INTEGRA CPD News – INTEGRA CPD https://integra-cpd.co.uk Next-Generation Training & Development for Counsellors & Psychotherapists Thu, 29 Feb 2024 01:30:06 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 INTEGRA CPD Survey: Your Ideas and Preferences for Future Workshops & Events (2018 and beyond) https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/integra-cpd-survey-your-ideas-and-preferences-for-future-workshops-events-2018-and-beyond/ https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/integra-cpd-survey-your-ideas-and-preferences-for-future-workshops-events-2018-and-beyond/#respond Wed, 25 Jan 2017 12:37:09 +0000 http://webappsitesdemo.com/integra-cpd/post_titledsd-4/ As we sometimes do at this stage in the yearly cycle of our planning, we now invite you to have some input into the priorities for our future programme. Here is a survey for you to express your preferences as to what kind of events you would like to see in 2018. The main ideas [...]

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As we sometimes do at this stage in the yearly cycle of our planning, we now invite you to have some input into the priorities for our future programme. Here is a survey for you to express your preferences as to what kind of events you would like to see in 2018.

The main ideas on the horizon are:

1.              Training for Group Therapists, Group Facilitators & Organisational Leaders

This will be the key issue of our March INTEGRA newsletter and is the project most likely to happen, in conjunction with the Oxfordshire project OTS. We are seriously trying to make an impact on the regional provision of mental health services (decimated by austerity), by building up a multi-disciplinary broad-spectrum integrative network of psychological therapies, and especially by providing more - and more varied - access to group therapy.

2.             Mindfulness - Mindlessness - Bodymind Fullness

A couple of years ago I suggested this as a useful topic - some people keep asking me about it, but we need more participants to make it happen. You can read the full proposal here, but this is how it starts: "Mindfulness is all the rage and in fashion everywhere – in therapy, in business, in health. ... But the promise of mindfulness is already flagging, and people are becoming disenchanted with it and disappointed in it. ... As Westerners, we are in grave danger of misreading the Eastern teachings on mindfulness through the legacies of our dualistic, religious heritage. Instead of ‘attending to the body in the body’, as the Buddha taught, the idea of mindfulness can easily plug into our established dissociation between mind and body, and exacerbate the crippling established dominance of the mind over the body ... If confronting addictive mindlessness is difficult, and mindfulness constitutes a challenge, ‘bodymind fullness’ is off the scale – no wonder it’s not usually on the menu. But without ‘bodymind fullness’, we can work our mindful socks off, running past the point of exhaustion just to stand still, and still not get anywhere worth while. Without ‘bodymind fullness’, we're ain’t going nowhere."

3.             Two-chair work

Some years ago I went through a period of running this series of 3 workshops on the nitty-gritty of 'two-chair work' in several places, until it seemed that everybody who was interested at the time had a chance to complete it. But now it looks like sufficient interest might have built up again. It's an eminently practical workshop, focussing on the recurrent problems and pitfalls which arise in using this powerful technique, and how to anticipate and deal with them productively. You can read the typical blurb about this series here.

4.             Narcissism

This topic is obviously socio-culturally and globally more relevant than ever (we are now officially in a scientifically validated "narcissism epidemic",  and you can find all kinds of instructional videos on the internet aiming to protect you from becoming the victim of a narcissist; unfortunately not so many videos are available on owning our own narcissism and what to do about that?). Some of this internet material is plain awful, some of it is fairly well informed, but most of it is lacking in depth-psychological understanding. I had been asked to run a workshop on this theme as it is of general importance to therapists these days, but specifically from an embodied and relational (Shaw) perspective (considering that Body Psychotherapy traditionally hasn't had much to say about narcissism), combining Johnson's character styles with the psychoanalytic controversies about narcissism (Kernberg versus Kohut), plus a Jungian perspective (Schwartz-Salant, Jacoby). This seems like a lot of material for one day, but I guess we could do a whistle-stop tour. I know from some of you that there is some interest in this - you can read the full blurb here.

5.             Body-oriented Supervision Training in Greece (near Corinth)

There is a strong medium-term possibility that we may be able to organise a body-oriented supervision training in collaboration with Body Psychotherapists in Greece. I have met with one of our colleagues in Athens (I have taught a couple of CPD days for her students and tutors and got to know them quite well), and she has beautiful residential place near the sea in Corinth that would make the perfect venue. It's not going to happen this year, but because this will need lots of advance planning for all of us, it may be worth announcing now.

