(A printable copy of this blog post is downloadable both as a Word doc and as a PDF file)  

Last Saturday was the fourth day of this seven seminar "Emotion-focused psychotherapy: Level 2 workshop series" that I'm going to at Glasgow's Jordanhill campus.  I took my bike on the train from Edinburgh and then cycled along the canal and in past Gartnavel Hospital.  There was a woodpecker chipping away high up in the trees as I arrived at Jordanhill.  It was a lovely morning ... the weather showing its creativity with rapidly alternating rain, snow and sunshine ... but mainly sunshine.  

This blog post is downloadable both as a Word doc and as a PDF file. 

This blog post is downloadable both as a Word doc and as a PDF file. 

See the two earlier blog posts - "Therapeutic writing & speaking: inspiration from values (background information)" and "Therapeutic writing & speaking: inspiration from values (how-to-do-it)" for fuller details of these self-affirmation, self-transcendence approaches.

This "instructions" post is downloadable as a Word doc. 

I wrote yesterday about "Therapeutic writing & speaking: inspiration from values (background information)".  Today's post looks more at how-to-do-it details.  Self-affirmation research describes a number of effective ways to reduce stress, clarify thinking, and boost effectiveness.  If the affirmation exercise is being done in response to a particular stress or threat, it's sensible to choose a subject to write (or speak) about that is of real personal importance but that is different from the area that's being threatened.  Happily several other writing research studies suggest additional ways of making this type of exercise even more helpful.  So a standard set of self-affirmation instructions might well involve asking participants to choose a particularly important personal value (for example, kindness,