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Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor – A Mind-Body Approach To Emotional Well-Being

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WHAT IS PBSP?

Created in 1961 by Albert Pesso and Diane Boyden-Pesso, Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor (PBSP) is the most advanced therapeutic system available for emotional re-education or reprogramming. PBSP heals past emotional deficits using unique processes called 'Structures' and 'Microtracking™' that help clients to identify emotional deficits and create 'new memories'. These 'new memories' provide symbolic fulfillment of the basic developmental needs of place, nurture, support, protection and limits. With the inclusion of 'Holes and Roles,' the latest innovation in PBSP theory and technique, therapists learn how to provide a highly effective and streamlined approach to reducing resistance, negative transference, and somatic overload. Many aspects of PBSP theories and techniques have close parallels in recent neuroscience findings about mirror neurons, empathy, morality, and the impact of language on the theory of mind.

To learn more about PBSP theory and techniques

In her book, 'Secrets, Lies, & Betrayals: The Body/Mind Connection,' Maggie Scarf devotes three chapters to PBSP characterizing it as 'one of the most remarkably compelling of the alternative (power) therapies.'

PBSP has been found to be highly effective in the treatment of anxiety, depression, sexual, drug, and alcohol abuse, and many other traumas. It has been employed in family therapy, couples therapy, pastoral counseling, and executive coaching. In 2009, the international humanitarian organization, GTZ, began a program with Al Pesso's guidance to adapt PBSP to address the traumas of rape and violence in the DRC. Therapists utilizing PBSP techniques can help clients to create happier, healthier, more productive, and hope-filled lives. Widely known as "the therapists' therapy," many therapists turn to PBSP for their own personal work.

To learn more about the PBSP therapy experience from the client perspective, To find certified PBSP therapists

"If you want to really learn how to work on family of origin issues, and how to use body information in your therapy, go straight to PBSP and the foremost therapist in that field, Al Pesso." Gus Napier, Ph.D., author of 'The Family Crucible' & 'The Fragile Bond.'

WHERE HAS PBSP BEEN PRACTICED & TAUGHT?

Thousands of therapists have trained in PBSP and it is now practiced by certified PBSP therapists in the US and 11 countries worldwide. Harvard Univ., McLean Hospital, Tufts, B.U., Univ. of Groningen, Univ. of Frieburg, Univ. of Osnabruck, and the Free University of Amsterdam are among the many institutions where lectures and programs have been offered in PBSP theories and techniques.

See how PBSP therapy techniques were adapted in the Democratic Republic of Congo to help victims of the ravages of the war recover from years of traumatic stress disorder.

Training is available in workshops, modular programs, and full certification.

"Over the past 40 years, Al Pesso and Diane Boyden-Pesso have perfected an extraordinarily effective technique, PBSP, providing people with experiences that were missing during their growth and development. The artistry of [the PBSP] 'structure' can be a unique and profoundly life-altering experience." Bessel van der Kolk, Best-selling author of "The Body Keeps the Score" in which he writes about PBSP.

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WHAT IS PBSP? Created in 1961 by Albert Pesso and Diane Boyden-Pesso, Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor (PBSP) is the most advanced therapeutic system available for emotional re-education or reprogramming. PBSP heals past emotional deficits using unique processes called 'Structures' and 'Microtracking™' that help clients to identify emotional deficits and create 'new memories'.

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A guide to living with worry and anxiety.

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A guide to living with worry and anxiety.

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Our world is changing rapidly at the moment. Given some of the news coverage it is difficult not to worry about what it all means for yourself, and for those you love.

We have put together this free guide Living with worry and anxiety amidst global uncertainty.

We have included a mixture of psychoeducation about normal and excessive worry, lots of normalization, and a selection of practical exercises that you, your clients, or anyone can use to manage worry and maintain well-being in these uncertain times. Please feel free to share this widely.

Wishing you well,

Dr Matthew Whalley & Dr Hardeep Kaur

Download (UK English): Living with worry and anxiety amidst global uncertainty (UK English version)

Download (US English): Living with worry and anxiety amidst global uncertainty (US English version)

Download (Afrikaans): Hoe om met bekommernis en angs te leef te midde van wereldwye onsekerheid (thanks to Anneri Victor)

Download (Albanian): Të jetosh me shqetësim dhe ankth përgjatë pasigurisë globale (thanks to Mimoza Gashi, Ariana Shala, Vigan Behluli)

Download (Arabic): التعايش مع انشغال البال والقلق في وسط عالمٍ مُبهَم (thanks to Mohammed Namlah and Jennifer Abou Samah)

Download (Armenian): Ինչպես հաղթահարել անհանգստությունն ու տագնապը ապրելով համաշխարհային անորոշության մեջ (thanks to Margarit Zalibekyan)

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Download (Catalan): Com viure amb l'ansietat i la preocupació enmig d'una incertesa global (thanks to Regina Vila Badia and Judith Usall i Rodié)

Download (Chinese Simplified): 如何在全球陷入不确定餓充满担忧和焦虑的情况中生活 (thanks to Earnest Chiam, Nemo Zang)

Download (Chinese Traditional): 在全球性的不確定因素中過著憂慮和焦慮的生活 (thanks to Cathy Yu)

Download (Croatian): Živjeti sa zabrinutošću i anksioznošću usred globalne neizvjesnosti (thanks to Maja Frencl Žvanut, Aleksandra Drzaljevic, Ines Žabek)

Download (Czech): Jak zvládnout obavy (starosti) a úzkost v době globální nejistoty (thanks to Marie Dvořáková)

Download (Dutch): Leven met zorgen en angst middenin globale onzekerheid (thanks to Isabelle De Smet)

Download (Estonian): Muretsemise ja ärevusega elamine keset ülemaailmset ebakindlust (thanks to Kaidi Peets, Pärtel Poopuu, Elina Kivinukk, Katre Raiend, Ivi Niinep, Lea Treufeldt, Ailen Suurtee)

Download (French): Bien vivre inquiétude et anxiété dans un contexte global d'incertitude (thanks to Laurie Kenny, Anaïs Joalland, Jocelyn Albert)

Download (German): Leben mit Sorgen und Ängsten inmitten globaler Unsicherheit (thanks to Christa Mennad, Rebecca DeWald, Marianne L. Hellriegel, Uta Schmidt-Straßburger)

Download (Greek): Ζώντας με την ανησυχία και το άγχος εν μέσω παγκόσμιας αβεβαιότητας (thanks to Aliki Eleni Pouli, Elli Kouvaraki and Dr Constantina Markides)

Download (Hindi): वैि􏰃वक अि􏰄थरता के दौरान 􏰅चतं ा और 􏰆याकुलता म􏰇 जीना (thanks to Shuja Hoda, Kiran Sharma, Elite Psychology Associates)

Download (Hungarian): Aggodalom és szorongás a globális bizonytalanság közepette (thanks toAnna Adamecz-Völgyi, Ildikó Fogarasi)

Download (Icelandic): Að takast á við áhyggjur og kvíða í heimsfaraldri (thanks to Logi Úlfarsson, Aðalheiður Jónsdóttir, Arnfríður Kjartansdóttir, Einar Kristinsson,

Download (Italian): Convivere con ansia e paura nella globale incertezza (thanks to Ilaria Fonzo and Marion Santorelli)

Download (Japanese): 世界中で不確実性が充満する中、心配や不安と上手に付き合う方法 (thanks to Mie Takaki, Amy Loo, Izumi Takeda, Carlo Francisco, Julia Sun, and Miyu Nakajima)

Download (Kazakh): ҒАЛАМДЫҚ БЕЛГІСІЗДІК ЖАҒДАЙЫНДА МАЗАСЫЗДЫҚ ПЕН ҮРЕЙДІ ҚАЛАЙ ЖЕҢУГЕ БОЛАДЫ (thanks to Saya Tlektes)

Download (Korean): 국제적 불확실성 속에서 걱정 및 불안감과 함께 살 아가기 (thanks to Ho Sung Kim, Nam Hwa Lee, Jimin Kim, Easter Robles, Eunkyung Choi)

Download (Kurdish): ژیان‭ ‬لەگەڵ‭ ‬نیگەرانی‭ ‬و‭ ‬دڵەڕاوکێ‭ ‬لەنێو‭ ‬نادڵنیایی‭ ‬جیهانيدا (thanks to Dyari S. Hama Amin and Marino A. Mohammed)

Download (Latvian): Kā sadzīvot ar raizēm un trauksmi globālas nenoteiktības apstākļos (thanks to Karīna Jaškova, Agrita Rukmane and Kristiāna Kalniņa)

Download (Lithuanian): Kaip susigyventi su savo nerimu visuotinio neužtikrintumo laikais (thanks to Aidas Ramanauskas, Jurgita Radavičienė, Petras Jurkuvėnas, Skaistė Aleksandravičiūtė, Gaila Matulytė, and Giedrė Apanavičiūtė)

Download (Norwegian): Å leve med bekymring og angst under global usikkerhetusikkerhet (thanks to Malin Christina Wikstrøm)

Download (Polish): Zmartwienia i lęk - jak sobie z nimi radzić w obliczu ogólnoświatowej niepewności (thanks to Karolina Kalisz, Monika Wilkowska, Michał Kłak, Ewelina Michalak, Monika Panczak)

Download (Portuguese): Vivendo com preocupação e ansiedade perante incerteza global (thanks to Ana Esther Freire, Dr Miguel Montenegro, Dr Claudio Pestana and um Humano, com Amor (que deseja ficar anonimo)

Download (Russian): Как справиться с беспокойством и тревогой в условиях глобальной (thanks to Lyudmila Grigoryeva)

Download (Serbian): Živeti sa zabrinutošću i anksioznošću usled globalne nesigurnost i (thanks to Dragan Milošević, Milutin Živadinović)

Download (Spanish): Cómo vivir con la ansiedad y la preocupación en medio de una incertidumbre global (thanks to Mariavi Martinez, Julia Carranza Neira, María Sol Garcés Espinosa, Julia Jiménez Guitart)

Download (Swedish): Att leva med oro och ångest i global osäkerhet (thanks to Paula Elovfsson)

Download (Tagalog): Ang buhay sa panahon ng paga-alala at pagkabalisa sa gitna ng pandaigdigang pag-aalinlangan (thanks to Anthony King)

Download (Thai): ก"รอยู่กับคว"มว'ตกกังวลในคว"มไม่แน่นอนครั้งย'่งใหญ่ของโลก (thanks to Sasi Krisanapant)

Download (Turkish): Küresel belirsizlik süre- cinde endişe ve kaygı ile yaşamak (thanks to Özge Selçuk)

Download (Ukrainian): Як упоратись із хвилюванням і тривогою в часи глобальної невизначеності (thanks to Tetiana Kryvoviaz, Антоніна Ящук, Катерина Яковлева)

Download (Urdu): پریشانی اور تشویش کے ساتھ اس عالمی غیریقینی صورتحال میں زندہ رہنا (thanks to Mujeeba Ashraf)

Download (Vietnamese): Sống với lo lắng và hồi hộp giữa bất ổn toàn cầu (thanks to Nguyen Yen Ngoc, Nguyen Thi Thu Thuy, Tran Quang Khoa)

Download (Xhosa): Ukuphila ngexhala kunye noxinzelelo lwengqondo kwilixa lokungaqiniseki kwehlabathi (thanks to Lauren Creese, Esona Bottoman, Anele Damana)

Download (Welsh): Byw gyda gofid a gorbryder mewn cyfnod o ansicrwydd byd-eang (thanks to Felicity Roberts, Manon Elin, and translators through meddwl.org)

Translations

2020-03-22: We have been inundated with many kind offers to translate the guide. If you would like to contribute we have created a Google Doc for each language. If you click on the link you will be able to view & edit the document. Using Google Docs means that the translation effort can be shared amongst many people. If you're having any technical issues, or need us to add templates in more languages just get in touch ([email protected] ). Do make sure to add your name at the top of the document so that we can credit your contribution.

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About this guide

Our world is changing rapidly at the moment. Given some of the news coverage, it would be hard not to worry about what it all means for yourself, and for those you love.

Worry and anxiety are common problems at the best of times, and when it takes over it can become all-encompassing. At Psychology Tools we have put together this free guide to help you to manage your worry and anxiety in these uncertain times.

Once you have read the information, feel free to try the exercises if you think they might be helpful to you. It's natural to struggle when times are uncertain, so remember to offer care and compassion to yourself, and to those around you.

Wishing you well,

Dr Matthew Whalley & Dr Hardeep Kaur

What is worry?

Human beings have the amazing ability to think about future events. 'Thinking ahead' means that we can anticipate obstacles or problems, and gives us the opportunity to plan solutions. When it helps us to achieve our goals, 'thinking ahead' can be helpful. For example, hand washing and social distancing are helpful things that we can decide to do in order to prevent the spread of the virus. However, worrying is a way of 'thinking ahead' that often leaves us feeling anxious or apprehensive. When we worry excessively, we often think about worst case scenarios and feel that we won't be able to cope.

What does worry feel like?

When we worry it can feel like a chain of thoughts and images, which can progress in increasingly catastrophic and unlikely directions. Some people experience worry as uncontrollable - it seems to take on a life of its own. It is natural that many of us may have recently noticed ourselves thinking about worst-case scenarios. The example below illus- trates how worries can escalate quickly, even from something relatively minor. Have you noticed any thoughts like this? (confession: we both have!)

Worry and anxiety physical symptoms

Worry isn't just in our heads. When it becomes excessive we feel it as anxiety in our bodies too. Physical symptoms of worry and anxiety include:

Muscle tension or aches and pains.

Restlessness and an inability to relax. * Difficulty concentrating.

Difficulty sleeping.

Feeling easily fatigued.

What causes anxiety or worry?

Anything can be a trigger for worry. Even when things go right, you might manage to think to yourself "but what if it all falls apart?". There are particular situations where worry becomes even more common, though. Strong triggers for worry are situations that are:

Ambiguous - open to different interpretations.

Novel and new - so we don't have any experience to fall back on.

Unpredictable - unclear how things will turn out.

Does any of this sound familiar at the moment? The current worldwide health situation ticks all of these boxes, and so it makes sense that people are experiencing a lot of worry. It is an unusual situation with much uncertainty, which can naturally lead us to worry and feel anxious.

Are there different types of worry?

Worry can be helpful or unhelpful, and psychologists often distinguish between worries concerning 'real problems' vs. 'hypothetical problems'.

Real problem worries are about actual problems that need solutions right now. For example, given the very real concern about the virus at the moment, there are helpful solutions which include regular handwashing, social distancing, and physical isolation if you have symptoms.

Hypothetical worries about the current health crisis might include thinking about worst- case scenarios (what we might call catastrophizing). For example, imagining worst case scenarios such as most people dying.

When does worry become a problem?

Everyone worries to some degree, and some thinking ahead can help us to plan and cope. There is no 'right' amount of worry.We say that worry becomes a problem when it stops you from living the life you want to live, or if it leaves you feeling demoralized and exhausted.

How to cope with worry

It is natural for you to worry at the moment, but if you feel that it's becoming excessive and taking over your life - for example if it's making you anxious, or if you're stuggling to sleep - then it might be worth trying to find ways to limit the time you spend worrying, and taking steps to manage your well-being. In the next section of this guide we have included a selection of our favourite information handouts, exercises, and worksheets for maintaining well-being and managing worry. These can help you to:

Maintain balance in your life. Psychologists think that well-being comes from living a life with a balance of activities that give you feelings of pleasure, achievement, and closeness. Our information handout Look After Your Wellbeing By Finding Balance discusses this in more detail. The Activity Menu on the following page contains suggestions of activities to help you to distract yourself and stay active. Remember that we're social animals - we need connections to thrive and flourish. We would recommend trying to do at least some activities that are social and involve other people. In times like these you might have to find some creative ways to do social things at a distance. For example, by keeping in touch online or by phone.

Practice identifying whether your worry is 'real problem' worry, or 'hypothetical worry'. The Worry Decision Tree is a useful tool for helping you to decide what type your worry is. If you're experiencing lots of hypothetical worry, then it's important to remind yourself that your mind is not focusing on a problem that you can solve right now, and then to find ways to let the worry go and focus on something else. You might also use this tool with children if they are struggling to cope.

Practice postponing your worry. Worry is insistent - it can make you feel as though you have to engage with it right now. But you can experiment with postponing hypotheti- cal worry, and many people find that this allows them to have a different relationship with their worries. In practice, this means deliberately setting aside time each day to let yourself worry (e.g. 30 minutes at the end of each day). It can feel like an odd thing to do at first! It also means that for the other 23.5 hours in the day you try to let go of the worry until you get to your 'worry time'. Our Worry Postponement exercise will guide you through the steps you need to give it a try.

Speak to yourself with compassion. Worry can come from a place of concern - we worry about others when we care for them. A traditional cognitive behavioral therapy technique for working with negative, anxious, or upsetting thoughts is to write them down and find a different way of responding to them. Using the Challenging Your Thoughts With Compassion worksheet, you can practice responding to your anxious or worrying thoughts with kindness and compassion. We have provided a worked example to get you started.

Practice mindfulness. Learning and practicing mindfulness can help us to let go of worries and bring ourselves back to the present moment. For example focusing on the gentle movement of your breath or the sounds you hear around you, can serve as helpful 'anchors' to come back to the present moment and let go of worries.

Final tips to help manage anxiety or worry

Set a routine. If you are spending more time at home it is important to continue with a regular routine. Maintain a regular time for waking up and going to bed, eating at regular times, and getting ready and dressed each morning. You could use a timetable to give structure to your day.

Stay mentally and physically active. When you plan your daily timetable have a go at including activities that keep both your mind and body active. For example, you could try learning something new with an online course, or challenge yourself to learn a new language. It's also important to keep physically active. For example doing rigorous housework for 30 minutes, or an online exercise video.