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What’s my book going to be about? https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/whats-my-book-going-to-be-about/ https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/whats-my-book-going-to-be-about/#respond Sun, 11 Sep 2016 18:44:32 +0000 http://www.integra-cpd.co.uk/?p=7200 Many of you know that I am planning to take off the spring term of 2017 in order to start writing a book. There are several books I have in my mind which I think deserve to be written[1]. But as I have previously struggled when writing longer pieces like that, for my first book [...]

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Many of you know that I am planning to take off the spring term of 2017 in order to start writing a book. There are several books I have in my mind which I think deserve to be written[1]. But as I have previously struggled when writing longer pieces like that, for my first book I have decided to go for a project where the structure is fairly self-evident, and I am hopefully less likely to get lost in endless cycles of re-structuring.

The basic idea is that I’ll be writing a textbook, (or training manual) outlining in fairly sequential fashion the possible curriculum for a 21st century integrative-integral-embodied-relational therapy course, and designed for students and tutors as an accompaniment to integrative learning and training.

Inspired by my recent visits to Pakistan, where I have been teaching on an integrative counselling course, I have been wondering about traditional counselling and psychotherapy training and how it is organised and how effective and productive it is. I call it ‘traditional’ because although my own original training was fairly experiential and there is an experiential tradition throughout the humanistic field, since the 1990s much counselling and psychotherapy training has become increasingly academic and less experiential. And in my opinion it is debatable whether - inspite of other beneficial developments in therapy (around trauma therapies, neuroscience, psychotherapy integration, the relational turn) - this has really served our discipline and improved the standard of therapy which the public ultimately receives. Arguably, our trainings are still stuck in the therapy principles of the 20th century - in their left-brain academic educational paradigms, their NVQ-like skill sets and assessment criteria, in their underlying assumptions about role of the therapist in the predominantly ‘talking therapies’, with some lingering sense of the ‘modality wars’ even in integrative trainings.

In the light of what we have learnt over the last 20 years in terms of the embodied, intersubjective and relational foundations of therapy, and what makes therapy work, we can wonder: what are the most important skills, qualities and competencies that prepare a student for the ‘impossible profession’? How would we prepare a trainee - the averagely wounded person coming into training as a student - and how would we allocate the few precious training hours we have realistically available? What kind of learning environment do we think is most suited to maximise attention to the crucial developmental processes that will make a difference to the kind of therapist they will become?
How do we help students reflect on the wounded subjectivity they are bringing to the intersubjective encounter, including their own tendencies for over-identifying or dissociating, for example? How do we facilitate the development of their implicit relational knowing, their right-brain capacities for attunement and attachment, the otherwise subliminal functioning of their mirror neurons, their investment in their own habitual relational positions? How do we help students deepen and enhance their innate emotional intelligence and life experiences, and turn them into resources for the therapeutic position? And how do we help them become aware of their own tendencies, mechanisms and patterns of avoiding or demanding intimacy, or breaking or forcing intensity, their inclinations for surrender versus submission, and their own investments in or abhorrence of therapeutic authority and power – all of these factors are crucial in maintaining awareness in the roller coaster ups-and-downs of the working alliance and its ruptures and repairs.

To access my imaginings about the kind of training textbook that would be needed in the future, I first asked myself the question: if counselling and therapy had not been invented about 100 years ago, but we were to discover and develop these disciplines now, during the first fifth of the 21st-century, based upon …
1. what we now know about primary intersubjectivity, attachment, the neuroscience of empathy and emotion, non-linearity and complexity;
2. what we now consider the baseline post-imperialist values of pluralism and diversity regarding culture and the politics of difference;
3. understanding - as we do with hindsight - the diversity of relational modalities practiced across our field, as well as …
4. the significance of the bodymind connection, embodiment, ‘right-brain-to-right-brain’ attunement and implicit relational knowing, ...
what kind of counselling and psychotherapy practice would we come up with? And what kind of training and learning environment would we consider most suitable and productive towards developing such a practice?

Any such kind of training would necessarily have to be integrative, drawing from all the branches of the field, not cherry-picking a couple of approaches to integrate, but aiming at a broad-spectrum integration that covers all the bases. It would have to be based upon an appreciation of pluralistic diversity, both in terms of culture and in terms of therapeutic approaches. It would have to include pre- and non-verbal communication and some question how to tackle the Cartesian dualism that is still rife across the collective as well as the profession, although it is a paradigm that is widely considered inadequate, unrealistic and unhelpful.

