This blog follows on from my previous blog – Existential Therapy. This is how I have interpreted some vital notions connected to existential therapies. Existential therapy is a diverse approach which is used to understand and clarify a client’s problems and possibilities for living their existence. Below are some more of the vital principles (as…
We spend much of our lives online these days and increasingly more services are available online that traditionally would have been conducted face to face. This is the same with psychotherapy and counselling, and there is a growing availability of online therapy services around on the internet. So, is online therapy for you? There are…
What is the difference between a counsellor and a psychotherapist? The terms counselling and psychotherapy are often used interchangeably and many mental health practitioners use both terms to describe themselves. In this article I explore whether there is a difference between counselling and psychotherapy, what that difference may be and why may matter. In very…
Professor Richard Layard, one time ‘Happiness Tsar’, wrote, ‘in every study, family relationships, (and our close private life) are more important than any other single factor in affecting our happiness’. It’s hard to grow and feel safe and content in the world if our family stories are causing us distress and discomfort. This is especially…
The Paradoxical Theory of Change[i] states that we can only change aspects of ourselves when we first become what we are. Likewise, in order to support children’s development, we also need first to see them for who they really are and accept where they are at. This can be a difficult thing to do. To…
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a short-term evidence-backed therapy with a high success rate in supporting clients to move through difficulties in their relationship. This includes one or both partners who have experienced early trauma. It is shown to to be an extremely effective way of helping distressed couples strengthen their attachment bond, particularly where…
“A rich tapestry of intersecting therapeutic practices, all of which orientate themselves around shard concern: human lived experience” (1) What is existential therapy? I’m asked this a lot. I even ask myself from time to time. In some ways it could be described as an attitude held by the therapist. It is certainly, in my…
We are evolutionarily wired for stress. For our early ancestors, inhabiting a natural world beset with predatory dangers the flight/fight response was crucial to survival. The same alarm system exists today for the same survival purpose evolution originally intended. What is different is that today the more likely sources of threat (at least for those…
When working with couples I am often struck by how much they love each other! This may sound surprising – by definition the couples I see in my practice have come to me because their relationship is in trouble. However I rarely see couples who say they no longer love each other. In my experience…
Many people will use the terms ‘fate’ and ‘ interchangeably and it can often not only be difficult to differentiate between the two, but also to understand what is actually meant by them. Both terms essentially refer to predetermined events that lie outside of our control and thus imply some sort of ‘higher power’ rendering…
New, ongoing adult psychotherapy group starting in Autumn 2019 A new, ongoing adult psychotherapy group is due to start in the Autumn – a mixed gender group held at the Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Practice in Hove on Saturday mornings. This group will be guided by group-analytic principles and hold similar aims to psychoanalytic psychotherapy….
Contrary to its intention, praise does not always make a child feel good. Whilst we might typically think of praise as a gift, it is technically an evaluative judgement on the other person (e.g. “you’re a good girl” or “you’re a brilliant artist”), which for some children can be experienced as threatening or even dysregulating…
You might have seen EMDR being spoken about in the media a fair bit recently. Many famous people have been speaking out about how it has helped them with psychological difficulties, most often past traumas, but what actually is it? EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. It was developed in 1987 by American…
Freud believed personality and behaviour come from the unique interaction of conflicting psychological forces that operate on different levels of awareness: the preconscious, conscious and unconscious. He believed these play an important role in behaviour. During therapy, we tap into our unconscious mind to discover more. How Therapy Works Therapy is often referred to as…
Deciding that you want or need psychological help can be a difficult position to arrive at. Choosing the right practitioner to work with can feel like a daunting task with so many different fields of talk therapy, types of therapy and professional bodies overseeing the field. This blog is a guide to helping you find…
Dramatherapy is one of a group of therapies which are called Creative Arts Therapies, along with Music therapy and Art therapy. Today I am going to explore one aspect of Dramatherapy. We usually come to therapy to talk. Dramatherapy has the capacity to go beyond the talking because it is creative. Dramatherapy becomes useful in…
The world today seems smaller than ever before. We think nothing of travelling to once exotic destinations for our annual holiday and more and more of us are choosing to live in countries other than that of our birth. Alongside these effects of globalisation is that of children who are now growing up in cultures…
The phenomenon of parental ‘blocked care’ is a term coined by Clinical Psychologists Dan Hughes and Jonathon Baylin and Psychiatrist Dan Siegal. It represents a central feature of the Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP) approach to treating children and young people with a history of developmental trauma and attachment disruption. Neuroscience research into the areas of…
“Each individual – itself an artificial though plausible abstraction – is basically and centrally determined, inevitably, by the world in which he lives, by the community, the group, of which he forms a part.” Foulkes, S.H. (1948, p 10, Introduction to Group Analytic Psychotherapy, Karnac) The above quote is from Sigmund Foulkes who was the…
Insomnia is defined as being a habitual, or regular, inability to sleep. Whilst it can be linked to medical conditions, the most common causes of insomnia are lifestyle related as well as anxiety, depression and stress related. With regards to anxiety, depression and stress, insomnia is not only caused by these conditions, but it further…