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Do therapists get wiser with experience - or just repeat the same old mistakes?

I'm due to give a talk at the "Cosca Ethics Seminar" in a few hours.  The title is "Do therapists get wiser with experience - or just repeat the same old mistakes?".  The 52 slides make quite a large file to download.  I've put them on Dropbox, so here's the Dropbox link to them as a downloadable Powerpoint presentation and here they are as a PDF file.  There should also be three handouts provided at the seminar - the "Situated wise reasoning scale (SWIS) event", "SWIS questionnaire &am

Complicated grief - how common is it?

I recently wrote a blog post "Grief is our natural human response to bereavementwhere I said that mourning may well involve powerful feelings of yearning, disbelief, anger & depression.  When we have lost someone who has been very important to us, we gradually need to learn to live without them. Reconfiguring our inner emotional lives and our outer activities can be such a challenge.  Mostly though people manage.  It may be hard, but like the body healing after injury, emotional pain also resolves as we hold our loved ones in our hearts but engage more fully again in our lives.  Sometimes though after physical injury, wounds don't heal adequately.  Maybe there is infection or non-union of fractures.  In these situations the healing process may need help.

Grief is our natural human response to bereavement

When we're badly physically injured, there may be horrible pain and loss of ability to function normally. Then though there is typically a gradual recovery.  Scars may be left; there may be some persisting vulnerability, but basically our bodies are wonderful at self-healing.  There are parallels between wounds due to physical injury and wounds due to emotional injury.  For example, when we are bereaved, there may be horrible pain and loss of ability to function normally.  Gradually, over time, our minds & hearts can heal.  Of course, if we have lost someone important to us, we will never be quite the same.  We may always miss them, and remember them with sadness, gratitude and love.  The grief resolves though and we can move on with our lives, even though we continue to carry our loved ones in our hearts ... and this resolution is what they would have wanted for us.

Warwick BABCP conference: 1st morning - trauma memories & a master presentation on four decades of outcome research (2nd post)

Yesterday I blogged about the pre-conference workshop I attended on "Anger dysregulation". Today was the first full day of the conference proper.  Breakfast illustrated the kind of helpful, fun conversation that can emerge at this kind of event.  I talked to Fiona McFarlene & Tara Murphy who were going on to run a skills class on "Exposure and response prevention: adapting skills you already have to the treatment of tics".

If you see a therapist, how many sessions are you likely to need?

Is this one question or many?  If you see a therapist, how many treatment sessions are you likely to need?  Sometimes that's a little like asking "If I go on a journey, how long should I travel for?"  Happily though, we do now have enough research evidence to be able to respond fairly helpfully to this "how many treatment sessions?" question.  To give useful answers though, it’s probably sensible to break the very general “how many sessions?” query into a number of more targeted sub-questions.

Recent research: two studies on relationships, two on body to mind effects, and two on mindfulness

Here are details of half a dozen recent research papers - two on relationships, two on body to mind effects, and two on mindfulness.  Fuller details, links and abstracts of all the studies mentioned are given further down this post.

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