These ideas take me back to 2005, when it was decided that we would slowly wind down the Chiron training and not invite any further intakes of students. We were then involved in writing the Chiron book, generating a snapshot of 30 years of Body Psychotherapy training and where we had got to at that point.
It then occurred to me for the first time that - rather than modelling the process which a student goes through during training on some linear idea of academic learning (or -as we did at Chiron - on childhood development, with the 1st year being considered the kindergarden, the 2nd year primary school and the 3rd year the teenage and separation phase towards adulthood as an independent practitioner) - it would make more sense to model any psychotherapeutic training on the therapeutic process itself.

Based on an integrative, embodied, relational perspective, what is the shape that the therapeutic process takes? Overall, we would think of it as a developmental process at the “intimate edge”, which - like primal attachment - goes through rupture-and-repair cycles of enactment and recovery from enactment, in deepening spirals of descent and transformation, integration, dis-integration and re-integration.

Relationally, such a process starts from the beginning with the negotiation of difference: in order to meet the client where they are (one of our essential principles), we cannot just assume that they know what kind of therapy they need, want or are signing up for - they come with their own conscious demands and unconscious construction, their longings and ambivalences. We want to meet them as the complex fullness of bodymind being they are – the multi-dimensional mysterious psyche of psychology. What we are meant to do together is not at all clear or understood, nor is it - the more we actually take unconscious processes into account - easily clarifiable by customer information, negotiation or clear contracting. On the contrary: we must not presume our own frame of reference as the fundamental terms of engagement.
In order to provide a relational space and container, we want to be immediately sensitive to the client’s habits in the contact, their relational patterns, e.g. in terms of controlling the space and/or being used to having things imposed upon them. Immediately, we are confronted with the self-other dilemma and the vicissitudes of difference. Like Schopenhauer’s hedgehogs, we have the urge to huddle close for comfort, but our defensive spikes impinge on the other the closer we get. In terms of forming a working alliance and working together productively, the only advantage we have over other professions is that we have available a psychologically profound grasp of just how different these constructions of our supposedly joint task may be.

It is through daring to encounter each other - through hurting each other and continuing to risk hurting each other - in an ongoing commitment that the mutual fault lines and dissociations (which we both have brought into the relationship in the first place as degrees of habitual unreflectedness) serve to bring awareness to each other’s sense of self and subjective identity (Bromberg’s theory of therapeutic action). To facilitate this deepening process, to keep making ourselves available to be “used as an object” by the client and to keep providing the relational space when our own “hard, dumb and blind spots” (these are phrases used by Jim Mc Loughlin, an American analyst whose work is mentioned by Bill Cornell in his book "Somatic Experience in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy", which Morit and I are currently reviewing) are touched, a therapist needs to deepen their own capacities for such exploration consciously, developing awareness of being both the wounded and the wounding healer.
When we recognise the kind of edges we come up against in ourselves in such a process, what would be the kind of learning experience needed in training which would maximise a student’s readiness to travel to such places in their practice?

As students, partly depending upon our own previous experience of being clients and our resulting understanding of the therapeutic process, we go through a series of common thresholds in our capacity to engage with the our client’s conflicts and pain, our willingness to be drawn into these conflicts, our ability to learn from within these conflict zones, and then how to make all of that useful to the client’s process.

These thresholds resemble the steps which I formulated in 2005 when I wrote about how the client’s wound enters the consulting room (today I would prefer to formulate it as: client’s wounding enters the consulting room).
The client’s wounding comes into the consulting room and enters the ...
... client’s ‘here & now’ experience as non-verbal process
... client’s perception of the therapist   ( = transference)
... client’s bodymind experience of the therapist   ( = embodied transference)
... therapist’s awareness   ( = situational countertransference)
... therapist’s bodymind experience   ( = embodied countertransference)
... supervisor’s experience   ( = ‘parallel process’)

At around the same time I also worked out a possible curriculum for a training (which might have become the blueprint for a successor of the Chiron training after its closure). And a couple of years later I proposed the associated idea of the three relational revolutions (treatment -> transference -> countertransference -> enactment). My plan for the book is to combine these various proposals now – more than 10 years later - with the benefit of further development and a lot more teaching experience, which gives me some sense how therapists can make use of these ideas in their continuing professional development.