Practice gratitude. At times of uncertainty, developing a gratitude practice can help you to connect with moments of joy, aliveness, and pleasure. At the end of each day take time to reflect on what you are thankful for today. Try and be specific and notice new things each day, for example 'I am grateful that it was sunny at lunchtime so I could sit in the garden'. You could start a gratitude journal, or keep notes in a gratitude jar. Encourage other people in your home to get involved too.

Notice and limit worry triggers. As the health situation develops it can feel like we need to constantly follow the news or check social media for updates. However, you might notice this also triggers your worry and anxiety. Try to notice what triggers your worry. For example, is it watching the news for more than 30 minutes? Checking social media every hour? Try to limit the time that you are exposed to worry triggers each day. You might choose to listen to the news at a set time each day, or you could limit the amount of time you spend on social media for news checking.

Rely on reputable news sources. It can also help to be mindful of where you are obtaining news and information. Be careful
to choose reputable sources. The World Health Organization provides excellent information here:
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/ novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public

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Free Guide To Living With Worry And Anxiety Amidst Global Uncertainty - Psychology Tools

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Our world is changing rapidly at the moment. Given some of the news coverage it is difficult not to worry about what it all means for yourself, and for those you love. We have put together this free guide Living with worry and anxiety amidst global uncertainty.

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Love yourself the way you want someone to love you.

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Love yourself the way you want someone to love you.

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This huge thing happens throughout your life - you become able to love in a whole new way.

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The person you really need to marry | Tracy McMillan | TEDxOlympicBlvdWomen

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Dying alone due to Covid19 isolation. Barriers to remote communications.

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Remote Connection with the Dying during COVID-19

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Vulnerability - why are we so uncomfortable with it?

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Vulnerability - why are we so uncomfortable with it?

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Why is it so hard to ask for help? We numb vulnerability because it's too painful. We can't numb the hard feelings without numbing joy and happiness. Why and how do we numb?

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The Power of Vulnerability | Brené Brown | TED

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Anger can be a vehicle for lasting change.

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Anger can be a vehicle for lasting change.

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It's our anger that can inspire us to say ENOUGH.

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We need to look at connection not punishment or shaming.

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Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong | Johann Hari | TED

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“You’ve Got A Friend” by Carole King – sung by London City Voices choir, campaigning for Women’s Aid

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Focus on your body and senses - not the thoughts in your head

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Focus on your body and senses - not the thoughts in your head

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The effects of a crisis on mental health 

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The effects of a crisis on mental health 

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Mental and Physical Health in a Time of Covid

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The 8 relational needs - Richard Erskine - Transactional Analysis

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Therapists and teachers warn of looming mental health crisis | Society | The Guardian

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"Talking therapies" services run by the NHS will be overwhelmed in the autumn when almost 500,000 people who did not get treated during the lockdown finally seek help, according to a major therapy provider. The warning comes as teachers predict a wellbeing crisis among children when schools return full-time in September.

Analysis by Ieso Digital Health claims there will be "an explosion" this autumn in the number of people being referred by their GP for treatment for anxiety, depression and obsessive compulsive disorder. The sharp rise in people suffering psychological conditions during the pandemic will leave England's 54 specialist NHS mental health trusts struggling to cope.

The NHS has treated far fewer patients than usual since March under its Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme, which usually gives people face to face counselling. Before Covid-19 struck about 150,000 people a month were referred to IAPT services in England, either by their GP or by seeking help directly themselves.

When lockdown began many NHS services were suspended and many people either became afraid to access care as normal or stayed away in order not to bother the NHS. Research by Ieso shows that in April - the first full month of lockdown - fewer than 60,000 referrals were made. It estimated that by the end of September just over 470,000 fewer people than would have been expected will have been referred since the start of lockdown. If all are referred for care in October, when IAPT services reopen, then that would leave services facing over four times the usual number of referrals.

Some people didn't seek a referral because they didn't want to go to their GP, or decided not to make a fuss because the NHS was so busy

Sarah Bateup

"One reason referrals to IAPT dropped during the pandemic is that people who were at home because of the lockdown were really worried about having a phone or video consultation rather than a face to face appointment," said Sarah Bateup, Ieso's chief clinical officer, who is also an experienced cognitive behavioural therapist.

"Other people didn't seek a referral because they didn't want to go to their GP, or decided not to make a fuss because the NHS was so busy. Others were more worried about Covid and keeping their family safe than they were about seeking treatment for anxiety, depression or OCD."

Ross O'Brien, the digital innovation director at Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust, one of the country's biggest mental health trusts, said: "There is the real risk that the mental health impact of Covid-19 will be more than the physical effects of the virus. This, coupled with the expected huge increase in IAPT referrals, means we are seeing a very worrying trend.

"Patient referral rates have been alarmingly low since lockdown across IAPT services in England. In London alone we have seen up to a 50% reduction in referrals in March and April," he added.

NHS England dismissed Ieso's analysis as "a back of the envelope calculation that relies on implausible assumptions and guesswork, which will almost certainly not turn out that way.

"No one is anticipating three months' worth of referrals materialising in a single month, and referrals are already starting to catch-up with pre-Covid-19 levels, so it is simply wrong to state that they will stay down at the end of September and create a big backlog."

A spokesperson stressed that services to help people with stress and anxiety have been available throughout the pandemic and that referrals have started to rise again recently.

Fears over a looming mental health crisis have also been raised in schools, with less than 5% of teachers expressing confidence that they will be able to effectively support an influx of vulnerable and traumatised pupils in September, according to research by the Chartered College of Teaching, the official professional body for the teaching profession.

Teachers reported that during the crisis, they were dealing with issues including domestic violence, death of students' parents and grandparents and suicide, as well as needing to direct families to foodbanks and charities for support. In many cases, they said they felt isolated and ill-equipped to provide this advice.

England 'decade away' from decent children mental health services

The study also found that a third of teachers think the crisis has negatively affected the wellbeing of most or all of their students, while 98% thought at least some of their students had been affected by partial school closures and lockdown measures.

Clear concerns emerged for pupils with mental health issues, those living in poverty, students with special educational needs and those without internet access. Around 40 per cent are planning specific support for bereaved or traumatised students. The concerns are already shaping the response to a wider reopening of schools in September. More than half of teachers said their schools were considering how to help children make transitions to new classes, with 44% discussing curriculum changes.

The discussions with teachers revealed that school staff largely want to prioritise wellbeing and rebuilding relationships with students, preferring to allow more time for re-establishing friendships, talking about their experiences and doing outdoor exercise.

Alison Peacock, chief executive of the Chartered College of Teaching, said the findings painted "a worrying picture of the education landscape". She added: "The level of anxiety about pupils' learning and wellbeing is deeply concerning."
Topics

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Therapists and teachers warn of looming mental health crisis

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"Talking therapies" services run by the NHS will be overwhelmed in the autumn when almost 500,000 people who did not get treated during the lockdown finally seek help, according to a major therapy provider. The warning comes as teachers predict a wellbeing crisis among children when schools return full-time in September.

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Find out how to use this script to join with many others who are creating these essential 'pop up' spaces for their teams and colleagues to re-set, recharge and re-commit. Our ambition is to rapidly develop evidence-based content that we can dynamically enhance over time. To help us, we'd really value your feedback through a short survey at the end of this guide. Sources: Major incident Clinical Expertise and associated Literature. Specialist Task Force and Clinical Advisors.

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Find out how to use this script to join with many others who are creating these essential 'pop up' spaces for their teams and colleagues to re-set, recharge and re-commit. Our ambition is to rapidly develop evidence-based content that we can dynamically enhance over time.

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Find 5 minutes to ask yourself 'questions that matter' to help you to develop a quiet mind, and practice kindness and compassion towards yourself, whatever is going on in your world.
For example, it can used when people are by themselves, or perhaps with someone they trust. It can be used before or after a shift, or during down time when people may be reflecting on work finished or planning the next run of shifts. It might be helpful for people who haven't yet manged to attend the team/group version, and it might even inspire some people to run a 10-min Pause Space (#10minPauseSpace) too.

Explanation

Asking questions that matter is one of three teachable compassion habits drawn from Andy Bradley's Compassion Circle practice, the others being Listening with a quiet mind and Appreciating from the heart.

These compassion habits have been distilled into a '10-minute Pause Space' for the NHS.

Some questions work best when we are asked them by others. Working in pairs allows the answers to be both heard and honoured. This also helps us to commit to our intentions for self-care, when we say them 'out loud'.

We can, however, still work with these questions outside of a facilitated space. As an act of self-care and compassion, we can ask them of ourselves. We've called this 5-min Me Space. It can be used before or after work, in your break or on your days off if you prefer. Use it alone or with a trusted friend or colleague, if you prefer.

Start here
Find a quiet moment. Then, using your own name, ask yourself: [YOUR NAME], what does caring for yourself mean to you?
Some people like to speak their answers out loud, and some to make some notes or do something creative to capture thoughts and feelings such as a picture or collage. Others will need to ponder the question for longer. When you run out of things to say, ask yourself: 'and anything else?'

Listen to your own answers with kindness and congratulate yourself for taking the time and care to ask the question.

Remember, some of the most compassionate people put others first and themselves last. Thinking about caring for ourselves often takes practice.

When you have finished answering the first question, invite yourself to commit to a self-care intention with our second question:
'To be wise, kind and compassionate towards myself I will...'
Notice what you have promised yourself. Again, think about how you will move this intention into action: make a note, tell someone else, create a reminder, a process or a new habit. What will work for you?

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Find 5 minutes to ask yourself 'questions that matter' to help you to develop a quiet mind, and practice kindness and compassion towards yourself, whatever is going on in your world. For example, it can used when people are by themselves, or perhaps with someone they trust.

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Sometimes we may experience imposter syndrome, a loss of confidence in our abilities. We may lose the ability to see the positives in ourselves (Internal world).

Try focusing on the external world. Focus on the feedback you have received from others; others believe in you, can you believe in yourself?.

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Can we talking to ourselves in the mirror help? When we feel alone and isolated maybe it can. Try it and see.

Looking in the mirror and talking to yourself does help. ... And the little secret is that saying things in front of a mirror really does make you believe it. It doesn't change anything in the physical world, but it puts strong, focused thoughts in your mind.

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The mirror technique may be the answer to all your problems. The following guide will tell you why...

If we could all have one quality that would get us ahead in every area of life, it would be confidence. Because that's what we need more of, and that's the tool that can help us kickstart every day and be a winner in life.

Confidence is the ultimate success, as even if you don't have the right qualities for a job, or else, you can still do it simply because you believe in yourself to such an extent, that all uncertainty, doubts, and fears are gone. And you see yourself successful before you actually are.

Once you have this mindset, nothing can stop you.

But how do we become so confident in our abilities? What is it that makes us believe in ourselves so much that no outer factor can affect our performance anymore?
By simply talking to ourselves in the mirror.
The Mirror Technique: Definition

The mirror technique is a confidence-building exercise. It lets you use your subconscious mind to appear and feel more confident in a matter of minutes.

Talking to yourself in the mirror: How to do it?

All you need is a mirror. You stand straight in front of it, with your head up and shoulders back. You look into your eyes, breathe deeply and start repeating powerful affirmations out loud.

This practice has a huge impact on many areas of your life if done daily. You don't need any preparation, knowledge, experience or even a little confidence.

All you need to do is look at your reflection and say positive, successful, motivational statements about yourself as a person and your life in general.

How often should you do it for maximum results?

Start with twice a day - in the morning right after you wake up, and in the evening before you go to bed.

These are the two best times of the day for this exercise. Here's why:

What you do first thing in the morning sets the tone for the day.

Your mind is most susceptible in the first minutes upon opening your eyes, and if you engage it in such an activity, the affirmations you'll repeat in the mirror will take your consciousness to a deeper level and you'll feel an instant self-esteem boost.

Then, do it again in the evening to make the effect even bigger.

People often wonder how long they should do the mirror technique each time. Truth is, the longer you manage to do it, the better. But for a beginner, it's going to be hard to keep doing it for 10 minutes from scratch.

That's why you should start small. As we do with every other new behavior.

Do it for a minute today. And for the next few days. Then you'll feel more comfortable doing it, won't forget and will soon feel like it's easy to keep it up for long. That's when you can do it for 5 minutes. Then 6. And so on.

By the time you do it on autopilot, the mirror technique will already be an important part of your daily schedule and you'll be increasing your confidence day after day.

Mirror Technique: Benefits

Here's why the mirror technique is the best confidence building exercise:

* you start feeling more comfortable in your own skin;
* you accept the way you look and behave;
* your communication skills improve;
* each time you do the exercise, you'll give yourself a self-esteem and a motivation boost;
* you'll be more positive;
* you'll start believing in your own abilities and thus be ready to try new stuff;
* you won't feel inferior to others anymore;
* you'll appreciate yourself for who you are and will embrace your good qualities;
* you won't be afraid to look people in the eyes;
* you'll appear more confident in front of others;
* you'll have a higher opinion of yourself;
* you won't have doubts;
* you'll be more decisive;
* you'll set higher goals and will be more confident in your chance to reach them;
* you'll look and be stronger and people will start treating you differently.

What makes the mirror technique unique and practical is the power of the mirror, the effect saying positive affirmations out loud has on our mindset, the benefits of doing such successful activities every single day and the magic of believing.

It's a combination of hypnosis, psychology, pep talk, gratitude, positive thinking, focused thoughts and a strong belief.

Mirror Technique: What to Tell Yourself in Front of The Mirror

Looking in the mirror and talking to yourself does help.

So many successful people are doing it even after they've achieved a lot, only because they know how powerful this little habit is, and how when done daily, can be the one thing that turns their life around.

And the little secret is that saying things in front of a mirror really does make you believe it. It doesn't change anything in the physical world, but it puts strong, focused thoughts in your mind. And they shape your reality later on.

But what should we say to ourselves in the mirror so that we can hack our self-esteem and actually become more confident?

Here are some positive affirmations that will help you feel the benefits of this technique (plus exact lines to tell yourself every morning and evening to gain self-confidence):

1. Your good qualities.

Start saying out loud all the good things you've ever heard about yourself, the compliments you've received, the things you like about yourself, your good sides, the stuff that makes you different from others.

Say things like:

I believe in myself no matter what.
I've succeeded before, I can do it again.
The only limitations are the ones in my head, and I won't let them stop me from going after what I want in life.
I'm an individual and have the right to love, be loved, fight for what I believe in and achieve success.
I'm beautiful and people see that.
I make the right choices.
Every day I get stronger, more experienced and confident in myself.
I have the potential to do great things with my life.

2. Positive things about the following day.

Today is going to be a great day.
At the end of it, I'll be proud of how much I've achieved.
Wherever I go, I'll radiate confidence.
Others will respect me and look up to me.
I deserve the best and only good things are coming my way.
I'm surrounded by other confident people.

3. Confidence affirmations.

I'm proud of who I am.
I'm self-reliant.
My voice sounds confident.
I trust myself.
I look people in the eyes.
I am confident of what life has planned for me.
I respect myself.
I deserve the best.

Other Questions You May Have about The Mirror Technique

How long does it take for it to work?

If you keep doing it twice a day and do your best to say the affirmations in the mirror as confident as you can, you'll feel much better and your self-esteem will be higher in a week, or 10 days.

And from then on, you'll feel more comfortable with yourself after each time you practice the exercise.

Does smiling in the mirror help?

Yes, it does. It makes the technique even more powerful because you're using body language, and not only your mind but your body too believe what you're saying.

Is the mirror technique only for building confidence?

No. It can be used for any other thing you want to believe in. With it, you can change your approach to life, become more optimistic, get over a traumatic event, etc.

I talk to myself in the mirror. Is that okay?

Absolutely.

Some people who haven't heard of this exercise may realize they've already tried it. And that's great.

It's a successful technique so many people use, that helps them believe in themselves and thus achieve more in life. It's nothing more than using body language and the power of your mind to build some confidence.

So that's all you need to know about the mirror technique. Now you have no excuse not to practice it daily and feel its amazing effects.

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The Mirror Technique: A Beginner's Guide to Building Self-Confidence

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The mirror technique may be the answer to all your problems. The following guide will tell you why... If we could all have one quality that would get us ahead in every area of life, it would be confidence.

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Online Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)
This online MBSR training course is 100% free, created by a fully certified MBSR instructor, and is based on the program founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

I'm so glad you found this website! Here you will find a complete MBSR course, designed for people who are not able to take a live MBSR course for financial or logistical reasons. All of the materials used in the live courses I taught, including guided meditations, articles and videos, are freely available here. - Dave Potter

Offering something for nothing does seem a little suspicious these days and I get many emails about this free online MBSR course, many of which ask one or more of the following questions:

The short answer is "yes". There is no catch: no fees, no spam, no cookies, you don't even need to identify yourself or give an email address. I receive no income personally from the site, not even indirectly. Contributions make the course even more accessible to people around the world, but this is not expected nor required - see About Contributions. (NOTE: Some of the videos have advertising, but the ad revenue goes directly to the creator of the videos and not to me or Palouse Mindfulness.)

I am fully certified as an MBSR instructor by the University of Massachusetts Medical School and I taught live, in-person MBSR classes in my community for 12 years. I'm also a retired professional psychotherapist who has had a daily meditation practice for over 30 years, and when I discovered MBSR, I wanted to offer it to my clients and my community. I started teaching my twice-yearly in-person classes in 2004 and, as a service to my students, began to put some parts of the class online. I soon realized that with a little work, the material could be useful to people who are not able to attend a live MBSR class, either because of financial or geographical limitations..

Creating and incrementally improving this resource has been a labor of love, and I'm happy to provide these materials without asking for a fee, something that is made possible given the economies of the internet, how the course is structured, and the generosity of other teachers* who have given their permission to make their teachings freely available on this website. It pleases me to know that anyone with an internet connection, whether they live in Moscow, Idaho or Moscow, Russia, can find and use the rich set of materials here. There is even a way for people without internet to have access to the course.

