"To reach the other shore with each step of the crossing": zazen, associative thinking & value-driven behaviour (1st post)
26th December 2012
(This post & the next in the series are downloadable combined into a Word doc or a PDF file) "But the future is the future, the past is the past; now we should work on something new." Shunryu Suzuki In 1970 I started to learn meditation with the Cambridge Buddhist …
Our minds work associatively: this is of central importance for psychotherapy and for life in general
24th December 2012
(this post is downloadable both as a PDF file and as a Word doc) In his brilliant book "Thinking, fast and slow" published last year, the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman says his aim is to help improve our "ability to identify and understand errors of judgement and choice ... …
Imagery, associative networks, embodied cognition and the transformation of meaning
16th December 2012
Research on the therapeutic use of imagery is blossoming ... so much so that it can be difficult, at times, to make sense of the wealth of emerging findings. In today's post I want to look briefly at three areas that currently interest me. One is a puzzle about why …
Arntz & Jacob's new book "Schema therapy in practice": rescripting traumatic memories
14th December 2012
I have already written a series of blog posts - both on Arntz & Jacob's new book and on working with traumatic memories. In today's post I want to explore imagery rescripting more fully. The memorably named Mervin Smucker is an important figure in cognitive therapy's development of rescripting with …
Recent research: articles from November journals
10th December 2012
I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 18,800 abstracts. Every few weeks I scan through all the articles I've found interesting in the previous month (in the general areas …
A day spent "idle and blessed": report of an experiment
30th November 2012
In the words of Mary Oliver's beautiful poem "The summer day": Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean - the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of …
Headache & migraine: new NICE guideline
20th November 2012
In September, the National Institute for Health & Clinical Evidence (NICE) published a guideline offering "evidence-based advice on the diagnosis and management of tension-type headache, migraine (including migraine with aura and menstrual-related migraine), cluster headache and medication overuse headache in young people (aged 12 years and older) and adults." The …
Working with traumatic memories: trauma-focused CBT and an introduction to rescripting
19th November 2012
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear." James Hollingworth Yesterday I wrote a post "Working with traumatic memories: KISS (keep it simple, stupid) and the virtues of straightforward prolonged exposure". Today I would like to consider what fuller …
Working with traumatic memories: KISS (keep it simple, stupid) and the virtues of straightforward prolonged exposure
18th November 2012
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." Leonardo da Vinci "It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Antoine de Sainte Exupery I have just written a series of three posts on Arntz & Jacob's new book …
Arntz & Jacob's new book "Schema therapy in practice": links with trauma-focused CBT and Marylene Cloitre's work on complex PTSD
17th November 2012
I've written a couple of recent blog posts - "Arntz & Jacob's new book 'Schema therapy in practice': some introductory comments" and "Arntz & Jacob's new book 'Schema therapy in practice': links with attachment theory and with therapies for self-compassion". In today's post I want to look at ST's focus …