So my intention is to write the integrative, integral, relational, embodied textbook for 21st-century psychotherapy, mainly focused not so much on establishing the validity of these principles (which many others have done by now), but mostly on how we apply them in practice, and how we would maximise our learning as students in those domains.

One of the things I am worried about most is my capacity to make these ideas and my writing accessible, especially to beginners. If you’re willing to help me by reading and commenting upon draft chapter of the book, please let me know.

 

[1]

  1. one book on working with psychosomatic symptoms, the psychological meaning of illness, the psyche-soma connection (from a non-dualistic ‘Reichian-functionalist’ holistic embodied-relational perspective) – this would be on the “8 ways of relating to the symptom”
  2. another book on the history of Body Psychotherapy and its evolution (similar to Stark’s ‘one-person psychology’ towards ‘two-person psychology’, but specifically applied to embodied ways of working and including a critique of ‘traditional Body Psychotherapy and how to evolve beyond it)
  3. another book on the ‘Fractal Self’ and the multi-dimensional nature of parallel process – based upon my extended model of parallel process
  4. another book on the complex notion of the ego as ‘internal therapist’ and the dilemmas which arise from that for the ‘external therapist’
  5. and another book on working with regression, how to access early, pre-verbal states in a variety of ways, but specifically using the mattress and breathwork

 

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‘In Therapy’ with Susie Orbach (radio series on Channel 4) https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/in-therapy-with-susie-orbach-radio-series-on-channel-4/ https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/in-therapy-with-susie-orbach-radio-series-on-channel-4/#respond Wed, 17 Feb 2016 22:13:02 +0000 http://www.integra-cpd.co.uk/?p=6851 Listen to 'In Therapy' with Susie Orbach: 5 episodes (15 minutes each) "Psychotherapist Susie Orbach explores the private relationship between therapist and patient. We join Susie in her consulting room, where she meets a different client each day.   All of the clients are played by actors, but these are not scripted scenes. Each client [...]

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Listen to 'In Therapy' with Susie Orbach: 5 episodes (15 minutes each)

"Psychotherapist Susie Orbach explores the private relationship between therapist and patient. We join Susie in her consulting room, where she meets a different client each day.
 
All of the clients are played by actors, but these are not scripted scenes. Each client profile has been carefully constructed by therapist Susie, director Ian Rickson (former artistic director at the Royal Court, and director of the highly acclaimed 'Jerusalem') and radio producer Kevin Dawson. The client profiles have been given to the actors who have learnt about their characters lives, backgrounds, and individual reason for seeking therapy. The scenes have then been improvised and recorded on hidden microphones at Susie's surgery."
 
What needs to be said, of course, is that Susie presents her own unique and sophisticated style and brand of therapy, an amalgamation of modern relational psychoanalysis (rooted deeply in the British independent tradition of psychoanalysis), feminism and a cultural critique of the objectification of the body. She doesn't attempt a left-brain definition of the discipline, but tries to evoke the atmosphere and feeling of the therapeutic space she creates. This works very well via the radio and the particular setup of this series (improvisation with actors). The basic format is obviously inspired by the TV series 'In Treatment' by HBO some years ago, which in turn was based on Israeli TV series, with a daily episode of a therapy session).
The disadvantage of Susie bringing the listener into her own consulting room, without any general remarks about the diverse field of therapy, is of course that the uninformed listener begins to assume that this IS what all therapy is. The reality is that some other therapists and therapies would respond to the same clients very differently. Once the series is finished, I'll try to discuss what kind of impression we might get from the particular style that Susie is presenting, and its advantages and disadvantages.

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Visionary psychoanalyst Harold Searles has died https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/visionary-psychoanalyst-harold-searles-has-died/ https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/visionary-psychoanalyst-harold-searles-has-died/#respond Sat, 28 Nov 2015 13:02:35 +0000 http://www.integra-cpd.co.uk/?p=6799 Harold Searles has died - see obituary and commentaries on this visionary psychoanalyst. There is also a piece of writing by a psychoanalyst who herself was in analysis with Searles, and describes it in glowing terms, revealing both the limitations of the sub-cultural context of the discipline at the time as well as glimpses of [...]

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Harold Searles has died - see obituary and commentaries on this visionary psychoanalyst.