After reading the letters of completion and practice sheets of more than 6,000 online students from over 100 countries (see Map of Graduates) and having previously taught MBSR to 400 people live and in person, I've concluded that students who complete the Palouse Mindfulness course typically have just as deep an experience as those who complete a live MBSR course (see Testimonials / Gallery of Learning).

One of the reasons Palouse Mindfulness can be as effective as a live course is because you are not limited to eight weeks of learning since you can take as long as you like to fully absorb the teachings and practices of each "week", and much more material is available.

Also, a live course, even one taught by a single gifted teacher, will necessarily be limited in range in terms of teaching style and content, but with the Palouse Mindfulness course, you will be taught, through videos and readings, by a variety of world-renowned teachers such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, Sylvia Boorstein, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Kristin Neff, and Shauna Shapiro (see the NOTE about other teachers* at the bottom of this page).

That being said, you can expect to receive everything Palouse Mindfulness has to offer only if you complete the entire course. This is challenging because it's easy to start a self-paced online course but difficult to finish without regular, live, encouragement. It is for this reason that, for those who can afford it and can fit it into their schedule, a live MBSR course may be a better option than the Palouse Mindfulness course because a regular live MBSR course increases the odds that a student will finish what they have begun (see Live MBSR Courses for alternatives to Palouse Mindfulness which are taught by qualified instructors).

A distinct advantage of the Palouse Mindfulness course is that you don't have to wait for a once-a-week meeting to ask a question or share a concern. There are optional weekly and monthly zoom meetings (see Zoom Meditation & Discussion Meetings) where students can join a zoom meeting that includes a live meditation and time for sharing experiences and/or asking questions about the practices that are part of the course. There are experienced graduates and senior students in all the Palouse Mindfulness forums who can answer specific questions. There is also the option to join the Palouse Mindfulness Facebook group, through which questions can be asked any time, day or night, and there is usually a response within a few hours,
Whether or not you plan to participate in any of the online forums, be sure to check out the Frequently Asked Questions page (see on menu above). The questions on the FAQ page are the ones that have been asked most often in the online forums.

If your native language is represented by a flag in the upper-left corner of this page ( Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, or Russian), you are in luck! All of the core readings, worksheets, subtitles for videos, and audio recordings have been carefully translated by Palouse Mindfulness graduates who are native speakers of that language. By clicking on the row of flags, you will be given an option to go to one of these translated versions.

If your native language is not one that we have translated, it's possible to use Google Translate to convert the course to another language, but the translation is not perfect, especially since the concepts presented in a mindfulness course are subtle and present a challenge even for experienced human translators. That being said, if you'd like to use Google Translate with this course, go to Other Languages for suggestions about how best to do this.

The Introduction is designed to give you a sense of mindfulness and an idea of how this course is structured. For each of the eight weeks, videos, readings and practices help you build a base of both knowledge and experience. MBSR "At a Glance" provides a brief outline of the MBSR course.

All of what you will need is accessible through this website, and whether or not you actually take yourself through the course, the wealth of material here, including videos and writings by the teachers mentioned above and others,is freely available to you.

This course is completely self-guided (there is no registration and only you will be monitoring your progress, using the provided practice sheets). If you successfully complete the eight weeks of practice and study and send the materials indicated inRequesting a Certificate of Completion, we will send you a personal note of congratulations along with a certificate of completion. There is no cost for this. You simply submit your practice sheets and a one page description of what you've learned and how you will be incorporating what you learned into your life.
If you are ready to begin, or if you'd just like to know more about mindfulness or this program, go to the Introduction.
* NOTE about other teachers: Much of the material in this course is drawn from the public works of other teachers and writers who share our passion for making mindfulness available to all. We're grateful to them for helping to make this free Online MBSR course possible. Those who have given their explicit written approval of how we've used their materials include Jon Kabat-Zinn, Thich Nhat Hanh, Tara Brach, Shauna Shapiro, Kristin Neff, Michelle Maldonado, Vidyamala Burch, Lynn Rossy, James Baraz, Ann Weiser Cornell, Daron Larson, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

All videos needed to complete the course, including the guided meditations, have accurate closed captions, with the exception of some that are in the "supplementary" sections or on the "Graduate" pages.

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Online Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) This online MBSR training course is 100% free, created by a fully certified MBSR instructor, and is based on the program founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. I'm so glad you found this website!

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Want to know why? read this and it explains everything.

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Photograph by Benjamin Rasmussen

Jodi Eichler-Levine finished teaching a class over Zoom on April 15, and she immediately fell asleep in the guest bedroom doubling as her office. The religion studies professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania says that while teaching is always exhausting, she has never "conked out" like that before.

Until recently, Eichler-Levine was leading live classes full of people whose emotions she could easily gauge, even as they navigated difficult topics-such as slavery and the Holocaust-that demand a high level of conversational nuance and empathy. Now, like countless people around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has thrust her life into a virtual space. In addition to teaching remotely, she's been attending a weekly department happy hour, an arts-and-crafts night with friends, and a Passover seder-all over the videoconferencing app Zoom. The experience is taking a toll.

"It's almost like you're emoting more because you're just a little box on a screen," Eichler-Levine says. "I'm just so tired."

So many people are reporting similar experiences that it's earned its own slang term, 'Zoom fatigue,' though this exhaustion also applies if you're using Google Hangouts, Skype, FaceTime, or any other video-calling interface. The unprecedented explosion of their use in response to the pandemic has launched an unofficial social experiment, showing at a population scale what's always been true: virtual interactions can be extremely hard on the brain.
Read: What will be the psychological effects of quarantine?

"There's a lot of research that shows we actually really struggle with this," says Andrew Franklin, an assistant professor of cyberpsychology at Virginia's Norfolk State University. He thinks people may be surprised at how difficult they're finding video calls given that the medium seems neatly confined to a small screen and presents few obvious distractions.

Zoom gloom

Humans communicate even when they're quiet. During an in-person conversation, the brain focuses partly on the words being spoken, but it also derives additional meaning from dozens of non-verbal cues, such as whether someone is facing you or slightly turned away, if they're fidgeting while you talk, or if they inhale quickly in preparation to interrupt.

These cues help paint a holistic picture of what is being conveyed and what's expected in response from the listener. Since humans evolved as social animals, perceiving these cues comes naturally to most of us, takes little conscious effort to parse, and can lay the groundwork for emotional intimacy.

However, a typical video call impairs these ingrained abilities, and requires sustained and intense attention to words instead. If a person is framed only from the shoulders up, the possibility of viewing hand gestures or other body language is eliminated. If the video quality is poor, any hope of gleaning something from minute facial expressions is dashed.

"For somebody who's really dependent on those non-verbal cues, it can be a big drain not to have them," Franklin says. Prolonged eye contact has become the strongest facial cue readily available, and it can feel threatening or overly intimate if held too long.

Multi-person screens magnify this exhausting problem. Gallery view-where all meeting participants appear Brady Bunch-style-challenges the brain's central vision, forcing it to decode so many people at once that no one comes through meaningfully, not even the speaker.

"We're engaged in numerous activities, but never fully devoting ourselves to focus on anything in particular," says Franklin. Psychologists call this continuous partial attention, and it applies as much to virtual environments as it does to real ones. Think of how hard it would be to cook and read at the same time. That's the kind of multi-tasking your brain is trying, and often failing, to navigate in a group video chat.

This leads to problems in which group video chats become less collaborative and more like siloed panels, in which only two people at a time talk while the rest listen. Because each participant is using one audio stream and is aware of all the other voices, parallel conversations are impossible. If you view a single speaker at a time, you can't recognise how non-active participants are behaving-something you would normally pick up with peripheral vision.

For some people, the prolonged split in attention creates a perplexing sense of being drained while having accomplished nothing. The brain becomes overwhelmed by unfamiliar excess stimuli while being hyper-focused on searching for non-verbal cues that it can't find.

That's why a traditional phone call may be less taxing on the brain, Franklin says, because it delivers on a small promise: to convey only a voice.

Zoom boon

By contrast, the sudden shift to video calls has been a boon for people who have neurological difficulty with in-person exchanges, such as those with autism who can become overwhelmed by multiple people talking.

John Upton, an editor at the New Jersey-based news outlet Climate Central, recently found out he is autistic. Late last year, he was struggling with the mental load of attending packed conferences, engaging during in-person meetings, and navigating the small-talk that's common in work places. He says these experiences caused "an ambiguous tension, a form of anxiety."

If you're feeling self-conscious or overstimulated, turn off your camera and save your energy for when you absolutely want to perceive the few non-verbal cues that do come through.

Photograph by Benjamin Rasmussen

" If you're feeling self-conscious or overstimulated, Normand recommends you turn off your camera."

As a result, he suffered a bout of autistic burnout and struggled to process complicated information-which he says is normally his strength-leading to feelings of helplessness and futility. To combat the issue, he began transitioning to working mostly from home and stacking all in-person meetings on Thursdays, to get them out of the way.

Now that the pandemic has pushed his coworkers to be remote as well, he has observed their video calls lead to fewer people talking and less filler conversation at the beginning and end of each meeting. Upton says his sense of tension and anxiety has been reduced to the point of being negligible.

This outcome is supported by research, says the University of Québec Outaouais's Claude Normand, who studies how people with developmental and intellectual disabilities socialise online. People with autism tend to have difficulty understanding when it's their turn to speak in live conversations, she notes. That's why the frequent lag between speakers on video calls may actually help some autistic people. "When you're Zooming online, it's clear whose turn it is to talk," Normand says.

However, other people on the autism spectrum may still struggle with video chatting, as it can exacerbate sensory triggers such as loud noise and bright lights, she adds.

On the whole, video chatting has allowed human connections to flourish in ways that would have been impossible just a few years ago. These tools enable us to maintain long-distance relationships, connect workrooms remotely, and even now, in spite of the mental exhaustion they can generate, foster some sense of togetherness during a pandemic.

It's even possible Zoom fatigue will abate once people learn to navigate the mental tangle video chatting can cause. If you're feeling self-conscious or overstimulated, Normand recommends you turn off your camera. Save your energy for when you absolutely want to perceive the few non-verbal cues that do come through, such as during the taxing chats with people you don't know very well, or for when you want the warm fuzzies you get from seeing someone you love. Or if it's a work meeting that can be done by phone, try walking at the same time.

"Walking meetings are known to improve creativity, and probably reduce stress as well," Normand says.

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'Zoom fatigue' is taxing the brain. Here's why that happens.

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Photograph by Benjamin Rasmussen Jodi Eichler-Levine finished teaching a class over Zoom on April 15, and she immediately fell asleep in the guest bedroom doubling as her office. The religion studies professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania says that while teaching is always exhausting, she has never "conked out" like that before.

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Someone's views around Covid and how it effects us mentally. How do you respond to the bear that is Covid19?

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Someone's views around Covid and how it effects us mentally. How do you respond to the bear that is Covid19?

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Why is 'resilience' such a buzzword at the moment? In this edition of the Why Factor, Abby Hollick asks, what exactly is resilience and why do some people cope better than others?

Resilience is one of the buzzwords of the moment with multiple self-helps books and motivational speakers all promising us we can learn to be resilient, and use this skill to manage our pain. But what exactly is resilience and why does it help some people to cope better in times of stress than others?

In this Why Factor, Abby Hollick examines why some people, in the face of trauma, seem to be extraordinarily resilient and tests her own inner reserves to discover if she is naturally resilient or not.

Dr David Westley, head of psychology at Middlesex University
Ann Masten, professor at the University of Minnesota
Lucy Wairimu Mkuria, psychologist
Dr Nimmi Hutnik, author of Becoming Resilient: Cognitive Behaviour Therapy to Transform Your Life
Melanie Reid, journalist for The Times
Dr Atle Dyregrov, clinical psychologist and Director of the Centre for Crisis Psychology in Bergen.

Presenter and Producer: Abby Hollick
Editor: Andrew Smith

(Photo: Man being rescued by two firefighters. Credit: Getty Images / Stock Photo)

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BBC World Service - The Why Factor, Resilience

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Why is 'resilience' such a buzzword at the moment? In this edition of the Why Factor, Abby Hollick asks, what exactly is resilience and why do some people cope better than others? Resilience is one of the buzzwords of the moment with multiple self-helps books and motivational speakers all promising us we can learn to be resilient, and use this skill to manage our pain.

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Can I be Person-Centred and Pluralistic?

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Can I be Person-Centred and Pluralistic?

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Ani de la Prida, creative arts counsellor, psychotherapist, founder of the Association for Person Centred Creative Arts, and lecturer at the University of East London

I have been a passionate person-centred therapist and trainer for many years. A couple of years ago I attended the pluralistic conference in London, and something in me changed. I felt like I'd come home. I felt I belonged. It was quite a profound experience. One that challenged my therapist identity and made me question my deeply held philosophies and beliefs about growth and therapy.

Am I pluralistic? Does that mean I am not person-centred? Can I be person-centred and pluralistic, are they compatible? I had been considering these questions for a long while when I came across a paper Unnecessary and incompatible: a critical response to Cooper and McLeod's conceptualization of a pluralistic framework for person-centred therapy. It states that the pluralistic approach is unnecessary, that the person-centred approach is in effect pluralistic at its heart, and that the pluralistic approach is simply old wine in new bottles. Whilst my blog post isn't an academic or a critical response to the paper, my very personal response here to this critique has grown in richness from my reading of the paper and from some valuable discussions with the author.

I know that the person-centred approach works, it has been extensively researched and shown to be one, if not the most, effective way of working. More important to me than the research is my experience, and I have worked with a person-centred approach for twenty years and know for myself how powerful and effective it can be.

The person-centred approach comes in for much criticism. Partly I think this stems from its phenomenological philosophy which can translate into a belief that experience trumps research. This is a philosophical view that is often dismissed and devalued in the current positivist climate, which values science over experience and tends towards promoting manualised therapies.

As therapists, our approaches are very tied up with our identities: a therapist often says 'I am person-centred,' for example. So, when someone says that the person-centred approach isn't effective, or that it isn't enough on its own, it can feel personal. And it seems to me that the person-centred field and its research is caught up (understandably) in defending the approach, in consistently wanting to prove, to a positivist world, that it is effective. This is a position that builds walls and shoots arrows in its defence: that can be critical of other approaches in what feels like a therapy war.

The pluralistic approach seems to have a looser, more inclusive philosophy, one that accepts a diversity of views and positions. Not in the sense of simply tolerating other approaches, but in a genuine spirit of actively valuing diversity. I really like that there isn't one way to be pluralistic. You may be at the other end of the spectrum to my practice and philosophy, but if we are both pluralistic there is some space perhaps where we can find common ground. For example, if you practice CBT pluralistically and I practice person-centred therapy pluralistically we share some common ground in that we both value the collaborative aspects of therapy.

The person-centred approach holds that the six conditions are necessary and sufficient, nothing else is needed. I agree and, in my experience, I have found that to be true. But-and for me a number of 'buts' have emerged-the concept of 'sufficient' feels to me to be a little dry. For example, we know we can survive on bread and water, it is sufficient. But... maybe a little jam or marmite would be nice? Jam doesn't stop the bread being bread, but it does have the effect of enhancing it.

The pluralistic approach seems to be asking the same question, what might enhance the therapeutic process. To be more specific, what might make this therapy with this client more effective. It encourages me to be more actively interested in what each client wants, to ask each client if they prefer jam, or chocolate spread, or marmite. This doesn't mean that I have discarded my trust in the actualising tendency, but it does encourage me to approach each therapeutic encounter more flexibly. Working in a person-centred way doesn't feel so flexible.

I originally trained with and was supervised by Liesl Silverstone in using a person-centred approach to arts therapy. In our sessions I often wanted to bring new art materials like glitter to the session. Liesl said 'no', glitter isn't necessary, pencils and pastels are enough. They are sufficient. She felt glitter was superficial and might distract from the essence of the process. True, maybe, some of the time.

Obviously, I did bring glitter to sessions with Liesl, and also to sessions with clients. What I learned is that for some clients glitter makes a difference. Glitter doesn't necessarily detract from the process; it often enhances it. That is if it is offered congruently without any attachment on my part to the client using it. And therapeutic congruence takes time, and training to develop.

Using glitter doesn't really sit comfortably within a person-centred approach, if glitter is seen, or used as a technique. But perhaps glitter, or marmite, or actively seeking preferences might actually, some of the time, enhance some clients' experiences of the six conditions?

That I am able to use glitter, and it can enhance therapy, doesn't mean that if another therapist brings glitter into their therapy it will have the same effect. It won't help all clients.

Isn't that annoying? Wouldn't it be great if we could manualise therapy and say 'this works,' 'glitter works,' so let's just all use glitter? But good therapy isn't and shouldn't be like that.

I think good therapy is about asking what will help this client at this time. It's about being open to-but not attached to-the use of glitter, or marmite, or something new that a client suggests.

In response to clients over the years I have developed how I work to include digital media (texting, emails, iPad, art apps, Google) as well as guided visualisations, breathing techniques, outdoor work, and even occasionally smoothie bowl homework (an exercise I created to therapeutically create, decorate, photograph, and eat healthy bowls of food, you can read more here). Most often these have been introduced at a client's request, but, and here is another but...sometimes at my suggestion. Always tentatively, always with careful consideration, and always collaboratively negotiated with a client. In that sense I feel I move away from a pure person-centred approach towards a more pluralistic approach in the degree that I introduce ideas of potential ways of working.

In my practice I have always been open to what a client wants to bring: how a client wants to work. Without realising it, I've been developing what I now see as a pluralistic approach to therapeutic communication. This is person-centred as its heart: the client at the centre. But I feel a pluralistic approach includes more of what I bring to the mix. What can I can offer to this client? What would support this client? Could glitter help here, for example?

