Mindfulness: the missing facet 'describe', and meeting at relational depth with self & others - theory
7th November 2011
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 There are good reasons for viewing "mindfulness" as made up of five facets - see, for example, the post "A better way to measure …
Orlinsky & Ronnestad's "How psychotherapists develop": three key recommendations for maintaining effectiveness
5th November 2011
I have already written a couple of times on Orlinsky & Ronnestad's book "How psychotherapists develop: a study of therapeutic work and professional growth" which reports on their 15 year study of nearly 5,000 psychotherapists in a dozen countries. The first of these two posts looked generally at the book, …
Recent research: articles from October journals
3rd November 2011
I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 16,800 abstracts. Every few weeks I scan through all the articles I've found interesting in the previous month (in the general areas …
Psychotherapists & counsellors who don't monitor their outcomes are at risk of being both incompetent & potentially dangerous
1st November 2011
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 …
Learning MBSR: fifth evening of the course - the value of "difficult" practice sessions & of "concentration"
28th October 2011
Yesterday evening was the fifth session of the MBSR course that I'm attending. I'd missed the fourth session because of my wife's birthday, but I did jot down some thoughts last week in the blog post "Learning MBSR: ... body scan, Damasio on identity, and informal practice". There were seven …
A better way to measure mindfulness: a short form of the five facet questionnaire
25th October 2011
A short 24-item version of the Five facet mindfulness questionnaire - the FFMQ-SF - is downloadable both as a Word doc and in PDF format. Mindfulness is currently a real focus for research, therapy and general interest. To help discussion be constructive it's very important that we're clear what we're …
Learning MBSR: fourth evening of the course - body scan, Damasio on identity, and informal practice
21st October 2011
I wrote last week about the third evening of this eight session MBSR course. The fourth session was yesterday evening and I missed it. It was my wife's birthday and I'd told the course teacher when I enrolled that I wouldn't get to this fourth meeting ... or to the …
Peer groups: Scottish Mixed Group – final morning
19th October 2011
The final morning of the group. Still strong feelings settling from the evening before. Caring for each other. Re-strengthening the group "container". We wobbled a good deal later on on Sunday, but I think everyone can feel good about "keeping the show on the road". Potentially very helpful learning. And …
Peer groups: Scottish Mixed Group – second full day: bumps, maintaining the group, emotions & cognitive processing
18th October 2011
I wrote in the last blog post about the first part of the second full day at Glassie. Later on in the afternoon we moved into a more "bumpy" phase of the group. Often in these more difficult interactions there is the richest learning for everyone involved if one has …
Peer groups: Scottish Mixed Group – second full day: emotional ‘cooking’ in the group, and personal work too
17th October 2011
I wrote yesterday about the first full day of this "long weekend" residential peer group. The second day of the weekend was particularly rich - very nourishing or a bit too much depending partly on one's digestion. So after the usual walks, talks, meditations, long chatty breakfasts, we began again …