There is also a piece of writing by a psychoanalyst who herself was in analysis with Searles, and describes it in glowing terms, revealing both the limitations of the sub-cultural context of the discipline at the time as well as glimpses of Searles' humanness and unorthodox authenticity.

And amazingly there is a link to the full text of his brilliant tome: "Countertransference and Related Subjects".

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Sneak Preview: The Handbook of Body Psychotherapy & Somatic Psychology https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/sneak-preview-the-handbook-of-body-psychotherapy-somatic-psychology/ https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/sneak-preview-the-handbook-of-body-psychotherapy-somatic-psychology/#respond Tue, 25 Aug 2015 23:49:11 +0000 http://www.integra-cpd.co.uk/?p=6370 Edited by Gustl Marlock and Halko Weiss with Courtenay Young and Michael Soth This global Handbook of Body Psychotherapy has been many years in the making,  and is now due to be published in December 2015. You can get a 30% discount ($69.99 rather than $99.99) by ordering that book directly from North Atlantic Books.  I spent [...]

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Edited by Gustl Marlock and Halko Weiss with Courtenay Young and Michael Soth

This global Handbook of Body Psychotherapy has been many years in the making,  and is now due to be published in December 2015. You can get a 30% discount ($69.99 rather than $99.99) by ordering that book directly from North Atlantic Books. 

I spent a good chunk of  my available time last year helping to edit this magnum opus, which is the updated English version of a book that was published in Germany in 2007.  It was a grand and magnificent undertaking, by the original editors Gustl Marlock and Halko Weiss, to bring together the very diverse and disparate global community of body-oriented psychotherapists in one big compendium (I wrote a review of that German edition in 2007).
With the body having gained so much recognition over recent years (considering how ignored and neglected an aspect of the therapeutic relationship it had a previously been), this publication is timely. Half of it was originally written in German, and had to be translated now for the English version. Some of the old chapters were dropped, and some new ones inserted, including two that I contributed (these were actually written years ago -  that tells you how long work has been going on to get this published):

  • Transference, Countertransference, and Supervision in the Body Psychotherapeutic Tradition
  • The Use of Body Psychotherapy in the Context of Group Therapy

Here are some juicy snippets and extracts from the ...

FOREWORD by Bessel van der Kolk

Our relationship to our own body determines how we make our way in the world.

Our physical sensations and body movements are the foundations of our sense of who we are.

We have little say over whether our organisms will perceive a particular sensory stimulus as safe, dangerous, or exciting.

We have little conscious control over whether, in response to those stimuli, our bodies freeze, tense up, space out, or mobilize for a fight.

One of the fundamental tasks of our brains is to create a map of the world in order to guide us in how to go about finding food, mates, shelters, and companionship. This map is constructed entirely on the basis of prior experience. Routinely following these internal road maps allows us to deal with any new situations in old remembered ways. Experience, particularly in the first few years of life, profoundly shapes what this map looks like, including our relationship to ourselves. Feeling loved and secure leaves us with a harmonious relationship toward our body, its needs, and its capacities—free to explore the world. In contrast, encounters with abuse, neglect, and domination render us physically powerless, frozen, constricted, immobilized, or activated and offensive—trauma and disrupted attachment patterns cause people to lose their way in the world.

Unless we physically come to grips with the remnants of fear and defensiveness lodged in our physical reality, the imprints of the past may permanently alter whether we feel at home in our bodies and may interfere with our openness to engage in new experiences, and learn from them.

The exploding interest in working with these bodily states has occurred simultaneously with three major scientific developments that support how fundamental bodily function is for effective operation of the human organism:

(1) trauma research; (2) neurosciences (that made it possible to visualize and track what happens in the brain when people feel, think, and sense); (3) attachment research

Although talking and figuring out why one feels bad can be a helpful first step to understand what is going on, it is unlikely to change fundamentally how one physically experiences oneself.

Our minds are much like talk shows on television, trying to explain the day’s events after the sun is down.

Insight and understanding frequently build only strong upper lips.

The rational brain is geared to the outside world, and not inward. The only pathway in the brain from the conscious self to the emotional brain, i.e. the only way that people can effectively influence how they feel, runs from areas in the conscious mind that convey the sense of being in touch with oneself and one’s bodily states (the medial prefrontal cortex and insula) to the emotional centers of the brain (centering on the amygdala), then to the arousal centers, and finally to the hormonal and muscular output centers. This means that working with deep sensations and feelings has the potential of attaining a sense of internal equilibrium and balance. This appears to be the only pathway toward gaining a sense of being the master of one’s own psyche—of being in charge of one’s life.

