I woke gently bubbling with excitement.  I'm off in a couple of hours or so to Glasgow to join a course entitled "Emotion-focused psychotherapy: Level 2 workshop series".  Sadly I missed the first day of this seven seminar sequence - I was at the October Scottish Mixed Group peer residential.  Hopefully I'll get to all of the next six.  There's a seminar scheduled for today and then one a month from January through until May.  I believe there will be about 20 participants, presumably all pretty experienced psychotherapists/counsellors.  What fun!

I wrote yesterday on "Mindfulness: the missing facet 'describe', and meeting at relational depth with self & others - theory" .  Today I'd like to take this into a practical example.

God guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone; he that sings a lasting song thinks in a marrow bone.  William Butler Yeats

I find the recent paper by Kraus & colleagues a bit scary - "Therapist effectiveness: Implications for accountability and patient care" - with its abstract reading "Significant therapist variability has been demonstrated in both psychotherapy outcomes and process (e.g., the working alliance). In an attempt to provide prevalence estimates of "effective" and "harmful" therapists, the outcomes of 6960 patients seen by 696 therapists in the context of naturalistic treatment were analyzed across multiple symptom and functioning domains. Therapists were defined based on whether their average client reliably improved, worsened, or neither improved nor worsened. Results varied by domain with the widespread pervasiveness of unclassifiable/ineffective and harmful therapists ranging from 33 to 65%.

"The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them."   George Bernard Shaw 

Wednesday morning - half way through this two day workshop with Scott Miller on client-directed, outcome-informed (CDOI) therapy.  I flew into Copenhagen on Monday evening, the plane blown fast from Edinburgh on the last gasps of Hurricane Katia as she slowly expired in her long journey across the Atlantic.  I like Copenhagen.  Bizarrely, having never been here before, I have now visited three times in the last 18 months - the European Positive Psychology Conference in June last year, a long weekend with my wife in December, and now this two day workshop.

I wrote a few days ago about Barry Duncan's interesting book "On becoming a better therapist".  Duncan cited three major influences that had helped to form the book.  The first was his involvement as an editor of the recently published, multi-authored "The heart and soul of change: delivering what works in therapy" - for further details about this more academic publication, see my blog post "The heart and soul of change."   The second major influence has been findings from the fascinating Norway Feedback Project.  As I've already written, the main research paper here is