?" ...when the client’s conflict becomes the therapist’s conflict Traditional academic teaching of counselling and psychotherapy assumes that our discipline is similar to any other subject - whether we are learning history or engineering or psychology, there is a body of knowledge and a range of models [...]
Applying Terentius’ (180 BC) 'Let nothing human be alien to me!' to the therapeutic space, I can ask myself: how much of human diversity does my consulting room invite, exclude or ignore? How much is structured out by default? What are the assumptions I take for granted – about myself, about therapy, about the client, [...]
from: Healthcare Professionals Network | Guardian Professional: http://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/views-from-the-nhs-frontline/2014/oct/06/political-attitudes-mental-health-harm-patients-staff We have become ever more used to hearing reports of a failing NHS in recent years. The NHS is becoming ever more politicised, and with it there are unseen and often unpredicted consequences for patients. While this makes providing compassionate and appropriate care more difficult across the [...]
Have you seen my recent blog postings “Different types of embodiment work”? I was surprised by the responses I received: as the content of the original talk was quite specialised, I assumed that it would have mainly been of interest to coaches and therapists who already work in an embodied way. Instead, what I have [...]
The more I am developing, the more impossible it gets? When counselling, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and associated disciplines are called 'impossible professions', this is often understood as a tongue-in-cheek conversational quip, a collective exclamation of mock exasperation: "What can you do? It's impossible!" - and then we continue as before. But I have come to think [...]
In an impossible profession, the therapist needs to fail In the last entry, I suggested that psychotherapy's depth, impact and effectiveness would increase dramatically, if we took the notion of the 'impossible profession' not as a quip, but as an essential reality - as the paradoxical foundation of our work. Today - without yet delving [...]
How do we further continuing development in an 'impossible profession'? In the last two entries, I described the crisis point in professional development that therapists can experience when they are getting in touch with the inherent impossibility of the therapeutic endeavour, and how wrapped up this can become with a disturbing sense of professional failure [...]
