Andrew Christensen's "Unified protocol for couple therapy" - the five principles (one, two & three)
19th August 2011
I wrote yesterday about Andrew Christensen's interesting proposal for a "Unified protocol for couple therapy". I mentioned that the protocol involves "five principles". The first of these is to: (1) provide a contextualized, dyadic, objective conceptualization of problems. Good. This makes plenty of sense. It's seeing the "wood" rather than …
Andrew Christensen's "Unified protocol for couple therapy" - overview
18th August 2011
Couple therapy was a major theme in last month's British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies conference and I wrote three blog posts about this. One of several initiatives I followed up after the conference was to get a copy of the book "Enhancing couples: The shape of couple therapy …
Barry Duncan's book "On becoming a better therapist"
16th August 2011
Last month I wrote the post "What shall we do about the fact that there are supershrinks and pseudoshrinks?" on Michael Lambert's very challenging plenary presentation at the British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies' annual conference. Then in the final post that I wrote about the meeting - "The …
CBT is better than interpersonal psychotherapy for social anxiety disorder
11th August 2011
Last month's posts "What shall we do about the fact that there are supershrinks and pseudoshrinks" and "Discussion on the Dodo assertion - all good depession treatments are equally effective" argued for the primacy of non-specific effects in psychotherapy. However in "Rolls Royce therapy and Anke Ehlers on PTSD" I …
Greater good science center & the wisdom of babies
8th August 2011
Recently I was looking at the idealistic & interesting website "Greater good: the science of a meaningful life". Their mission statement reads "The Greater Good Science Center studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society. Based at the University …
"Naming emotions" is another useful self-regulation & mindfulness strategy
7th August 2011
(This blog post is downloadable as both a Word doc and as a PDF file). I was intrigued by a recent research paper - "Subjective responses to emotional stimuli during labeling, reappraisal, and distraction" - from the highly productive Professor Matthew Lieberman. His UCLA social cognitive neuroscience lab's website has …
Recent research: articles from July journals
4th August 2011
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 16,400 abstracts. Every few weeks I scan through all the articles I've found interesting in the previous month (in the general areas …
Guildford BABCP conference: the four main areas I want to use clinically after this conference (eighth post)
28th July 2011
I've already written a series of seven blog posts on this year's BABCP conference. What are the key points I want to take away? I think they centre around four areas. Most important for me is what's been triggered by Michael Lambert's presentation on "Supershrinks and pseudoshrinks" . Secondly, a …
Guildford BABCP conference: last morning and the NICE guideline recommendation on the provision of couple therapy (seventh post)
27th July 2011
The last morning of the conference was pretty abbreviated for me as I needed to catch a train to London at around 11.00am. I went along to the first three talks of the symposium on "Behavioural couples therapy (BCT) in the South-West: New developments." Interesting times. Working in Scotland and …
Guildford BABCP conference: fathers & child anxiety, and more on couple therapy (sixth post)
26th July 2011
Yesterday I wrote about the "Discussion on the Dodo assertion - all good depression treatments are equally effective." What happened next? It was keynote lecture time ... with a choice of four. Probably I should have cold-bloodedly chosen to go back to Don Baucom on "Relationship functioning and adult psychopathology: …