Some in the person-centred field might say what I'm describing is an example of effective person-centred practice. Maybe. But I think it is more accurate to describe it as 'pluralistic practice' because I feel freer to be more involved in collaborating with clients. I tell clients that if I have what I think are good ideas I'll offer them. This distinguishes between a person-centred and a pluralistic approach.

My heart is in the person-centred approach, my practice is person-centred. But there is also now some new space for exploration, for asking about jam or marmite too, the aim of which is not to direct but to enhance how I support the client's direction. That feels pluralistic. Not either or, but both person-centred and pluralistic.

My therapy contract used to say, 'I will work to understand you and to provide a non-judgmental relationship where you feel able to explore your issues and feelings openly so that you can find your own answers, inner resources and solutions'. Now I've added, 'My role is to explore with you, and to collaborate so that we can work out what is helpful, and to help you to discover your own inner resources, promote psychological healing, and/or find solutions'. The use of 'we' feels important. That subtle difference feels relational, more dynamic, less dry. Interestingly since I have changed my contract and my practice, I find clients feel more empowered, more engaged in the process of therapy.

I opened one of my favourite Carl Rogers books, Client Centred Therapy, hoping to find something from Carl Rogers to use here. The page it fell open at said:

It is about our feeling of tentativeness as we advance theories in the hope that they may strike here and there a spark which will aid in illuminating and advancing this whole area of endeavour. (xii)

I have found this feeling of tentativeness within the pluralistic approach: an approach and developing theory which holds its truths lightly. I see the approach as actively trying to shine a light into therapeutic crevices and therapy battlefields. The approach is new and developing. I don't agree with all of the pluralistic writers I have read. But I get the sense that is OK and that in fact a critical voice is welcomed.

So, do I think the pluralistic and person-centred approaches are compatible. Yes. I think I can be both person-centred and pluralistic in my practice. There are differences, but I believe they are fundamentally compatible. Is the pluralistic approach old wine in new bottles? Actually, I think the pluralistic approach is neither old wine nor new wine-it is a lovely bubbly, sparkling wine. It feels exciting and fresh.

I hesitated when I wrote that sentence. I could have said Prosecco or Champagne, but that would be hinting at creating a brand, and that is something that I know the pluralistic approach is trying really hard not to do.

I also hesitated when writing this blog post, worried that I might be seen as being critical of the person-centred approach and field, which I am not. I am still passionately person-centred and will stand up and defend its effectiveness. But now I am passionately pluralistic too.

In fact, if Rogers were here now, I think he would be pluralistic. Even if he didn't describe himself as pluralistic, I am pretty sure he wouldn't fire any arrows at the approach and that he would be happy to sit and stay awhile and share a glass of lovely bubbly pluralistic wine with us.

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Bread and Jam and Sparkling Wine? Can I be Person-Centred and Pluralistic?

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Ani de la Prida, creative arts counsellor, psychotherapist, founder of the Association for Person Centred Creative Arts, and lecturer at the University of East London I have been a passionate person-centred therapist and trainer for many years. A couple of years ago I attended the pluralistic conference in London, and something in me changed.

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Another session where my patient, a man in his 30’s, has taken over the session

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Another session where my patient, a man in his 30’s, has taken over the session

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Uh oh, it's happening again. Another session where my patient, a man in his 30's, has taken over the session. I sensed this might be an issue from our first intake visit, which extended into a second session because of our mutual tendency to allow him to speak in long-winded answers. And here we go again - 20 minutes into our session and I've barely gotten a word in edgewise. I take an audible in-breath and lean forward in my chair, signaling that I'd like to speak. He responds with a small nod, but at the same time speeds up his words and raises his voice, effectively saying "no" to my bid for a turn. We've been through this cycle enough times that I'm feeling rather trapped - my choices seem to be either to shout him down or fall silent. On the one hand, this isn't a good thing. He's not going to get any help if he doesn't let me participate in the conversation. On the other hand, falling into this pattern is exactly what needs to happen. He's come to see me for help with his relationship with his wife, who complains that he interrupts her all the time. I can almost see the thought bubble above his head shouting, "Help! Stop me!"

Healthy relationships offer opportunities for the joy of conversational "flow." An excellent conversation can have the charge of two soccer players passing a ball back and forth down the field or the grace of a figure skating pair. The two parties read each other's non-verbal communications, sensing when to move forward and when to shift to support their partner's motion. In conversation, the "silent" partner is active in the role of listener, sending feedback signals in the form of nods, reactive facial expressions and all of those wonderful listening noises: "uh-huh," "mmm," "oh?" "I see," "yes," "go on."

People can fall out of conversational cooperation by either talking too little or too much. Some people offer excessively terse "closed down" answers when discussing emotional content, obliging the listener to work hard to draw them out. Others tend to speak with excessive length or over-complexity, in ways that can be hard to follow and difficult to interrupt¹.

Traditionally, the culture of therapy has been to let patients talk. Psychoanalysts famously say almost nothing. But failing to address conversational imbalance is a huge missed opportunity. Helping patients recognize and shift a problematic default tendency is an important part of therapy - both because conversational collaboration is a key part of the working relationship, and because the therapeutic dialogue serves as an in-vivo training opportunity in collaborative behavior. What is tricky is to do this in a way that is encouraging rather than shaming².

"Allan, can I stop us for a moment?"

He looks at me somewhat surprised, for I've raised my voice a bit louder than usual in order to get his attention.

"Sure?" he says a bit dubiously.

"I've noticed something happening between us, and I was wondering if we could take a look at that together because I'm thinking it's an opportunity for us to communicate better."

"What do you mean?" He's flinching as if anticipating a harsh blow.

"There have been a number of times I've had something I've wanted to offer you, but I haven't been able to find a way to break into the conversation. I've noticed feeling a bit frustrated, and also sad because I don't feel as connected to you as I'd like to be. I'm wondering if you've noticed this, too, and if you've felt anxious or frustrated with how we've been connecting."

I can see him physically expand, as though about to let out a flood of thoughts, but he stops himself. He speaks slowly for the first time.

"I was afraid you were going to criticize me for interrupting you, just the way my wife does. I think I've been worried all along that you have been silently judging me, and ironically I think that makes me talk even more so you won't have a chance to hurt me."

"It sounds like I was on the mark about your feeling anxious in our relationship - and that you've been feeling that anxiety for good reason, because you were picking up on my unspoken frustration. It's really cool that you noticed that. It feels awkward to talk about this, but at the same time, I'm excited by the opportunity we have to shift things, so we can have a better connection."

"But I don't know how to stop interrupting or even to talk less. I don't feel like you really get me, so I have to give you all the details. Like, I mean..."

I raise my hand and smile. "Is this an example where you wanted to add in more details so I'd understand?"

He nods.

"Could we try something?" I ask, "I wonder if this might be a 'less-is-more' situation. Would you be willing to let me guide you a bit? I'm thinking that if you give me a little more space to talk, we might actually communicate better and ironically, you might feel more understood."

"I already feel more understood since you stopped me to talk about this."

Together we agree on a plan for me to raise my hand when I'd like to talk so we can practice a more back and forth dialogue. He recognizes that this shift away from telling every story in completeness is going to be uncomfortable for him, but he sees what he stands to gain.
Two sessions later, things are already starting to look different - he's still a talker, but we've gotten ourselves in rhythm, and we've gotten down to work tackling his communication difficulties with his wife.

"Wow!" he tells me at the end of a particularly good session. "We had a real back and forth going there. That was actually a lot of fun! I'm so glad you stopped me!"

References
Gratitude to Dan Brown's work on fostering collaborative behavior (see his book Attachment Disturbances in Adults, Norton, 2016)

Gratitude to Dr. David Burns for his method "Changing the Focus" demonstrated here (see his book Feeling Good Together, Crown Publishing Group, 2008.)

File under: Musings and Reflections

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Uh oh, it's happening again. Another session where my patient, a man in his 30's, has taken over the session. I sensed this might be an issue from our first intake visit, which extended into a second session because of our mutual tendency to allow him to speak in long-winded answers.

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I don’t want to burden him with my feelings when he’s going through the exact same thing.

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I don’t want to burden him with my feelings when he’s going through the exact same thing.

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Read: Dear Therapist's guide to staying sane during a pandemic
Since your therapist has talked with you about the fact that you don't need to "take care of him," this seems to be something you're already working on. Maybe you've talked about how taking responsibility for other people's feelings has affected your relationship not just with him, but with your friends and family members and co-workers too. And perhaps you've also talked about how your need to protect others is really a way of protecting yourself: Putting yourself last distracts you from looking at yourself at all.

In other words, you say you're trying to protect your therapist, but I have a feeling that the person you're trying to protect is yourself. If you stop having sessions, you don't have to examine your feelings and patterns and behaviors at a time when you may, like many people right now, feel most vulnerable. But this doesn't really protect you-it just makes it harder to feel the full range of your emotions, which is ultimately what helps us connect authentically with both ourselves and others.
Read: I'm growing exhausted dealing with my sister's anxiety
Now would be a good time to make an appointment with your therapist, and to open that session by telling him what you told me. Instead of guessing how your therapist feels, you can ask him directly. It will reassure you to hear that it is our professional duty as therapists to assess whether we're able to work with our patients even when we might be going through a challenging time in our own lives; if your therapist needed time away from his patients, he would make arrangements for them while he took care of himself.

One day, this pandemic will end, and if you dig in and use this time to more deeply understand how this pattern of protecting others gives you a false feeling of safety, you'll start to see yourself the way your therapist actually does: not as a burden, but as someone who has finally let herself be seen.

Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it-in part or in full-and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Lori Gottlieb is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a psychotherapist based in Los Angeles. She is the author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.

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Dear Therapist: The Pandemic Has Changed My Relationship With My Therapist

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Read: Dear Therapist's guide to staying sane during a pandemic Since your therapist has talked with you about the fact that you don't need to "take care of him," this seems to be something you're already working on.

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Needs of healthcare workers during Covid19 crisis.

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Needs of healthcare workers during Covid19 crisis.

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Attachment plays a big part.

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Grieving is an experience almost everyone will go through at some point in their life. And is something we often have no control over.

It isn't just humans either. There is plenty of evidence, albeit anecdotal, that other mammals, particularly primates, stay close to their dead relatives or babies - even carrying them around for a time before descending into a period of depression.

In terms of evolution, if grief were not helpful, it would long have been bred out of our species. The real question then is not why do we grieve, more what purpose does it serve?

Stages of grief

People often talk of the " stages of grief". The "five stages" model is the best known, with the stages being denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance - though these were actually written to describe coming to terms with dying rather than bereavement.

For many working in the area of bereavement of counselling, the stages of grief are little more than of historical interest now, as the stages are seen as too rigid and not individualised enough - grief don't come in fixed stages and everyone feels things differently.

In fact, most of what we understand about grief today, is down to psychologist, John Bowlby's attachment theory. Essentially, attachment theory focuses on the "psychological connectedness between human beings".

The theory looks at the quality of the intimate bonds we make during the course of our lives, with a specific focus on parent-child relations. And it seems that grief is the flipside to these very close attachments we, as humans, are able to form.

Read more: How coronavirus has transformed the grieving process

Every parent knows the ear-splitting protest when their infant is left alone. If they return quickly, peace is restored. Bowlby concluded that this behaviour evolved to keep the infant close to parents and safe from predators.

If, for whatever reason, the parent is unable to return, Bowlby noticed that after a prolonged protest, the child became withdrawn and despairing. Colin Murray Parkes, guru of bereavement theory and research, and a colleague of Bowlby's, noticed the similarity between this behaviour and grief.

Science of grief

As a bereavement counsellor and researcher this is something I see in my clients. Initially they cry out in protest, but as time passes, they begin to despair, realising their loved one has gone forever.

Grief isn't just a mental experience either. It also has a physiological effect as it can raise the levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This may explain why many of my clients experience stress reactions in the form of panic attacks, particularly if they attempt to bottle up their emotions.

Shutterstock/1000 words

Modern techniques in neuroscience allow us to see grief in real time. In MRI scans, a brain region called the nucleus accumbens, which lights up when we talk fondly of our love ones, also glows at our grief at losing them.

Read more: Adults can help children cope with death by understanding how they process it

These reward centres in our brain that make us happy together, keep us bonded by making us sad when we are apart. In this sense, evolutionary biologists have suggested the protest phase of grief lasts long enough for us to search for our loved one, yet is short enough to detach when hope is lost.

The despair phase, a form of depression, follows - and may serve to detach us from the one we have lost. It saves us from an energy-draining and fruitless search for them. And in time, emotional detachment allows us to seek a new breeding partner. It has also been suggested that both protest and despair may function to foster family and tribal cohesion and a sense of shared identity through the act of shared grief.

A changed world

Most people associate grief with losing someone they love, but in reality people can grieve for all sorts of reasons. In essence, knowing what to expect and feeling secure and stable is important for our survival - so when a loss occurs in our lives, our world shifts and is turned upside down.

In grief and trauma work, this is knows this as " assumptive world theory ". In the face of death and trauma, these beliefs are shattered and disorientation and even panic can enter the lives of those affected.

Life is split into two halves - before the loss and after the loss. We grieve for the loss of the safe and familiar and it feels as though things will never be the same again. The loss of a loved one triggers both the grief of separation and the loss of our assumptive world in which they were a part.

But over time, we adapt to our new world. We relearn the world changed by our loss. Indeed, one of the privileges of working with grief is watching how so many clients learn and grow from the experience and emerge from their grief better equipped to deal with future losses.

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Grieving is an experience almost everyone will go through at some point in their life. And is something we often have no control over. It isn't just humans either. There is plenty of evidence, albeit anecdotal, that other mammals, particularly primates, stay close to their dead relatives or babies - even carrying them around for a time before descending into a period of depression.

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Welcome to our new 2020 guide to online counselling. This exciting and ever-evolving field of therapy has never more accessible to both therapists and clients. Here, we look at how to get started and what you should be aware of.
Contents
An introduction to online counselling

While many counsellors have already been seeing clients online for some time, many of us are having to make this shift now out of necessity. In the absence of face-to-face meetings we are moving to platforms like Zoom to continue our work with current clients and also to offer our support further afield.

The BACP may ordinarily recommend lengthier trainings to practice as an online counsellor, they are understanding that right now the priority is continuity of support to our clients. That said, it's crucial to understand how best to work online - from technology and privacy to changes in the therapeutic dynamic. This will ensure you are best meeting your client's needs while also alleviating some of your own inevitable anxiety around this new way of working.

But does online therapy work?

When you are used to sharing a room with clients, noticing shifts in energy and feeling the connection between you, it's easy to be skeptical about online counselling. You may wonder if it's possible for therapy to continue being effective if it's via video call, or whether depth is possible.

Relational depth is possible

Reassuringly many therapists and clients report that they quickly settle into online counselling and that the connection remains. Mick Cooper recently shared a blogpost highlighting a study carried out on relational depth in online therapy. The study found that "it is possible to experience relational depth in online therapy, though there are aspects of this medium that may make it less (as well as more) likely to occur" - largely these were related to technology glitches or delays.

Empathy and engagement remain

This article looks at studies comparing face-to-face with phone therapy, finding little variation in empathy and actually increased levels of engagement from clients.

The impact of your mindset

The writer also questions the stories we tell ourselves about whether this kind of therapy "works", serving as a helpful reminder to not go down the route of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Benefits of online therapy

Beyond the necessity of moving over to online therapy which we are currently experiencing, there are general benefits to working in this way:

Flexibility - Working from home means you can choose when to work, selecting hours which suit you best and spreading them through the day rather than fitting into a centre's availability or fixed slots.

Cost - With no room fees or travel expenses the therapy is cheaper to provide. This reduction may be carried over to the client. So, new clients may be better able to access therapy and for more sessions than if they were meeting face-to-face.

No travel time - With no commute to a therapy room you have added time in your day.

More time to process - With online counselling you don't have the rush of a ten-minute window to swap with another therapist - instead you can sit and have plenty of time to process the session, with time to reflect and make notes.

Expand your client base - With online counselling you're no longer limited by the area you live in, with the possibility of seeing clients anywhere in the country, or even the world!

Increased honesty - In the relational depth study mentioned above some clients explained how the physical distance between them and the therapist enabled "a more honest dialogue, and therefore deeper levels of communication". There seems to be a freedom of expression that can come from working online.This sense of disinhibition is something to mention to clients as they may reveal more than they intend to. However, it can be deeply therapeutic. There can be a level of comfort for some clients being in their own home, where the therapy room encounter can feel intimidating to some.

Increased intimacy - Clients and counsellors alike have also talked about a sense of intimacy that arises through phone and video counselling - feeling much closer than they are in the therapy room with the closeness to the camera, or in the focused dialogue of a phone conversation.

Self-care and depth of exploration - The client already being at home means that after their session they do not have to navigate a journey home encountering others, instead they can stay with what has come up for them. They may be better able to exercise self-care, with easy access to the soothing comfort of a sofa or bed, and also people or pets that they can connect with. Again, this may affect what is explored - with the potential of it feeling safer to delve deeper - knowing they aren't having to go through a waiting room or face public transport. If a client lives alone it is worth exploring how they can look after themselves after sessions.

Which platform to use

There are numerous platforms through which you can deliver online counselling. Previously, Skype and email were predominant, but many new platforms are now available, some of which are designed specifically for delivering therapy online.

Zoom is the new Skype

Skype used to be the go-to online therapy and while we accept that many still use it today, it's not one we now recommend as it does not have a good enough level of encryption and security. Zoom seems to be the preferred platform with a higher level of security and the useful "waiting room" facility. That said, you may have seen some articles explaining how the encryption isn't as secure as first thought. However, we still think this seems to be the most secure of the various platforms - especially if you are ensuring your room is locked.

