Yesterday was the third day of the seven seminar "Emotion-focused psychotherapy: Level 2 workshop series" that I'm attending at the University of Strathclyde.  I wrote about the second workshop last autumn in the posts "Emotion-focused therapy workshop series (first post): excitement and why am I doing this?" and "EFT workshop series (second post): client processes and therapist-client conflict".  So how was yesterday's workshop for me?  Irreverently that question reminds me of the joke "The love making was so good that even the neighbours stopped for a cigarette". 

(This blog post is available both as a PDF file and as a Word doc - you may need to 'save' the latter before you can open it) 

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."  Jonathan Safran Foer

"No man was ever wise by chance."    Lucius Seneca  

This post describes the "Needs, beliefs & behaviours" diagrams, best viewable on screen in PDF format (slides 1 & 2 and slides 3 & 4), but also downloadable in Powerpoint format (slides 1 & 2 and slides 3 & 4).  The post below is downloadable as a Word format handout. 

They taught me more about, in the midst of all this trauma and suffering and uncertainty - of remaining true to who you are,
and what love can be about in those moments. And there are three or four of those that really stand out very strongly,
whose lives were very different but who were kind of my teachers.
A therapist describing the impact on himself of working with clients struggling with AIDS

You can access a downloadable Word format version of this post by clicking here.

Fear is the mind-killer ... I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.  Bene Gesserit "Litany against Fear" from "Dune" by Frank Herbert

You can access a downloadable Word format version of this post by clicking here  .

Here are seven recent papers on panic, attention training, and the effects of childhood sexual abuse (all details & abstracts to these studies are listed further down this blog post).  Pfaltz & colleagues report on a novel ambulatory respiratory monitoring system that seems to demonstrate that panic sufferers are not routinely suffering from breathing abnormalities (e.g. hyperventilation) when they go about their daily lives.  The CBT theory of panic disorder would go along with this - panic being seen as due, in part, to catastrophizing about the meaning of experienced physical sensations rather than due to simply having unusual physical sensations.  Shelby et al's paper extends this understanding concluding that with sufferers from non-cardiac chest pain (NCCP) "Chest pain and anxiety were directly related to greater disability and indirectly related to physical and psychosocial disability via pain catastrophizing.