"The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt. "


Autogenic training: eighth session

26th October 2009

Here are the handouts and recordings for the eighth and final session of this basic Autogenic Training course. The initial "Autogenic relaxation training" page introduces the method and gives access to the previous seven lessons in the training sequence. There are two main themes for this last session. One is …

Assessing and encouraging enjoyable activities

25th October 2009

What we've seen in our work is that most people don't give themselves permission to live until they've been given a terminal diagnosis. Stephen Levine I came across an interesting research study recently: Pressman, S. D., K. A. Matthews, et al. (2009). "Association of Enjoyable Leisure Activities With Psychological and …

Recent research: six studies on emotional & relationship ‘intelligence’ – placebo, warmth, mindfulness, & emotions

22nd October 2009

Here are half a dozen research papers that have recently interested me in the broad areas of emotional and relationship "intelligence" (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting). Kelley et al report on "Patient and practitioner influences on the placebo effect" which in …

Some upcoming conferences in CBT & in Positive Psychology

20th October 2009

The autumn edition of the BABCP magazine CBT Today carries information about a wealth of courses & conferences. Here are half a dozen that look interesting, including three - children & families and a couple of European conferences - that aren't mentioned in CBT Today: ACAMH-BABCP Conference, Croydon, London. Cognitive …

Assessing attachment in adults

18th October 2009

I'm a doctor and psychotherapist who's interested in using attachment ideas to improve how helpful I can be for clients. Awareness of attachment issues informs therapy, it doesn't dictate it. An obvious question is whether it's sometimes worth assessing attachment in a "formal" way. I'm no expert in this area. …

Recent research: six papers with broad social implications – inequality, health insurance, spanking, bullying, and religion

15th October 2009

Here are half a dozen recent research papers with broad social implications (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting). Kay and colleagues publish on "Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things …

Autogenic training: seventh session

12th October 2009

Here are handouts and recordings for the seventh Autogenic Training session. The initial "Autogenic relaxation training" page gives introductory details of this method. In the face-to-face trainings that I run, I would typically start the two hour class by practising last time's Autogenic Training exercise together - in this case …

NHS LifeCheck: online health checks for three age groups - babies, teens & mid-life

11th October 2009

People who have visited this blog a fair amount will know that I'm a huge fan of healthy lifestyle. It's a no-brainer. I've talked about this in Does healthy lifestyle really make a difference?, Common sense isn't common, Would you like to be 14 years younger - it's largely a …

Recent research: articles from September journals

8th October 2009

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 nearly 13,500 abstracts. Every few weeks I scan through all the articles I've found interesting in the previous month (in the general areas …

Some great attachment websites

4th October 2009

Last week I wrote about "A couple of fine books on attachment". Today I want to highlight what a fantastic resource the internet is - below are details of half a dozen websites that offer lots of attachment information, and also details of further websites that are helpful but more …