It feels like it may be rare to have a video call programme totally free from risk. What's necessary is to weigh up the risks of a privacy breach versus the risks of not continuing support for clients.

Other options: Vsee, WhatsApp and Doxy.Me

Other platforms include VSee (good for low bandwidth situations) and WhatsApp video - most likely already used by clients and counsellors alike (though some counsellors may prefer to have a platform separate from their social messaging).

Doxy.Me is another option which comes highly recommended for being HIPPAA compliant and no download necessary. With so many people using Zoom it's good to explore alternative, or back-up, options.

How to make the decision

When researching which platform to use, you can come away with your head spinning and feeling very aware of the various negatives. But we know that these platforms are being used by thousands of therapists worldwide. Our preference is for Zoom or Doxy.Me but what feels crucial is that you find a programme both you and your client are comfortable and confident using. Talk to your clients, and see what their preference may be too. There is no perfect right answer and instead being honest about what you know, collaborating and also being client-led feels important.

Privacy and confidentiality

Privacy isn't just about the programme you use (though end-to-end encryption is the ideal), it's also about the environment that both you and your client are in when making the calls. Realistically, this is the bigger risk factor.

How to keep your space confidential

Consider who will be able to hear the calls you are making. Wearing earphones keeps the client's voice out of the equation, but your side of the conversation will be revealing too. Are you taking calls by an open window where neighbours can overhear? Can you ask family to stay upstairs while you have sessions? Your device will need to be password protected, with the screen locked if taking a break.

Client issues with confidentiality

Some clients may not have a confidential space in their home. One idea for a private space where they won't be overheard is sitting in a car, if they have one available. This means they won't be overheard. There is the issue of being seen though once a session is underway this is often forgotten. For those who do not have this option, they may wish to pause their counselling until face-to-face sessions can resume. Counsellors may suggest email counselling or instant messaging as a way to continue support, or else some self-help resources to refer to if appropriate.

With technology, as much as clients need to know how to use programmes to take a call, they may also need to know how to quickly end a call or shut down the programme, if for whatever reason their partner or family can not know they are receiving counselling. This can be explained by phone, or however is best for them to communicate, but again it helps to have a platform they are confident using.

Smart devices

It may also be sensible to switch off any smart devices such as Amazon Echoes. We know that there have been issues with devices making short recordings when they think the trigger word (Alexa) has been heard. You also don't want Alexa butting in when you're in the middle of a serious conversation!

Be prepared for delivering online therapy

For many therapists, delivering counselling online is an entirely new experience. It's challenging in numerous ways, from getting to grips with a new digital platform through to the experience of delivering therapy in an entirely new environment. There are number of ways to get more prepared for delivering counselling online.

Further training

Before commencing sessions, ensure you are as prepared as possible. More extensive training can allow you to anticipate any issues you may experience. We recommend Kate Anthony's short course (approx 8 hours) for a comprehensive look at how to move your practice online.

Practise

What is key though is practising with the programme you will be using - make a full-length call to a friend or colleague to get comfortable conversing in this way, but also to navigate any practical issues as they arise.

Get to grips with technology

Use your practise time to understand the technology within a call but also before this - adding a contact or sending an invite to a scheduled meeting, to ensure this is coming from the correct email address.

Suss out how to mute and unmute yourself, and ensure you know how to turn the volume up and down through your keyboard.

Programmes like Zoom and Skype also have the capacity for a test call within their settings so you can check out the video and audio.

Find the right set-up

Practising will also help with finding the best set-up. You will want to stay as close as possible to your wi-fi router to avoid any connection glitches. Lighting also makes a difference - if you can sit with a window in front of you this is ideal. If not, you can experiment with closing curtains and having lights on or off so you are as clear as possible.

Check this out at the times of day you will be making calls - you don't want to get a surprise in the evening if the room's light still leaves you with a dark image. If the quality of your image still looks poor from your device's inbuilt camera you can look into external cameras.

You also want to get the height of your camera right - if the laptop is on your lap with the screen tilted to see you, you may end up with an unnatural angle of you looking down at the client. If you can have the camera at eye level this will feel more natural. Having the laptop on top of a box, or a sturdy stack of books, can help. If you are using a tablet, ensure you have something to securely lean this on - rather than attempting to hold it steady throughout a session.

Think about your background too, ensuring this is tidy but also that nothing is present that you wouldn't want clients to see such as family photos (or laundry!). Make sure you have a clock visible so you can keep sessions to usual timings too.

Client preparation

It's important that clients familiarise themselves with the programme you're using so give plenty of notice on this so they can have a practise too. If needs be, once you've learnt how to use the software yourself you can always guide them via a traditional phone call.

Get into the therapy mindset

Then, when you are ready to go and it comes to the first therapy session itself - give yourself some time to get into the therapy frame of mind. Sometimes, particularly when you first start out, video meetings can feel a little unusual and put you on edge. Practice a few minutes of mindfulness yourself.

It can feel easy to get distracted by the technology but come back to the basics of active listening, really focusing in on your client and breathing in how they are feeling.

Contracting

When starting with new clients your usual contract (with some adaptations) can be spoken through and then emailed over. A reply confirming they agree to the terms is sufficient in place of a signature.

Whether with new or existing clients, it's also worth updating the contract to include this way of working. This may include payment and cancellation policies.

Back-up plans

Having a back-up plan in case of technology failures is also needed - such as the counsellor explaining they will make a phone or WhatsApp video call to the client if Zoom is not working, for example. Ensure you have the client's contact details (phone and email) for if this happens, and for arranging appointments.

Explaining disinhibition

Explaining the sense of disinhibition that can occur from working this way prepares the client for this possibility, rather than them feeling any regret (or, as Brené Brown calls it - a vulnerability hangover) for sharing more than they meant to.

Preparing for common issues

You can also pre-empt a common issue by explaining that some clients have reported on feeling distracted or uncomfortable because of having their own image on their screen. Zoom lets you turn off your own image being displayed, so this is an option to share with your client.

Therapeutic dynamic

The changes to the therapeutic dynamic are among the most challenging that therapists experience when moving to counselling online. It's key to understand how those changes will affect both you and your clients, and how to manage them during the delivery of therapy.

Making the non-verbal verbal

One issue with video counselling can be the reduction in non-verbal cues. It's still possible to feel connection and empathy but it may be worth checking in more on how clients are responding. Equally, we may need to explicitly verbalise our own feelings and experiences. You may be very moved by what the client has shared but they wouldn't necessarily know this from seeing you onscreen. Using immediacy to share your own feelings can become increasingly important.

Regular check-ins

Check in regularly with how the client is finding online counselling and non-defensively share that it's ok if it's not working out for them. It may take a few sessions to settle into it, but after that it's important to support their autonomy in deciding if this is something they want to be doing.

How clients share

You may also find that clients share more of themselves - showing you their home, pets or people in their house. This wouldn't usually happen but if this is what they're wanting to share with you at this time then accepting this can be important for the therapeutic relationship. This can also be a benefit - with clients sharing photos of loved ones they have lost, or themselves as a child, for example.

Self-care

For many therapists, delivering online counselling is challenging. Learning new ways of delivering therapy, and the changes to the therapeutic dynamic can take its toll on us. It's important to be constantly aware of this, and understand how to manage the changes. Take your time to shift into this new way of working. There are certain measures that you can take to support your journey into the world of online therapy.

How many clients to see

While we may now have the capacity to "see" more clients in a day be aware of the energy this takes, both emotionally but also physically, when deciding your limits. Screentime can be draining, as can the energy it takes to stay emotionally connected.

A comfortable chair

Your chair at home may not be as comfortable or supportive as your therapy room. If you can invest in a new chair or back support this may help, but if not then adding cushions can help.

You don't have to do this

Also, while many are setting up online or extending who they can offer support to, know that this isn't something you have to do. Supporting existing clients during this stressful time feels crucial, if they can, and want to, still engage with therapy. However taking on new clients, even it feels necessary for our income, isn't always the right thing to do. You need to know you are in the right headspace to see clients and it's ok if you don't feel you have the capacity to set up online or to see new clients. Right now self-care is crucial - you may be needed later on.

Self-compassion through change

And while you're going through this process of navigating the change to working online, give yourself some self-compassion. It will take time to adjust. There will likely be things that go wrong and that's ok. Technology fails. We might not hear quite as well as in person. We're human and get ill too. Whatever it is - remember self-compassion. You're doing your best under trying circumstances. And remember, rupture and repair can strengthen the therapeutic relationship.
Equally, if clients don't feel that video counselling is working for them, you may try other formats such as phone or email counselling, but if they wish to cease counselling - acknowledge with yourself this loss but also that you did your best.

A sense of separation

Giving yourself a sense of separation while working from home can also be helpful. Some counsellors have a particular candle burning or change clothes after sessions, while others time their daily walk after seeing clients.

Insurance

Check with the provider of your insurance to ensure you are covered for working online. Most seem to include this automatically, as long as your client is also in the UK.

Final thoughts

Right now supporting our clients' mental health and wellbeing is crucial and online counselling allows us to do that. Like with all change, before we know it we will have settled into this new way of working. We may even continue on afterwards. Clients with access needs through chronic illness or disability may especially appreciate having a variety of online counsellors to choose from.

It's important to remember that every client will respond differently. Some may prefer it to face-to-face and experience deep, intense relating. Others, it won't be right for - whether through a sense of disconnect and distance, or not feeling comfortable with the technology. Another issue is clients having the privacy at home - with family members or partners present, or children to care for, this may not be possible for all. In which case it may be helpful to signpost to self-help resources, such as those listed below, until they are able to return to therapy.

All you can do is your best. Get comfortable with the technology and ensure it's working properly, brief your client on what to expect, and check in regularly with how they are finding the experience. You may well be pleasantly surprised.

Don't forget to update your Counselling Directory, Psychologies Today, website and social media to include that you are taking on online clients if this is something you'd like to do.

If you have any further questions, or own tips, we'd love for you to share them in the comments.

Additional Resources and Training

Digital resources for clients

If you've found this guide to online counselling helpful, then please consider taking a moment to share it with colleagues!
Upcoming event
We're thrilled to have been able to move our CPD event on Saturday 20 June online. World renowned speaker Professor Mooli Lahad will be presenting on The Healing Power of Imagination in Impossible Situations: Working with Loss, Grief and Trauma with Creative Methods. This subject, with Mooli's experience in post-disaster work and within the current pandemic, feels timely and will make profound and practical learning.
Online CPD
In light of the current situation we are also currently offering 20% off all our online CPD via Therapy Education Online (ThEO). Our online learning platform gives access to previous BTP events, with video recordings from leading therapy trainers on a variety of subjects. Simply enter the code THEO2020 at checkout by 31 May 2020.

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How to Start Online Counselling - Brighton Therapy Partnership

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Welcome to our new 2020 guide to online counselling. This exciting and ever-evolving field of therapy has never more accessible to both therapists and clients. Here, we look at how to get started and what you should be aware of.

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How Brené Brown Runs Emotionally Intelligent Zoom Meetings | Inc.com

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Now that many meetings have quickly gone virtual, there's no lack of advice about how to run them productively and efficiently. But there's an emotionally intelligent step that can easily be missed.

Have you checked in with your teammates to ask how they're feeling? Since you can't check in with your team in-person or read body language, it's important to ask.

Brené Brown, the vulnerability researcher and professor whose TED Talk is one of the most-viewed in the world, has a masterful way to ask this question so people will give an honest answer.

Asking people point-blank how they're feeling might not work. How many times have you heard "I'm fine," or "I'm OK," when you know that's likely not the case?

Start team meetings with a quick, two-word check-in.

To gauge how people are really feeling, Brown has her entire 30-person team do a short exercise before kicking off a Zoom meeting. Everyone gives a two-word feeling check-in.

The brilliance of this is two-fold: First, it's super short. It doesn't take long for everyone to give their answer. It gives permission for people to quickly name their feelings without judgement. Second, it acknowledges that we humans often feel many things at once.

"What I'm seeing right now are these weird paradoxical feelings and emotions," Brown said when she spoke about it on her podcast, Unlocking Us. She used herself as an example. "I am exhausted. I am hopeful. I am weary. And I am grateful."

Practice positive self-talk, even if you're feeling terrible.

Brown's guest on the episode was Dr. Marc Brackett, who runs the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

Brackett said this rush of confusing emotions was normal -- as normal as things can be while you're living and working through a pandemic. In these uncertain times, you can hold space to feel both anxious and optimistic.

"Our brains like to tell ourselves stories," Brackett said. "I think it's a helpful strategy. It's a self-talk strategy. I've got to be hopeful. I've got to be grateful. I've got to get through this. Having that positive self-talk makes all the difference."

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How Brené Brown Runs Emotionally Intelligent Zoom Meetings

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Now that many meetings have quickly gone virtual, there's no lack of advice about how to run them productively and efficiently. But there's an emotionally intelligent step that can easily be missed. Have you checked in with your teammates to ask how they're feeling?

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Until three weeks ago, you had probably never heard of the video conferencing software Zoom.

But now, as we remain in lockdown and are forced to communicate with colleagues and friends remotely, it's one of the world's most talked-about technologies - whether that's because of its easy-to-use and free set-up or because of accusations that it steals your data and infects you with malware.

There has been little room for middle ground when it comes to Zoom. You're either one of the 200 million people who use it daily, or one of the sceptics, like the MOD, which has banned the software.

So, which side of the divide should you be on? Let's take a look.

What are people's concerns about Zoom?

There are plenty of justifiable reasons to be wary of Zoom. For example, The Intercept reported that video calls are not end-to-end encrypted, despite the company's claims that they are. That means that, in theory, a criminal hacker could capture the information either at rest (on your computer or Zoom's server) or as it's being transmitted from one to the other.

Likewise, security researchers have found several major vulnerabilities - one of which can be used to steal Windows passwords, and another two that can be used to take over a Zoom user's Mac and tap into the webcam and microphone.

There were also reports that Apple was forced to step in to secure millions of devices after it learned that Zoom installed a secret web server on users' Macs, and that Zoom has an "attendee tracking" feature that lets a host see whether participants clicked away from the app during a call.

And then there's the threat of "zoombombing", where uninvited guests enter meetings to harass participants and snoop into people's homes.

But perhaps the biggest concern is whether Zoom itself breaches users' privacy. Until last month, its privacy policy contained this statement:

Does Zoom sell Personal Data? Depends what you mean by "sell."

It then goes on to explain what it doesn't mean by "sell", in a way that Bruce Schneier describes as "[being] carefully worded by lawyers to permit them to do pretty much whatever they want with your information while pretending otherwise".

Zoom has since updated its privacy policy, but the phrasing still gives the organisation room to use personal information in a variety of ways. Crucially, that includes using third-party trackers and surveillance-based advertising - which if not selling your data is certainly sharing it.

"I really messed up"

When you stack all these issues next to each other, it's easy to dismiss Zoom as another rogue app that is actively trying to harm its userbase.

Perhaps that's true, but it could just as easily be an example of Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" - although perhaps 'negligence' is the more accurate term.

Zoom has been hurriedly addressing the myriad security flaws that have been unearthed in recent weeks, which is perhaps a sign that its developers were, at best, careless.

CEO Eric Yuan acknowledged as much last week, telling the Wall Street Journal that he "really messed up" the app's security.

Another explanation for Zoom's security failures, Bloomberg's Tae Kim argues, is that it was a victim of its own success.

"Much of its problems stem from the unintended consequences of when demand explodes in unexpected ways," Tae writes. "Originally founded in 2011 for corporate clients, Zoom's software is now being used in situations it was never designed for."

He notes that the organisation was slow to recognise the changing demands of its users, many of whom weren't familiar with the security features that would have prevented many of these issues.

Likewise, under ordinary circumstances, an organisation's IT team would carefully assess any potential new software, apply controls where necessary and guide staff on how to use it responsibly.

Unfortunately, the suddenness with which employees were requested to work from home meant that organisations needed quick solutions. Meanwhile, many organisations that previously didn't rely on software (and therefore didn't have processes in place to manage the way technologies were rolled out) simply plumped for the most cost-effective solution without considering security concerns.

What action has Zoom taken?

Zoom has taken accountability for many of its security and privacy failings, which is always a positive step.

Likewise, it has implemented several controls to improve its security posture, such as password-protecting meetings by default and adding a waiting room feature, which allows the host to select who can enter a meeting.

But perhaps the most important thing it did was to advise users on things they can do to stay safe. Many vulnerabilities are directly related to people's failure to perform basic actions (like password-protecting their account) or by doing things that actively jeopardises their security.

Remember when the UK government was criticised for holding a cabinet meeting on Zoom? The problem was that Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted a picture of the meeting that included the room ID.

Luckily, the meeting had already concluded, but had that not been the case, anyone with that information could have 'zoombombed' the meeting.

Coronavirus: your biggest challenge yet

If you're one of the many organisations that's using Zoom for team meetings during the lockdown, you'll be well aware of the cyber security uncertainties that have come with the coronavirus pandemic.

But software vulnerabilities are just one of the many issues you should be concerned about. Are your employees' home Wi-Fi connections secure, for example? And do they understand the dangers of phishing scams?

We understand that, among all this chaos, it can be hard to keep up with new and changing security concerns. That's why we've put together a series of packaged solutions tailored to these turbulent times.

Meanwhile, we're offering 25% off our April training courses - which are available in several remote learning options - and if you book one of our selected courses, you'll receive the Coronavirus Business Continuity Bundle for free.

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Is Zoom safe to use? - IT Governance UK Blog

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Until three weeks ago, you had probably never heard of the video conferencing software Zoom. But now, as we remain in lockdown and are forced to communicate with colleagues and friends remotely, it's one of the world's most talked-about technologies - whether that's because of its easy-to-use and free set-up or because of accusations that it steals your data and infects you with malware.