Most “psychological” problems are rooted within our relationship to ourselves, to our internal sensations that have become blunted, exaggerated, or “stuck.”

Hence, the process of psychological change is fundamentally concerned with regaining a healthy relationship to our internal feeling states.

However, without being able to relate to one’s body as the container of one’s self-experience, true integration, empowerment, and thus healing is not possible.

After regaining a physical sense of one’s self and befriending one’s inner experience, some people may choose to tell the story of what got them in trouble, while others decide to just go on with their lives. Body Psychotherapy helps with both these processes. I can therefore strongly recommend this handbook.

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Adrienne Margarian: Working with Somatic Countertransference, a Cross-Cultural perspective https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/adrienne-margarian-working-with-somatic-countertransference-a-cross-cultural-perspective/ https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/adrienne-margarian-working-with-somatic-countertransference-a-cross-cultural-perspective/#respond Sun, 02 Aug 2015 12:46:04 +0000 http://www.integra-cpd.co.uk/how-is-countertransferential-enactment-worked-through-steps-towards-an-embodied-relational-answer-2/ PsycheVisual presents Video by Adrienne Margarian on Somatic Countertransference In this short video extract from her lecture, Adrienne Margarian summarises her thinking on somatic countertransference, refers to her research and gives a couple of clinical examples. A significant aspect of her research is the cross-cultural dimension -  she confirms that somatic countertransference this significant in different cultural contexts,  both [...]

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PsycheVisual presents Video by Adrienne Margarian on Somatic Countertransference

Adrienne_MargarianIn this short video extract from her lecture, Adrienne Margarian summarises her thinking on somatic countertransference, refers to her research and gives a couple of clinical examples. A significant aspect of her research is the cross-cultural dimension -  she confirms that somatic countertransference this significant in different cultural contexts,  both in terms of the client's and the therapist's background.

She starts by saying: "Feeling nauseous, sleepy, hungry, thirsty, lower back pain, splitting headache … What is countertransference? Is everything felt by the therapist relevant for therapy?"

She then defines 'Somatic Countertransference': when the body of the therapist is activated in the therapy session, thus going beyond the traditional notions of countertransference as thoughts, feeling and images,  including the additional dimension: physical sensations - when the body of the therapist is enlivened or deadened or made to feel something that may relate to the psyche of the client.

She quotes Andrew Samuels’ distinction between ‘embodied’ versus ‘reflective countertransference’ as a subset of countertransference: “There is a considerable difference between on the one hand my reflecting of the here and now state of my patient, feeling just what he's unconscious of at the moment and on the other my embodiment of an entity, theme or person of long-standing intra-psychic inner-world nature. One problem for the analyst is that the two states may seem similar.”

She gives two case vignettes from her research, where therapists reported  somatic experiences in the countertransference:  one seems uncanny and accurate (with the therapist sensations of itchiness tapping into a long-forgotten symptom/illness  in the client's childhood);  whereas the other seems less extraordinary and more generic.

Adrienne Margarian concludes: “Empirical studies have been conducted … demonstrating that many psychotherapists experience somatic countertransference, irrespective of their treatment style. It is of particular interest to the trauma treatment field which has a focus and concern about psychotherapists becoming burnt out as a consequence of vicarious traumatisation. In my opinion, which is shared by some, vicarious traumatisation equates with the physical aspect of the somatic countertransference. To make sense of this, think of how therapists may become hyper-vigilant or prone to exaggerated startle responses after working for some time with trauma patients.”

Whilst bringing badly needed attention to the therapist's bodymind experience, the problem with these formulations now is, of course,  that they are no longer cutting-edge (as they were in the mid-1990s), but somewhat retrograde:  both Nick Totton and I have suggested critiques of the somatic countertransference notion,  in that the very term still perpetuates a dualistic conception,  making it a special instance,  rather than "the thing itself", as Nick says: " 'Embodied transference and countertransference' is not a special sub- category, but the thing itself. If countertransference is not experienced in the therapist's body, we need to ask what has caused this dissociation."

