I had lunch with a health professional friend the other day.  Later he emailed me saying "The last few times we have met you have mentioned the importance of attachment style in determining aspects of the interaction between patients and health care professionals."  He went on to raise a series of questions about health professional-patient relationships, about the way that the attachment style of both health professional and patient can affect outcomes, about how adult attachment is measured and the possibility of improving attachment patterns, and about links between attachment & mindfulness.  Gosh a lot of interesting questions being raised here.

(this post is downloadable both as a PDF file and as a Word doc)

"O wad some Power the giftie gie us to see oursels as ithers see us!   It wad frae mony a blunder free us, an' foolish notion."   Rabbie Burns

"He who knows others is learned; he who knows himself is wise."   Lao-tzu

I have written a good deal in the past about variability in the effectiveness of psychotherapists - see, for example, "What shall we do about the fact that there are supershrinks and pseudoshrinks?", "Psychotherapists & counsellors who don't monitor their outcomes are at risk of being both incompetent & potentially dangerous" and other posts on feedback to therapists.

I've been asked to give a talk on "Mindfulness and the healing relationship" at a seminar later this autumn.  The brief is to approach the subject via the emerging research evidence.  The seminar organizer may well reduce the number of words involved, but the information I sent him read:

In June I wrote a series of five posts reporting on a pre-conference workshop (about treating chronic fatigue) and the first day of the British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) main annual conference, held this year in Leeds.  Then last month I wrote a further couple of posts.  Now here is the eighth and final report in the sequence:

The last day of the BABCP main annual conference in Leeds was the usual mix of presentations & conversations.  I had breakfast with a couple of delightful researchers earnestly discussing the technicalities of a proposed new questionnaire about genital dissatisfaction.  Mm ... not a very appetising topic over the tea & toast. 

Last month I used Google Analytics to identify the most read pages on this website and I wrote the post "Update on website traffic: the ten most popular blog posts". This got me thinking - "What are my own personal favourites?" I quickly realised that the posts that I've written that have had the most impact on me and my practice as a therapist are nearly always made up of sequences of blog posts rather than just individual items.  I said that glancing back over the last year or so, themes that stood out included mindfulness, therapist feedback, self-control, conflict, embodied cognition and positive psychology.