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Vitamin D - could it be a protective factor against Covid19? 

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Vitamin D - could it be a protective factor against Covid19? 

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Vitamin D deficiency may be linked to more severe cases of COVID-19, studies suggest - CTV News

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Two recent studies have found an association between vitamin D deficiency and COVID-19 mortality rates, suggesting that not having enough of the micronutrient could lead to serious health complications if infected.

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when we get stuck with a thought (eg shame) and we don’t talk about it, it sits in a “petri dish and grows”. Shame needs secrecy, silence and judgment to grow. When we think about shame and douse it with empathy , shame cannot survive.

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Contributing Sex & Relationships Editor

By Kelly Gonsalves

Kristina Hallett, Ph.D., ABPP

Here's everything you need to know about the four attachment styles. Plus, how to find your own attachment style.

Why are some people very aloof and unattached in their relationships, while others are clingy and need constant validation? According to attachment theory, it's because different people have different attachment styles.

Here's everything you need to know about the four attachment styles, how they're formed in childhood, and how to develop a secure attachment style.

What is an attachment style?

An attachment style is a specific pattern of behavior in and around relationships. There are four adult attachment styles: secure attachment, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, and fearful-avoidant (aka disorganized) attachment.

According to attachment theory, first developed by psychologist Mary Ainsworth and psychiatrist John Bowlby in the 1950s, a person's attachment style is shaped and developed in early childhood in response to their relationships with their earliest caregivers.

Some research measures the four attachment styles based on an individual's levels of avoidance and anxiety in relationships, as seen in the chart below.

Summary

The four attachment styles

There are four main attachment styles:

Secure attachment

Anxious attachment

Avoidant attachment

Fearful-avoidant attachment

Anxious attachment style is a type of insecure attachment style marked by a deep fear of abandonment. People with an anxious attachment style tend to be very insecure about their relationships, often worrying that their partner will leave them and thus always hungry for validation.

Anxious attachment is also known as anxious-preoccupied attachment, and it generally aligns with the anxious-ambivalent attachment style or anxious-resistant attachment style observed among children. Some 19% of adults have the anxious attachment type, according to Hazan and Shaver's research.

In relationships, avoidant people typically maintain some distance from their partners or are largely emotionally unavailable. They may even find relationships suffocating and avoid them completely, preferring to be independent and rely on themselves.

Avoidant attachment is also known as dismissive-avoidant attachment, and it generally aligns with the anxious-avoidant attachment style observed among children. Some 25% of adults have the avoidant attachment type, according to Hazan and Shaver.

Fearful-avoidant attachment style is a combination of both the anxious and avoidant attachment styles. People with fearful-avoidant attachment both desperately crave affection and want to avoid it at all costs.

The attachment styles quiz

Below are the descriptions of the main attachment types used in Hazan and Shaver's foundational research on attachment theory. Read the statements and pick the one that most resonates with you:

1. I find it relatively easy to get close to others and am comfortable depending on them and having them depend on me. I don't often worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to me.

2. I find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn't really love me or won't want to stay with me. I want to merge completely with another person, and this desire sometimes scares people away.

3. I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them completely, difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, love partners want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being.

Once you've picked the number you most resonate with, scroll back up to the descriptions of each attachment style in the previous section of this article.

The number you picked here corresponds with your attachment style in the list up there.

(Note: Fearful-avoidant attachment, the fourth and rarest attachment type, was not studied in Hazan and Shaver's research and is not included in this mini attachment quiz. The two more detailed quizzes below can tell you if this may be your attachment type.)

Here are two more attachment style quiz options to try:

eHarmony.com

How attachment styles are formed

According to Mancao, it's "determined by how the primary caregiver responds to the child's cues when they are experiencing emotional stress."

"The quality of that first bond-loving and stable or inconsistent or even absent-actually shapes the developing brain, influencing us throughout life in how we deal with loss and how we behave in relationships."

Secure attachment: Caregivers are responsive and attuned to their child's needs, says Mancao.

Anxious attachment: "Caregivers are inconsistent, unpredictable with affections, sometimes overly involved, and intermittently withdrawn," says Suh. It's the unpredictable fluctuation between caregivers being emotionally available and then distant that leads children to be anxious about all their future relationships, Mancao adds.

Avoidant attachment: Caregivers are not responsive, and they are often dismissive and distant, Suh explains. They're consistently emotionally disconnected from their child, "resulting in the child believing that their needs won't get met," Mancao says.

Fearful-avoidant attachment: "The type of an environment that influences a disorganized attachment involves a caregiver who is frightening or traumatizing, leading to the child to experience a deep sense of fear and a lack of trust in others despite wanting close connections," Mancao says. They may be neglectful or even abusive, Suh adds, such that the child develops a "poor understanding of boundaries" and is "confused about what a healthy relationship looks like."

Caregivers are not the only ones who shape your attachment style, however. People's attachment styles may also be influenced by other significant relationships throughout their lives, such as friendships and past romantic relationships.

"A person can have had a secure attachment during childhood; however, betrayals and infidelity in adulthood can lead to an insecure attachment," says Mancao.

It's also possible to have a different attachment style in different situations, according to Mancao.

"While we may have a primary attachment style, depending on our relationships, we may feel more secure with one person than we do with another," she explains. "For many people, their attachment style is not the same in every relationship they encounter. Things that contribute to this are their counterpart's (romantic or platonic) personality and feelings of safety."

Summary

How to change your attachment style

Start by thinking about your relationship with your parents as a child, says Suh. She recommends asking yourself questions like:

How were they toward you as a child?

How did you respond to them?

To whom did you go for comfort when you had a problem?

Were they negligent or reliable?

This will help you get more clarity on what may have shaped your attachment style.

"Assess your current and past attachment style and identify if there are any patterns in choosing romantic partners," Suh says. "Be aware of your childhood history; the familiarity is comforting, whether it was good or bad. Meaning, your past unhealthy relationship patterns from childhood can recreate in adulthood."

Low self-esteem is a common characteristic across all insecure attachment styles, says Suh.

"Learn to embrace, value, love, and care for yourself first," she recommends. "If you cannot fathom what self-love is because you were neglected, abused, and dismissed as a child, you can start with self-tolerance and self-neutrality. This can look like, 'I'm a person, and everyone deserves to be valued' instead of forcing yourself with empty words of, 'I'm beautiful and valuable.'"

At the end of the day, all insecure attachment styles are people who tend to form insecure relationships because of deeply held fears that their relationships will not work out.

So it's important to figure out how to make yourself feel more secure in your relationships. Part of that involves being aware of what your needs and desires are in relationships.

"Learn to be assertive and set boundaries. Honor what you feel, and express your needs in words without manipulation and hidden meanings," Suh says. "Securely attached people are often direct and appropriately confrontational to create a healthy and meaningful relationship."

"Therapy is helpful, both individual and couples," Suh says. "A quality therapist will help you to dive into your attachment style, past wounds, ways to identify, establish appropriate boundaries, and promote a healthy relationship."

The history of attachment theory

His theory was that children's tendency to emotionally attach to their caregivers and to become distressed and seek them out in their absence was an adaptive evolutionary trait, something that allowed children to survive by clinging to an attachment figure who provided support, protection, and care when they were too young to care for themselves.

Mary Ainsworth, a psychologist and one of Bowlby's colleagues, expanded on Bowlby's original attachment theory by identifying individual differences in how infants handled separations from their parents.

Her famous "strange situation" experiment in 1969 identified four attachment types among infants: secure, anxious-resistant, avoidant, and disorganized.

Later in the 1980s, social psychologists Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver began to apply Ainsworth and Bowlby's attachment theory to adult romantic relationships, giving birth to the concept of the adult attachment styles we know today.

In 1998, research psychologist Kelly Brennan and her colleagues further expanded on adult attachment, demonstrating two distinct dimensions that shape attachment patterns: attachment-related anxiety and attachment-related avoidance.

People can be low in both, high in one and low in the other, or high in both, which determines their attachment style. (See above graphic.)

"Based on these kinds of studies, it seems likely that attachment styles in the child-parent domain and attachment styles in the romantic relationship domain are only moderately related at best," Fraley writes in a University of Illinois article.

But the concept of attachment styles is enduring for a reason: It gives people language to describe the distinct ways they show up in their relationships, and it challenges them to look to their past experiences to help them understand why they are the way they are.

Mary Ainsworth and the strange situation

Her team brought mothers and their infants into the lab and had them play in a room with toys on the floor and with various other adults coming in and out of the room.

At some point, the mothers would get up and leave the room without their child. After a while, they'd return.

The researchers wanted to observe how children responded first to their caregiver leaving and later to their caregiver returning to them.

Here are some of the patterns they observed:

Some children explored and played freely when their mother was in the room, became distressed when she left, and then were able to be soothed and comforted upon her return. These children were labeled as securely attached.

Some children tended to avoid or ignore mothers even before she left and showed little emotion when left and when she returned. Ainsworth and her colleagues hypothesized that this avoidant behavior masked their true distress, and some further research tracking avoidant infants' heart rates confirmed this theory. These children were labeled as anxious-avoidant.

Some children were already a bit distressed before the mother left, showed significant distress when she did, and were hard to comfort when she returned. The researchers sometimes observed a desire to "punish" their mothers for leaving by continuing to act out despite being relieved that she'd returned. These children were labeled anxious-ambivalent or anxious-resistant.

Finally, some children showed largely inconsistent behaviors, including general aimlessness throughout the experiment, fear of the caregiver, or even aggressiveness toward them. Sometimes they'd have these moments of out-of-place behaviors and then fall into one of the other categories, or they'd be a mix of several. These children were labeled as having disorganized attachment.

Attachment styles are typically formed with our earlier caregivers and how they respond to a child when they're experiencing emotional stress.

Graphic by mbg Creative / Contributor

An attachment style is a specific pattern of behavior in and around relationships. It's shaped and developed in early childhood in response to relationships with someone's earliest caregivers.

Graphic by mbg Creative / Margaryta Basarab x iStockPhoto

More On This Topic

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Your Childhood Can Affect Your Adult Relationships: Attachment Theory, Explained

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There are four different attachment styles that people may have in relationships, and they're often caused by childhood experiences.

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Similar to bedtime stories, sleepcasts take you on an audio-guided tour of a dreamy environment, whether that's a Californian desert at night or a beautifully tranquil lakeside lodge.

Sleepcasts vary in length, from 45-55 minutes. Each one begins with a "wind down," which could be a meditation exercise, or even a simple breathing technique, followed by a narrated tour of a sleepy landscape, complete with a soundtrack that evokes that place, to create a soothing, immersive experience.

Unique to Headspace's sleepcasts, these night-time journeys are remixed each night, meaning that experience is slightly different each time you listen. That way, you can't memorize the narrative, and use it to track the passage of time, something we found could cause anxiety for restless sleepers. Whatever bedtime story appeals, the blend of sound and visualization helps to create the ideal conditions for healthy, restful sleep.

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Similar to bedtime stories, sleepcasts take you on an audio-guided tour of a dreamy environment, whether that's a Californian desert at night or a beautifully tranquil lakeside lodge. Sleepcasts vary in length, from 45-55 minutes.

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Psychotherapy isn't what you think. It isn't a healing of an illness. It isn't guidance from a wise counselor. It isn't the mutual sharing of good friends. It isn't learning esoteric knowledge. It isn't being shown the error of one's ways. It isn't finding a new religion. Psychotherapy isn't what you think.

Psychotherapy is not what you think. It surprises many people because it is not primarily about your childhood . . . or about what has hurt or traumatized you . . . or about the germs in your body . . . or about destructive habits you've acquired . . . or about negative attitudes you carry . . . .

Psychotherapy is not what you think. It is about how you think. It calls attention to unrecognized assumptions in how you think. It makes a distinction between what you think about and how you do that thinking. It is less concerned with looking for causes to explain what you do and more concerned with discovering patterns in the meanings you make of what you're doing.

Psychotherapy is about how you think. It is about how you live with your emotions. It is about the perspectives you bring to relating with the people who matter to you. It is about what you aspire to in your life and how you may unwittingly make it harder for yourself to reach those goals. It is about being helped to see that the change you seek is already latent within you. It is coming to recognize and appreciate the spark of something eternal that is your core.

Psychotherapy is not what you think; it is about how you live with yourself right now.

Psychotherapy Freshens How We Perceive Our Living

. . . It is appropriate to take several steps back in order to view in broader perspective what it is that is the focus of our concern. When we do so we are demonstrating the very theme we are expressing: Life is lived as a perceptual experience. How we "see" or define our own nature and the nature of the world in which we find ourselves is a crucial element in determining what our lives will mean to us and to those with whom we share this epoch of living.

The opportunity, necessity, and challenge of living is that each of us must create and live out a life. Ultimately this is an individual responsibility-even though that often may not seem to be the case. Many influences press us to disavow or, at least, to try to delegate this responsibility.

Recognition of this basic life truth of our ultimate self-responsibility is sometimes misunderstood as a kind of "blaming the victim" philosophy and in other instances is thought to be an absurd "Pollyannaism" which promises that anyone can do anything if only he will set his mind to it. Of course, neither of these is sensible, and certainly neither is accepted by the stance here presented.

It is obviously and irrevocably true that we live in a multifaceted reality which profoundly affects what we experience and what opportunities and obstacles we encounter in carrying out this basic responsibility for our lives.

When and where one is born, whether female or male, healthy or ailing, intelligent or of limited potential, into what sort of family, society, and times; and much else influence our lives' courses. Yet each of these factors-and the many others, including some of which we are only partially aware-open out into further arrays.

Literature, both popular and technical, provides many accounts of individuals who overcame crippling environmental and chance-inflicted handicaps to live rich and contributing lives. To be sure, often such stories also recognize how exceptional native talents were called into action and in turn facilitated the exceptional outcomes. But it would be naive to attempt to so dismiss all such instances as simply products of random gene combinations. Indeed there is the real possibility that the exceptional talents were in some measure the products of human will as it confronted those very handicaps.

Candidly, almost any of us who soberly examines his own history is likely to discover occasions on which he failed to use his powers effectively and other times when he stretched to go beyond what were his usual life patterns. Popular idiom says it, "If life hands you a lemon, make lemonade."

Yet by no means does this homily assure a happy ever-after outcome. We simply don't know the stories of unnumbered men and women of great potential who were overwhelmed by circumstances and never realized their potential.

The Therapist's Mission

Our work, as we view it in this book, is to engage with the client's way of grappling with his life, or in other words, with the patterns through which the client seeks to be safe, fulfilled, in relation. "To engage" not to learn about them; "engage" signals a more experiential process. That, in turn, implies that the therapist cannot simply be a detached observer but needs lived experience of how her client grapples with her life.

Those patterns constitute the client's implicit conception of his own nature, powers, vulnerabilities, and all else that is implicit in his way of experiencing his own being and employing his powers in life-i.e., the client's self-and-world construct system as it is structured to deal with possibilities, hazards, resources, and much more.

What underlies this stance is the recognition that the self is always defined in terms of its interaction with the environing world, and the world is always perceived in terms of its actual or potential effects on the self.

Another aspect of this conception needs to be made explicit: We are speaking here of perceptions, of how the self and its attributes and the world and its many aspects are perceived. Of course, perception here does not mean only visual or even sensory perceptions as independent existents. Although the sensory facets of our perceptions may prove of great importance at times, they always do so in larger contexts.

We live in a perceptual world-that is, in the world which our perception reveals. As we experience our lives we form percepts about this world's elements and aspects. These become de facto definitions, and rightly or wrongly they do much to determine how we will relate to that which they name.

Is the world a safe place? Can a woman deal with this kind of problem as well as would a man? How will this art authority respond to my paintings? Must I cultivate the big shots to get promoted in my job or will doing a good job be enough?

The Omnipresence of Death

The disease which results in 100-percent fatalities is called "Life." Life is lived between the brackets of birth and death, and that very stark reality subtly or openly affects much that we think and do. In earlier years we implicitly claim immortality, but even then the shadow falls from time to time. As we age, that warning is more frequent and demanding.

Death accompanies life day by day, moment by moment. It isn't an event that will occur in the future; it is an actuality in each moment now. Each moment's life lives on the dead corpse of the previous moment. My lover today dies in tomorrow's kiss.

Recognizing this, anticipation, apprehension, remembrance, and regret are appropriate but not if they obscure what is in this present moment. The very fact of ending can give vitality to that which is in fact now and therefore in some measure accessible, and it counsels action rather than delay.

Psychotherapists need to be aware-and to help their clients be aware-that the resistance is an attempt to delay the death of possibilities. Becoming genuinely aware of that inexorable fact may impel one to claim the life of what is immediately possible and avoid the death of inaction.

Searching is the life force (chi) being its own nature. Case formulations can so easily become like butterflies impaled on pins and put in display cases.

Psychotherapy and Changing

It is time to try to bring together the chief elements of the existential-humanistic perspective on life-changing psychotherapy, as I envision it. Other psychotherapists will, of course, have points of difference, and that is as it should be. We are considering an art form, and by its very nature, all art is not to be captured by any one artist. Thus each person must, perforce, produce a masterwork, and no explanations can ease that responsibility.

Effective Ingredients in Psychotherapeutic Change

To begin with a synoptic statement of this existential-humanistic perspective: Essentially and experientially, life is subjective awareness. Without awareness, we are not truly alive. The conditions for which we seek therapy (e.g., anxiety, impulse control, meaninglessness in life, difficulties in relationships) may usefully be thought of as likely to be the products of shrunken and distorted ways of being aware-that is, of being alive.

The range and depth of our awareness constitute the settings of our self-and-world construct systems. When that system is too confining or too poorly corresponding with the consensual world view, we experience anxiety, pain, futility, or other symptoms which may lead us to seek psychotherapy. The task of such therapy is, then, to explore the client's self-and-world construct system and then to facilitate the client's making needed revisions in it.