I said a similar thing in 1999: "In this sense the term ‘somatic countertransference’ owes more to psychotherapy’s traditional focus on the therapist’s thinking (as opposed to feeling and sensation) than to clinical accuracy and coherence. In other words: the term is still more a symptom of the return of the counsellor’s own repressed body than an expression of its integration. From an holistic perspective, ‘somatic countertransference’ is like saying ‘a swimming fish’.
But having said that, the term can retain some clinical usefulness if we’re clear that the main feature is not the somatic nature of the experience per se, but the degree to which the body can be experienced as alien. This ‘alienness’ is a function of the client’s body/mind split, i.e. their internal sense of dissociation, which indeed can communicate itself to the counsellor via projective identification. The intensity of the counsellor’s somatic experience is then a measure of the client’s dissociation from it."

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Interview 2 for Psychotherapy Excellence webcast series https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/interview-2-psychotherapy-excellence-webcast-series/ https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/interview-2-psychotherapy-excellence-webcast-series/#respond Mon, 13 Oct 2014 04:35:45 +0000 http://integra-cpd.co.uk/interview-for-psychotherapy-excellence-webcast-series-2/ A series of 10 interviews by Psychotherapy Excellence - Interview 2: How Does Psychotherapy Work? Last Monday I completed the second in the Psychotherapy Excellence series of interviews, with Tom Warnecke, on the topic of how psychotherapy works. This is building on the first interview on the question “What is Psychotherapy?” some months ago. The [...]

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A series of 10 interviews by Psychotherapy Excellence - Interview 2: How Does Psychotherapy Work?

Last Monday I completed the second in the Psychotherapy Excellence series of interviews, with Tom Warnecke, on the topic of how psychotherapy works. This is building on the first interview on the question “What is Psychotherapy?” some months ago. The idea of this series is that a fundamental question will be addressed by representatives of different therapeutic modalities, approaching the question from within the context and background of their tradition.

As I am representing Body Psychotherapy in the mixture of modalities contributing to the series, I was in a bit of a dilemma: what in the jargon we traditionally call the ‘theory of therapeutic action’, i.e. how does therapy do the work it does (if and when it does, that is), is not easy to answer as this is something that has changed radically in my mind over the last 30 years. As I have been proposing over the last 15 years or so, I need to make a distinction between ‘traditional’ Body Psychotherapy, and what I would think of as a modern integrative and relational version of it. These two versions of Body Psychotherapy have profoundly different assumptions in terms of their underlying ‘theory of therapeutic action’.

There is a lot of tension and confusion about this distinction and the relationship between these two versions of Body Psychotherapy - as we know from many other things, ‘later’ is not necessarily ‘better’. This is not just some advertising gimmick: buy now! - the much improved version – better, longer, deeper, cleaner, higher, or whatever. We’re not talking about cars or other technological gadgets where the latest model outperforms and supersedes the earlier one.

No, this is a good example of Wilber’s “transcend and include”, where the later version is only as good as it qualitatively transcends, but comprehensively includes the earlier version - which if you get into the nitty-gritty is ultimately a paradoxical thing, and not a comparison chart with ticks and crosses indicating which version/model has which features, with built-in obsolescence guaranteeing that the later pro version gives you a lot more bang for your buck.

It would be difficult to do the delicate paradoxical integration of these two versions of Body Psychotherapy justice in 50 minutes, but the interview does include some indications.

The interview will need to be edited and transcripted before it appears as a free webcast and then as a download to be purchased within the whole series  - follow me on Twitter (@INTEGRA_CPD) to be sure you receive the information about the date and time of the webcast.


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Political attitudes to mental health are harming patients and staff https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/political-attitudes-mental-health-harming-patients-staff/ https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/political-attitudes-mental-health-harming-patients-staff/#respond Tue, 07 Oct 2014 16:12:31 +0000 http://integra-cpd.co.uk/?p=5051 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 [...]

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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 health service, it is having a disproportionate effect upon care in mental health services in particular.

I have worked as a senior NHS psychotherapist, supervisor, manager – and also academic teacher to NHS staff. I am now clinical director of a private psychological therapy company as well as maintaining strong academic and NHS links. I can see the clinical differences between NHS and private approaches to care.

