Posts tagged with 'emotions'
Peer residential group, first full day: pain, challenge, sunshine, love & dancing (2nd post)
7th September 2014
After a rather inauspicious start on Friday (see yesterday's post), the next day - Saturday, the first full day of the group - was, for me, deeply wonderful. One of the really special days of my life. An ocean of a day, so much happened. A bit like a lifetime …
Therapeutic alliance ruptures/tensions: description, frequency, causes & effects
11th July 2013
I wrote a blog post yesterday entitled "Therapeutic alliance ruptures: common, very challenging & a key area for increasing therapist (and personal) helpfulness". I think this area is so important that I'd like to spend additional time exploring it more thoroughly. I want to clarify what we mean by an …
"Therapeutic alliance ruptures": common, very challenging & a key area for increasing therapist (and personal) helpfulness
10th July 2013
We had another of our small peer Emotion-Focused Therapy supervision/practice groups yesterday evening. Half a dozen of us were able to make it. We'd agreed we would look particularly at "therapeutic alliance ruptures" at this meeting. As a doctor, I can't help finding the term "alliance rupture" rather giggle-inducing. I …
Do psychotherapists, doctors and leaders develop "emotional chainmail"? Some ways of building both stability and empathy.
28th February 2013
In the last couple of days I've written two posts on the possibility of developing "emotional chainmail" when faced with repeated experiences of suffering ... "Do psychotherapists, doctors and leaders develop "emotional chainmail"? Description of a possible problem" and "Do psychotherapists, doctors and leaders develop "emotional chainmail"? Two kinds of …
Do psychotherapists, doctors and leaders develop "emotional chainmail"? Two kinds of empathy.
27th February 2013
I wrote yesterday about how, at the weekend, I was involved in an hour and a half's deep emotional conflict resolution with an old friend that was witnessed in a group by another eight people. As pretty much always, in the feedback that emerged over the next twenty four hours, …
Do psychotherapists, doctors and leaders develop "emotional chainmail"? Description of a possible problem.
26th February 2013
I've been in a peer "psychotherapy group" residential retreat again recently and I was involved in an interaction that has crystalised a series of thoughts about potential "emotional armouring" in therapists that I've been aware of more vaguely for some time. And in fact these "suspicions" involve not just psychotherapists, …
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": 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 …
Arntz & Jacob's new book "Schema therapy in practice": links with attachment theory and with therapies for self-compassion
16th November 2012
Yesterday I wrote a post "Arntz & Jacob's new book 'Schema therapy in practice: some introductory comments" about the recently published and potentially broadly applicable extension of this Dutch team's previously successful treatment approach for borderline personality disorder. So the authors comment "While schema therapy was originally developed for clients …