This system is the way in which the client survives, seeks fulfillment, and avoids harms; yet it is this same system that must be investigated and in which changes must occur as a result of the therapeutic work. Understandably, the work of therapy inevitably encounters resistance from the client's way of being in the world (i.e., that same self-and-world construct system). Thus psychotherapy must encourage and support confrontation with the negative effects of this system while supporting its positive contributions to the client's life.

The two chief ways in which the therapeutic process carries out this work are through (a) intensive attention to the actual way the client explores and utilizes her/his own capacities as manifested in the client's self-presentation in the consultation room and (b) coaching the client to improved skill and range in self-exploration in order to better understand his/her own self-and-world construct system. These tasks are best carried out in a setting of mutual respect and dedication.

This approach to the therapeutic work may be called life-coaching to contrast it with notions of psychotherapy as repair of injuries or curing of diseases. Coaching seeks to increase the positive life skills of the client rather than focusing on negative patterns as such.

Restating the Central Thesis

From Freud on we have been governed by the myth of historic determinism. This implied emphasis on the need to try to discover what happened in the past has brought us to today's information-centered approach. In so much of our work as therapists we tend to be caught up in collecting and disbursing information about the client. Such information may be the client's history, his current concerns, her relationships, and what she hopes to gain from the therapy. Our clients soon get caught up in this information about process.

However, all information is abstracted from the flow of time-i.e., the flow of life. The only truly actual element is the process of the moment in the client; yet clients and therapists have come to discount the momentary and seek "the long view."

What is advanced here is that therapists need to give greater attention to what is, in fact, actual. This means the subjective experience of the client in the moment. This means (in line with Hillman's views) abandoning the notion of finding causes. This means disclosing to the client her/his immediate experience.

I do not reject the notion of historical sources of much in our living, but I do insist that while history equips us with habit systems that can be useful (speech, social intercourse, and much else), these habits are at a level similar to muscle habits-available, repetitive, continually evolving, incompletely conscious, and only semi-voluntary. I can and need at times to adapt or override some habits to type these words, to drive a car, to do most of the physical activities of daily life. I can change and override emotional patterns when I am aware of them in the moment of their activation. However, so many of my emotional habits I only know about incompletely and after their functioning-i.e., as information about myself and information about what is past.

An emotional habit is a set or predisposition to respond in patterned ways to certain situations
What is here proposed is that pointedly identifying in the moment that which is activated but unregarded introduces a new element in one's internal governance. When this is done, a change process is initiated which can have far-reaching results.

What Is Life Coaching?

Life coaching is a mode of psychotherapy. It is, as the name suggests, a combination of concepts and practices through which a trained and dedicated person may provide a facilitating and renewing perspective and experience to another person. The recipient of this aid may be termed a "client" or "patient," but what is important is to emphasize the centrality of this person's own responsibility and self-direction.

Central to this conception is the conviction that many-perhaps most, possibly even all-the distresses which bring people to psychotherapy are at base the product of ineffectual and counterproductive life assumptions and the patterns of action and reaction deriving from them.

A similarly central assumption insists that relief or recovery from such distresses is only to be had when the distressed person comes to fresh perspectives on her/his life-its assumptions, patterns, and internal conflicts.

Reflections About Our Work

1. The people with whom we are engaged are living all the time they're with us. They bring that-with-which-they-are-not-content to us. They live it out in our offices.

2. We are not physicians, repairmen/women, or substitutes available to direct others' lives.

3. We are coaches for those who are not satisfied with their experiences of being alive.

4. The only change agency which produces lasting results is a change in a person's perception of her/his self and world.

5. That change will only occur when we help them see more fully how they are living their lives right now, right in the room.

6. The only reality about one's self is that which actual in this moment. All else is static, is without power, is only information.

7. Recognition, insight, interpretation, and similar, familiar therapeutic products that are often mistaken for the goal. They are useful to the extent they evoke or express an immediate experiencing.

The Central Drama of Depth Psychotherapy

I will sketch here, in greatly over-simplified terms, the core processes as they are conceived in this orientation. This will permit reviewing key terms. It will also, I hope, foster a more energetic or dynamic sense of the therapeutic engagement than I (quite biasedly) think of as the "whodunit" approach to therapy-i.e., those modes in which primary attention is given to seeking cause-and-effect relations among elements of the client's history and complaints and then to teaching those connections to the client in the hope that the complained-of conditions will be eliminated or at least radically modified.

The basic drama of depth psychotherapy is carried out as a struggle between two opposing forces: on the one hand is a sense of possibility in combination with feelings of concern. These impel each of us forward in all venues of our lives. On the other hand, these positive impulses come up against other subjective elements in the form of forces or structures which seek continuity and predictability. These latter influences can be lumped together under the name resistances. As we explore them further it becomes manifest that they are chiefly expressions of our self-and-world construct systems, the very ways we define our own nature and the nature of the world in which we live. Obviously threats to these definitions, at the most extreme, are experienced as threats to our lives.

What is evident from the foregoing is that our lives are lived at the level of perception. How we see ourselves, our world, our needs, our powers, our potentials-this is the key to our living.

It follows then that psychotherapy must be concerned with perceptions. And, of course, that concern must not be limited solely to the conscious and verbalizable perceptions. Thus in the therapy work described in this book, we attend scrupulously to implicit perceptions as they are manifested in the living moment.

The phrase, "in the living moment," is particularly important. It is no exaggeration to say that the only reality we have is that of this living moment-the moment in which I write these words and the quite other moment in which you read them.

Even were we talking together in the same room, we would not have precisely the same "living moment" because of the multiple and contrasting histories we would bring to our engagement. Another implication of this recognition is that when the client tells about his experience, it is always a different experience than it was when it occurred.

The particular merit of the perspective I'm presenting here is expressed by references to "the actual." What is actual is what is at the very moment; therefore therapeutic attention and efforts need to be focused at the immediate now.

A Semi-Final Recognition

This book has attempted to summarize my thinking and experiencing about psychotherapy as of early 1998. It has fallen short of doing so. Thank the good lord!

Psychotherapy is concerned with life, with living. That means it is concerned with what is going on, what is changing and evolving, what is about to be recognized. A book is much more static than is actual, vital psychotherapy. What I have written has taught me about what I have written. When I rewrite the account of some point I want to express clearly, the point has changed somewhat. When I try to capture the new perception, it has already gone on ahead of me.

That is the way with life. That is the way with our thinking about life. Therefore that is the way with psychotherapy. We are-and we should be-always running to catch up.

You must excuse me now. I've got to hurry to find out what is next.

LIFE ISN'T WHAT YOU THINK*

Life isn't what you think. Life is.

Does the yolk know the shape of the shell?
Does the foaming crest know the power of the wave?

Life isn't what you think.
Life is going on . . . now.
Life is impending even as I write
and as you read.

Life is experiencing, but not experience.
Life isn't what you think.
Life isn't future, past, or even now.
For even that now is now past, now-past.

Life isn't what you think.
Life isn't what will be in the future
for when that future has become now
it will be now and not the now we foresaw.
Life is what is before it becomes what was.

Life isn't what you think . . . or what I think . . .
or what ever it might be.
Life is.

Copyright © 2001 Psychotherapy.net. All rights reserved.

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Psychotherapy isn't what you think. It isn't a healing of an illness. It isn't guidance from a wise counselor. It isn't the mutual sharing of good friends. It isn't learning esoteric knowledge. It isn't being shown the error of one's ways. It isn't finding a new religion. Psychotherapy isn't what you think.

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Ernesto Spinelli on Existential Therapy: a Personal Reflection on its Defining Features

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Strengthening resilience with the Imagery Toolbox

In cases of cancer, chronic illness and crisis. How does it work?

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The imagination is a realm in which we find our inner resources which we can draw upon to fortify ourselves. Everyone possesses this innate, self-reinforcing ability.
The Imagery Toolbox contains some excellent 'tools' which can help us to do just this. These take the form of simple exercises, suggestions and materials which can provide you with the means to use your imaginative resources to increase your power and resilience in difficult times of illness or crisis and recovery.

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Strengthening resilience with the Imagery Toolbox

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The imagination is a realm in which we find our inner resources which we can draw upon to fortify ourselves. Everyone possesses this innate, self-reinforcing ability. The Imagery Toolbox contains some excellent 'tools' which can help us to do just this.

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Okay, y'all, God help me, here goes...Please note I am not speaking ex cathedra here, from my post as a Wisdom leader, but as a fellow human being speaking my own truth...
****************************

PANDEMIC AT PENTECOST - A personal letter on COVID, courage and love, from Cynthia Bourgeault

At the start, it was for two weeks. Then a month. Then two months. Then the whole summer. And now, more and more are talking "well into the fall..."

Slowly we are realizing we are in it for the long haul. The Covid-19 pandemic is not about to go away any time soon.

The problem with all our dramatic spring behavioral shifts is that they were based on a short-term strategy. "Flatten the curve." "Social distancing." Zoom everything. Shut down businesses, close up restaurants, postpone the start of the summer tourist season. Then, as the grim picture continued to fill in: cancel the summer camps, the college summer sessions... quarantine all out-of-staters. But the prevailing assumption was still that if we just did that for a while, the battle would be over, the pandemic licked. We'd take a short-term economic hit, but by some time in the foreseeable future we'd be back to business as usual.

But the goal posts kept getting pushed further out. And here in my corner of Maine, as the pandemic casualties continue to rise slowly but steadily, businesses are also, with marked "fear and trembling," reopening. At some point the short term strategy has to collapse.

Meanwhile, the coronavirus keeps sitting out there like a fog bank hovering just offshore. Or to switch metaphors, like that classic cat-and-mouse game. Mouse is motionless, cat is motionless. Mouse moves, cat moves. Mouse makes a dash; cat pounces.

We are mouse. Covid-19 is cat.

We are in it for the long haul. There are no miracle cures in sight, no magic turning point when we make our town, or our state, or our world "covid-safe," as one of my friends naively bleeped. There is no more "safe." Church and Eucharist will never again be entirely safe. Large-crowd or even small-crowd gatherings will not be safe. Meeting strangers, travel, dining out will not be safe. It is a new world, wild and beautiful but definitely not safe, and our short-term strategies are at the end of their shelf life.

Now we have to begin to get a grip.

We will be living in the presence of risk and death for a good time to come. Is there a way we can walk forward into this new era, not reckless, but neither trapped in the living death that is separating us from our lives, our loved ones, our natural instincts for embodied courage and compassion? How much risk can we assume - individually and collectively - in order to move beyond this shadowland we have languished in for too long now?

Let me share a few perspectives from the Christian Inner tradition.
BEFRIENDING OUR MORTALITY
The first turn is always inward: the willingness to face and accept our own mortality. This disease will claim its harvest. Some of us will be among that harvest. Quite possibly me. We can slow down its rate of spread; we have learned how to do that well. But I do not believe we will "beat" it, or outrun what it seems to have arrived cosmically programmed to do by some homeostatic intelligence way beyond our ken. It is not a biological accident or mistake; we cannot fix it. It is I believe, addressing a dangerous imbalance that has grown up in our planet, not simply in the biosphere, but in the geosphere and stratosphere, catalyzed by our human invasiveness. Its mission is in service of a necessity far beyond our own self-interest, or even our species self-interest; it will cut its appointed swathe...in two months, two years, two centuries...

As we dare to look within, "pondering the hour of our death," in the words of the ancient desert monks, there we soon come upon the inner truth of that remarkable Pauline promise, "Whether I live or die I am the Lord's." In whatever worlds, in whatever form, consciousness does not die when I leave my physical life. The belongingness that I am and always have been does not suddenly find itself orphaned, let alone extinct.

Many times during these past two months of lockdown, I have bumped into that inner place: that tender, golden flow at the heart of all things, their true lifeblood. I know it even more now as an intimate friend, and I know by that same sweet taste that my death is a transition of form, not an end to everything. Knowing this, anxiety departs. I will do the best I can with what I have, for as long as can. Nothing more is required.

I thank the spring of "sheltering in place" for that gift. It is by far my best takeaway.

What is the worst thing this disease can do? Kill our bodies? No. Kill our spirits? Yes. If there is no more joy, no more expansiveness, no more risk-taking, no more hugging lepers, why bother? No more need for bloody sentiency; let the headstones take our place. I think they already have. But as ever, resurrection begins on the other side of death.
RISK MANAGEMENT FOR THE LONG HAUL
The second is the outward turn: intelligent risk assessment. It is certainly prudent if one is in a high-risk area - an airport, a disease hotspot where contagion is present and actively spreading - to suit up with one's mask and observe all safety protocols. In a relatively sheltered spot like my own, where there are only 11 active cases in the entire county (9 now fully recovered) and none within a 20-mile radius, it is, I believe, overkill. Not only is it unnecessary, it is energetically counterproductive to act as if everyone as a potential contaminator or contaminee. There is a risk/fear algorithm at work here, and the trade-off is real.

As I was teaching all the way back in 2003 (in The Wisdom Way of Knowing) we humans are obligatory generators of energy fields around our actions; the fields are their moral signature, their tincture. When we enact the drama of fear and suspicion, we actively generate fear and suspicion and emit these energies into the atmosphere. This perhaps makes no sense from a "world 48" standpoint (our own worldly logic), but from imaginal causality it is palpably clear. My own reluctance to wear a mask on the streets around my little hometown has nothing to do with reckless Trumpian politics. It's because I can SEE the energy of fear, contraction, and self-protection when it arises, and my own take is that far greater harm is being done IN THIS PARTICULAR LOCALE by spreading this contagion of fear than by helping support the folks who are taking the risk of normalization. That could turn, of course, on a dime, but at this point, given what we have to work with, the blessing we Stoningtonites can offer back to our hurting and bewildered planet is the sacrament of normalcy, offered on behalf of those places where the luxury is not possible. I believe it will make a difference in the planet.
RE-GROUPING
So: facing one's own mortality, intelligent risk taking, not getting locked into identified positions. What else? I believe the next step, in places where it is possible, is to slowly re-open small group on-the-ground gatherings. Wee church (under two dozen people), wee classes and retreats, no overcrowding, but yes, physical presence. And to wean ourselves away from the all-too easy zoom fix which I continue to insist is really not helping. Again, it is a short-term strategy. But it is continuing to exacerbate the already inflamed planetary atmosphere (where the contagion of fear is still clearly spreading, aggravated now by the contagion of anger and divisiveness), and the data is now beginning to pile up which I was already intuiting last March - that it does no long term good to our psyches and distracts us from sinking our bodies deeper into the real bedrock of our earthiness, where the healing from this planetary trauma will finally take place.

Somehow, we must muster the strength to reconnect. To risk the handshake, the hug. The Eucharist. (And yes, there is a way to do it on the ground, including wine, observing lower-risk protocols.) The choir. Our human voices, "singing in our chains like the sea."

They call it courage. The way of the heart. The only vaccine that will finally lick this beast.

*****
Would you like to browse a full list of our resources by subject categories? A complete list of all our Resources by Category available HERE

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Pandemic at Pentecost (letter from Cynthia)

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Okay, y'all, God help me, here goes...Please note I am not speaking ex cathedra here, from my post as a Wisdom leader, but as a fellow human being speaking my own truth... **************************** PANDEMIC AT PENTECOST - A personal letter on COVID, courage and love, from Cynthia Bourgeault At the start, it was for two weeks.

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Psychological test measuring your Autism Spectrum Quotient, also know as AQ.

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Statement

Whilst there is understandably considerable attention being paid to the disorder, apprehension and general concern generated by the current pandemic, we want to introduce a new idea to the TA professional community. We had planned to wait awhile before launching our thinking but given what is going on right now, we realised that this is precisely the time to share this. We want to present a movement in TA that is orientated toward an ecological understanding of the individual embedded in relationship with others and the wider natural world. It is based on the premise that TA has historically been anthropocentric, by which is meant that human psychology has been primarily understood in terms of what goes on within the individual person and in between people, in other words, the intra-psychic and inter-personal domains. In common with most psychological frameworks, TA has been 'person(s)-centred'. By introducing Ecological TA (Eco-TA) as a distinct movement, our intention is to draw attention to the ecological domain in advocating a new direction in TA theory and practice. We offer an initial working definition of Eco-TA as follows:

Eco-TA is an approach for understanding the human and more-than-human experience that is forged in connection with the ecological context in which it occurs. Furthermore, that this inter-connected process incorporates the embodied agency of both human and the more-than-human partners in the encounter. It is, to be more succinct, the practice of transactional analysis in alliance with Earth.

Our definition is based on a core assumption - an ontological premise - which is that human experience is just one component in a wider system of connections, extending beyond those simply involving other people. In this respect it is systemic, but one that incorporates the impact of the other than human factors and is therefore better understood as eco-systemic.

What is distinctive about Eco-TA is that its point of origin is outside of any one field of practice. It is, in the context of TA categorisation, coming from beyond the notion of fields of application. It has neither emerged from, nor 'belongs' to any one field and is perhaps the first time TA practitioners can share a common ground, to be cultivated, shared and enjoyed by all of us, irrespective of where we practice, with whom we practice and how we define our role. Like Earth itself, when lived with in respect, there is abundance, sustainability and flourishing to be found in nourishing a model that acknowledges inter-connectedness. It can be owned by no-one but belongs to us all.

Key features of Eco-TA

In exploring the scope of Eco-TA, we suggest that the following features begin to form a distinct character and distinguish it from what has come before in terms of theoretical and practical development. Each feature is designed to emphasise and support the overall aim of Eco-TA which is to advocate a key shift whereby 'client' (or group) and practitioner regard their working relationship not as being apart from, but to one of being a part of nature and the planet.