In recent times the effectiveness of mental health services has been reduced to how much a patient scores change on a range of blunt questionnaires about their mood that are often used incorrectly by clinicians and patients Greater emphasis is placed on these by politicians who incorrectly interpret what the data is saying. NHS mental health services are soon to have payment by results where their overall funding will be based on attempts to square the circle of subjective emotional experience into objective terms through flimsy questionnaire assessments. There is an obvious difference in patients that present to our private clinics compared with those in my NHS practice. Patients I have treated within the NHS paradoxically tend to have higher expectations of treatment than those in the private sector. I believe this is due to political over selling and heightening of expectations that patients are given of mental health treatments, to the point of being simply unrealistic. Ever greater targets have been introduced in order to try and combat perceived failings and NHS underperformance which produces great headlines but has also exacerbated the stress on mental health therapy staff and increases the gulf between Whitehall, patients and services.

I have first-hand experience of the numbers of clinicians seeking to leave the NHS and work privately – our business alone now has near weekly enquiries from excellent therapists and psychologists who are looking to leave the NHS for these reasons: indeed, all of our staff are ex-NHS. This affects NHS patients as more good staff seek to work privately creating serious consequences and leading to what is becoming obvious as a brain-drain of experienced NHS staff leaving more rapidly than ever before. This leaves increasing numbers of newer, inexperienced NHS staff treating ever more complex referrals with even greater expectations placed upon them and their teams.

The solution as I see it can only be a political one, but it won’t happen without pressure from NHS staff and the professional bodies within mental health. Government needs to adjust health policy to reflect the subjective nature of mental health; NHS commissioners should look to the private sector where patients are viewed more qualitatively as individuals rather than opportunities for statistics; and clinicians should think carefully about whether a private or NHS environment will allow them to provide their best level of care currently. I am aware of the difficulties of nationalised industries – indeed my current directorship in the private sector belies capitalist tendencies. However, with something as important as the NHS, a clear message needs to be sent to all that emotional health cannot be compared with physical health, and that NHS bashing disproportionately harms mental health patients in the NHS.

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Subscribe to posts on Organisational Development and Leadership Development https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/subscribe-posts-organisational-development-leadership-development/ https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/subscribe-posts-organisational-development-leadership-development/#respond Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:58:52 +0000 http://integra-cpd.co.uk/?p=5047 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 [...]

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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 had are lots of responses from people interested in leadership development, organisations and business.
In order to respond to some of the questions I received (and rather than laboriously cooking something up from scratch which would cover the same ground), I found these quite copious notes which I prepared for a conference in 2008 with the theme “Body, Brain and Business”.

Originally entitled: “How the brain-bodymind revolution will affect business and leadership development” (2008), I’ll be updating and publishing these notes in a sequence of blog entries, working towards the idea of an organisation as a network of evolving multi-dimensional multiple consciousnesses. Increasingly, the main task of the (sustainable) leader will need to shift from the charismatic provider of the organisational vision to an integral facilitator of the organisation’s consciousness evolution (which, by implication, requires an embodied perspective and stance).

The main idea that is helpful in inhabiting this role and task is ‘parallel process’ (in the way that I have elaborated it over recent years in terms of what I call the ‘fractal self’).

Following the group-dynamic principle that the group expresses the unconscious of the leader, we can recognise parallels between the leader’s internal world and the organisational culture: the leader’s intrapsychic bodymind matrix of multiple consciousnesses is reflected in the synergy (or lack of it) of consciousnesses throughout the organisation. The embodied leader and the learning organisation are only the very beginnings of this paradigm-shifting new trend.

You can subscribe to these postings at http://eepurl.com/4zlAL

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The latest INTEGRA newsletter (Sep. 2014) https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/latest-integra-newsletter-sep-2014/ https://integra-cpd.co.uk/news/latest-integra-newsletter-sep-2014/#respond Wed, 17 Sep 2014 04:35:45 +0000 http://integra-cpd.co.uk/next-iarpp-conference-june-25-28-2015-toronto-2/ This newsletter update is mainly to inform you about the proposed purpose and format of our online enquiry, but it also includes a reminder about a CPD event I am helping prepare which is not to be missed: a 1-day conference with philosopher Shaun Gallagher. To subscribe to future newsletters, join our mailing list.   [...]

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This newsletter update is mainly to inform you about the proposed purpose and format of our online enquiry, but it also includes a reminder about a CPD event I am helping prepare which is not to be missed: a 1-day conference with philosopher Shaun Gallagher.

To subscribe to future newsletters, join our mailing list.

 

 

 

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