A move toward the concept of the ecological self and away from the egological self. The ecological dimension offers a sense of the 'I' formed within and incorporating the wider web of life. This includes becoming increasingly eco-centric and acknowledges the limitations of an anthropocentric frame of reference. One dimension of this shift is that humanism is no longer sufficient as a basis for developing progressive, planet-focussed theory and practice.

Linked to the above is the centrality of our embodied experience and 'knowings' inextricably embedded in an ecological context. The moving, sensing body is viewed as inherently connective and an important ecological guide.

A recognition that it is increasingly necessary to develop an understanding of the implications of working in the ecological space, as different from, for example, the relational space. Or, to be more precise, that in referring to the 'relationality' of TA practice, this includes the interplay of embodied social, conscious, unconscious and environmental processes.

Working with natural agency as it emerges in our TA practice. This has significant implications for how physis is re-framed conceptually. In Eco-TA, physis is understood as being universally present, existing both within and outside of the individual self. It is this understanding of physis that draws attention to the tendency toward homonomy alongside the familiar TA goal of autonomy.

An understanding that people establish an eco-script both individually and culturally in relation to nature, ecology and Earth. Eco-TA is aimed at expanding the frame of reference, encouraging permission and becoming increasingly 'script-free' in relation to matters of the environment. Individuals and communities have narratives that can (dis)connect with the ecological domain. Ecological scripting has remained unexplored territory in TA, and Eco-TA exists, in part, to bring about a new phase of organisational psycho-educational development in the professional community.

Implications

An understanding that people establish an eco-script both individually and culturally in relation to nature, ecology and Earth. Eco-TA is aimed at expanding the frame of reference, encouraging permission and becoming increasingly 'script-free' in relation to matters of the environment. Individuals and communities have narratives that can (dis)connect with the ecological domain. Ecological scripting has remained unexplored territory in TA, and Eco-TA exists, in part, to bring about a new phase of organisational psycho-educational development in the professional community.

However, we argue that whilst a change of attitude is central to establishing Eco-TA, there are several ways in which changes might be considered that would make such a shift more effective in the TA community. Examples include:

Legitimising the importance of outdoor work for practitioners and clients by devising guidance for this practice and acknowledging this type of approach in credentialing practitioners.

Incorporating references to ecological awareness in examination criteria, through marking schemes, written examination guidance, theory questions and oral examination.

Allocating a special issue in the TAJ to the theme of Eco-TA and working outdoors.

Generating discussion and debate that raises awareness of the limitations of a default 'indoor mind' position and to open up discourse about other ways of envisioning where and how practice might take place.

Incorporating Ecological TA in existing TA training programmes

Including ecological considerations within TA professional ethical frameworks

At this early stage in developing the idea of Eco-TA we are mindful that there will be many in our professional community who will be interested in keeping in touch, developing practice and thinking anew about theory. In the first instance we have established an initial 'watering place' an on-line reference point at ecota.dev to register interest. You'll be welcome - we'll be waiting there.

- Giles Barrow and Hayley Marshall
Note: A full version of this paper was published in the Transactional Analyst, the journal of the UK Association of TA (April, 2020)

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Whilst there is understandably considerable attention being paid to the disorder, apprehension and general concern generated by the current pandemic, we want to introduce a new idea to the TA professional community. We had planned to wait awhile before launching our thinking but given what is going on right now, we realised that this is precisely the time to share this.

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Two books that profoundly impacted my perspective on "shame" include Patricia DeYoung's book Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach" and "The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves" by Curt Thompson.

Both DeYoung and Thompson underscored for me the profoundly relational nature of shame. Prior to reading these books, I imagined shame as confined to the recesses of an individual's hidden heart, characterized as a lonely stream of negative self-talk. I have learned that shame is this and more.

Shame tells us that we are too much or not enough...with respect to another. As DeYoung describes: "Shame is the experience of one's felt sense of self disintegrating in relation to a dysregulating other" (p. 18).

Shame festers in an environment where connection and acceptance is lacking. Imbedded within shame is a fear of future lack of connection and acceptance. And shame causes separation, which prevents the kind of connection that has the capacity for experiencing acceptance.

Both DeYoung and Thompson suggest that the antidote for shame is vulnerability in empathic relationships. DeYoung provides insightful detail on treating shame in therapy relationally through tools based on neuroscience and attachment theory. Thompson's work broadens the discussion to include our relationship with God, the theology of shame, God's plan to restore us to joyful connection, and the role of community and embodied spiritual practices in combating shame (pp.17-18).

Shame separates us from others by disrupting connections within us as well: between our right brain and left brain, between our sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, and between our brain stem, limbic system and neocortex (Thompson, p. 42-43). Shame precedes our ability to articulate, residing in our "bodily sensations and movements, perceptions and emotions" (Thompson, p. 24). This means that we feel shame before we know how to articulate or understand shame. Our minds attempt to make sense of our embodied experience, creating a shame narrative that frequently does not get tested by the light of day in community with others. Our ability to process internally is impeded by shame itself, as shame disintegrates our thought process and leads to rigid and chaotic states of mind (Thompson, p. 46). As our minds betray us in this process, our need for outside connection with God and others is great. Yet ironically, although shame rises from our fear of losing connection, shame is the biggest perpetuator of our lack of connectedness. As Thompson describe, shame disintegrates us to the point where "I am not able to think coherently, and my logical thought process, which usually help me make good choices, are unavailable to regulate my right brain, from which all the emotion is pouring" (Thompson, p. 67). I have felt this many times. In the distress of feeling out of place or overwhelmed or not good enough, I have found myself frustratingly unable to remember or articulate thoughts, only to regain access to this information when I felt safer and more regulated. In these moments, I don't want exposure to others, I want to hide. And yet, my distress is about my loss or anticipated loss of connection with others.

Both Thompson and DeYoung taught me how much our past and present attachment relationships (the primary relationships where we seek to get emotional needs met), inform our internal dialog or shame narrative. Experiencing "calm, emotionally available" caregivers who can attune to us and repair misconnections with us, teaches us how to live in regulated ways (DeYoung, p. 48). The lack of these type of relationships results in dysregulation, where we have no place to metabolize our thoughts and feelings, often leading us to feel stuck.

In describing chronic shame, DeYoung says it "has roots in early, repeated, right-brain experiences of affective dysregulation" (DeYoung, p. xiv). Prior to reading her book, I never realized there was such a thing as chronic shame - an underlying, often unnoticed, drumbeat that drives the rhythm of our current day interactions that, on the surface, seem to be unrelated to our attachment relationships. While I understood that many of our interactions play off of insecurities from our past, I am struck by how hard wired our thought processes, emotional circuitry, and embodied experience become based on our past experience. In this sense, not only is shame triggered by relationships in our current "in the moment" missed connections, but the ghosts of our most important attachment relationships also haunt these interactions.

This dynamic can be especially subtle when our attachment relationships do not feel particularly harmful, and it can be hard to see the roots in attachment relationships. "There is no better place for shame to hide than in those stories in which it does not seem to be that prevalent" (Thompson, p. 72). DeYoung describes in detail the varying ways that more subtle experiences in our attachment relationships impact chronic shame. For example, this can include times where caregivers are "critical or absent" or overly invested in our talents and achievements (DeYoung, p. 44-45). This can include a parent not knowing how to help a child to feel accepted for his/her best and worst parts (DeYoung, p. 47). This can include a parent's inability to be "present in a relaxed, good humored way" (DeYoung, p. 65). These may not seem like obvious traumas/potential roots of adult shame, but they are one of many types of "misses" in a child's "need for attunement" which "is also her heartfelt longing to be seen, supported, known, and treasured" (DeYoung p. 56). Sustained over time without repair, these moments set the tone for how a person learns to interact with her internal and external world.

DeYoung's book emphasized in a radical way that left brain work with a chronically shamed person does not work - due to the confusion caused by a disintegrated self, the person is unable to hear logical arguments against their experiences of shame. Rather, the key to treating shame is through re-establishing right brain connections and engaging clients with "PACE, an acronym that stands for "playfulness, acceptance, curiosity and empathy" (DeYoung p. 83). This happens over time through right brain connections rather than left brain explanations for shame. This explains so many frustrating conversations where a loved one has tried to talk me out of my self-criticism and despair, only to experience me as impenetrable - I don't know how to think differently. As I think about why God would leave Adam and Eve susceptible to temptation in a perfect garden, I wonder if we may only learn about goodness in a "deep in our bones" sense through longsuffering, sustained, right brain connection with God and others. God Himself engages with humanity through PACE.

Thompson so beautifully paints the origin of shame and the epic battle against fame within the framework of the gospel story: God's desire to be in joyful relationship with us, the fall and emergence of shame, and God's heart to redeem us from the way shame seeks to separate us from Him and others and as well as to stifle our creative flourishing. According to Thompson, shame is Evil's plan to tell us a different story - one where we are alienated from God and others, and one where we are so paralyzed in our fears that we remain stagnant - isolated from others, distant from joy, and frozen in our ability to use the gifts and passions given to us by God. This framework highlighted for me the significant stakes involved in battling shame. Rather than being something that only implicates an individual in isolation, the battle against shame is an epic battle for the glory of God through joyful relationship with Him and with others. Conceding to shame is conspiring with evil. And yet, even in that statement, I want to be aware of my propensity to have shame for having shame. As Seattle School Professor Steve Call says, shame is sneaky. I want to be playful as he suggests, viewing this in a competitive way - we will not let shame win.

Thompson and DeYoung highlight the relational nature of shame. Thompson helped me to see shame as Evil's tool to disrupt God's plan for joyous connection with and between humanity. Thompson demonstrates how we fight this through empathic connections with our communities. Through DeYoung, I learned about chronic shame as maladaptive coping with fear of impending loss. DeYoung animated the many subtle ways that shame resides in our bodies and brain through "misses" in our attachment relationships. DeYoung helped me see that treating chronic shame must begin with reestablishing healthy right brain connections with clients rather than offering left brain "reasons" for shame. Both authors offered hope for combating shame through relationship and provided excellent tools for this battle.

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The Relational Nature of Shame: A Conversation on Shame Inspired by the Work of Patricia DeYoung...

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Two books that profoundly impacted my perspective on "shame" include Patricia DeYoung's book Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach" and "The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves" by Curt Thompson. Both DeYoung and Thompson underscored for me the profoundly relational nature of shame.

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A Test to Judge How Good Your Parents Were

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Close your eyes for a few moments. You'll soon be aware of thoughts streaming through your mind - thoughts reminding you of the jobs you haven't done, anxious thoughts about the future, fragments of memories, images of people you know, or snatches of songs you've recently heard.

Now try to stop this stream of thought. See if you can experience a clear, empty mind, with no impressions or associations running through it.

It's unlikely that you will be able to do this. Involuntary 'thought chatter' seems to be an affliction of human beings. It's there whenever our minds aren't occupied with external things - when we're lying in bed trying to get to sleep, waiting at the bus stop or at the doctor's office. It's there when we do jobs or tasks which aren't interesting enough for us to give our whole attention to. For example, a cashier may spend her day daydreaming about her next free weekend. A boring conversation may lead a man to wonder what he'll watch on TV that night.

Thought-chatter fades away when our attention does become absorbed in external things, such as engaging in challenging jobs or hobbies, or in distractions and entertainment, like watching TV or reading a novel. But thought-chatter always starts up again the moment our attention is unoccupied.

Thought-chatter is such a normal part of our experience that most of us take it completely for granted. But why should we have a kind of voice in our heads, a noise and image-producing machine that constantly recalls our experience, replaying bits of information we've absorbed and imagining scenarios before they've occurred? Why should our minds jump randomly from one association to the next? Doesn't this mean that we're all a bit crazy?

Short periods of thought-chatter can sometimes seem pleasurable, particularly the daydreaming type. It's pleasant to lie down on a beach or on a sofa, and create mental scenarios of you satisfying your desires and ambitions, or to relive pleasant past events or look forward to future ones.

Some psychologists have also suggested that daydreaming may have a purpose as a kind of "social rehearsal," allowing us to prepare for situations and events. The daydreaming state can also be a kind of "cauldron of creativity" which gives rise to insights and ideas, such as when Einstein daydreamed the Theory of Relativity while working as a clerk in a patent office. Composers such as Brahms and Debussy purposely used daydreaming to help them compose.

But in the main, involuntary thought-chatter has more negative than positive effects. After a while, it makes us feel uncomfortable and gives rise to an impulse to immerse our attention externally in order to escape it. (I've suggested before - in my book Back to Sanity - that this is why television is so popular, because it offers a simple and effective way of immersing our attention externally, away from our thought-chatter.)

Part of the reason for this is simply that thought-chatter creates a constant disturbance inside us. Our mind is filled with the chaos of swirling thoughts that we have little or no control over. We feel unsettled and uneasy, in the same way that we do when there's a loud disturbance outside us. It creates what the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi calls psychic entropy - a lack of control over our own minds.

Thought-chatter also creates a barrier between us and our experience. It stops us from experiencing the world in an immediate way. It creates a fog of abstraction in our minds, which dilutes and obscures our experience - everything we see, hear, smell, feel, and touch - so that reality becomes a shadow. It may even create a sense of unreality, when the memories, images, and scenarios that run through our mind appear more real than our actual experience.

Perhaps the biggest problem with thought-chatter though is that it's often tinged with negativity. Thoughts about the future are tinged with worry and anxiety, thoughts about the past are tinged with regret or bitterness and thoughts about your present life situation are tinged with dissatisfaction.
Why Are We Afflicted with Thought-Chatter?
Where does thought-chatter come from? Perhaps it can be seen as a byproduct of the ability to self-reflect - the ability to talk to ourselves inside our heads, to hold an inner dialogue with ourselves, and to deliberate and interpret our experience. This self-reflection should be - and often is - very beneficial to us. These are the powers of reason which supposedly make us superior to animals, able to organise our lives, evaluate situations, make plans and decisions, and so on.

Unfortunately, this self-reflective ability seems to sometimes malfunction. Like a computer that has developed a will of its own, the mechanism has somehow slipped out of our control and produces an endless chaotic series of impressions and images.

Perhaps thought-chatter is the result of the interaction of this self-reflective ability combining with our faculties of memory, imagination, and anticipation. When self-reflection becomes automatic and random, it interacts with the faculty of memory and replays scenes from our past; it interacts with the faculty of imagination and creates imaginary realities for us to inhabit, and it interacts with the faculty of anticipation - the ability to plan and envisage the future - and allows us to create scenarios of future events. It should really be seen as a psychological aberration, a kind of quirk of the mind.
Overcoming Thought-Chatter
It seems clear that our psychological health, and our lives in general, would be enhanced if we were less afflicted with thought-chatter. In fact, this is one of the long term effects of meditation. Regular meditation practice has the effect of slowing down or quietening thought-chatter. Seasoned meditators may experience extended periods of complete mental emptiness during meditation, and in the long term, their minds will become permanently quieter (although it's unlikely that they will be able to stop their thought-chatter altogether).

However, just as importantly, meditation or mindfulness practice enables us to become less identified by our thought-chatter. It helps us to stand back from our thoughts, and just watch them flow by. Thoughts are fuelled by the attention we give to them; when we become immersed in them, their momentum increases. So this detachment itself has the effect of slowing down thought-chatter. It also means that we're less vulnerable to the emotional overspill of negative thoughts. We're able to say to ourselves, "Oh well, there goes another negative thought - I don't have to pay attention to it."

In that sense, you could see meditation as a way of helping us to become more sane.
Steve Taylor, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, UK. He is the author of The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening.

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Close your eyes for a few moments. You'll soon be aware of thoughts streaming through your mind - thoughts reminding you of the jobs you haven't done, anxious thoughts about the future, fragments of memories, images of people you know, or snatches of songs you've recently heard.

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People are often advised to go to therapy to "process" some issue. But what does "processing an issue" actually mean? And why and how does this "processing" help?

For starters, we may define "a process" as a series of actions or operations taken toward achieving a particular end. "To process," hence, is to perform a series of operations on something in order to change (or preserve) it-processing milk to make cheese or yogurt, for example. In therapy, these operations are performed through the therapist-client interaction, and they may take several forms.

First, processing an issue in therapy may mean working to place it inside a coherent life narrative. We experience our life as a story, of which we are both protagonists and narrators. And we make ourselves known to others in this manner, too. If someone wants to genuinely get to know you, giving them a list of facts and numbers describing you will not suffice. They will want to hear your story. For human beings, processing information involves organizing it in narrative form.

In this framework, shocking or traumatic events damage us by disrupting our stories, mangling our established narratives of self and the world. They do this by refusing to fit into our established narrative ("This is not me; this can't be happening") or by flooding and overwhelming it ("I can't stop thinking about it; nothing else matters"). To "process an issue" in this case is when therapy helps us to either integrate the traumatic event into our life's narrative or pull our story out from under the weight and confusion of the trauma.

Second, processing an issue in therapy often means bringing past events or habits into present consciousness and analyzing them using our current tools and knowledge, resulting in fresh insight. One reason this is helpful is because difficult events often lead to avoidance. Places, emotions, and memories associated with the traumatic event are avoided, and thus they fail to undergo the constant reevaluation and examination that would have updated their meaning in light of new knowledge and experience. Thus, the meanings of these difficult events remain frozen in a past perspective. This means that the only reactions in our repertoire regarding these events are our original ones, which by now may be dated, ill-fitting, or suboptimal. If a dog bit you when you were 4 years old, leading you to hate dogs and carefully avoid any contact with them, whenever you do finally encounter a dog, you will have the terrified reaction of a traumatized 4-year-old, which you no longer are; likewise, the dog you are responding to is the one from your childhood, not the one in front of you now. Such a rigidly disproportional reaction is, by definition, neurotic, and neither healthy nor helpful.

Another example: Children often experience their parents' divorce in real time as somehow their fault, and thus may harbor guilt and self-doubt related to the event even many years later. Observing the events of a divorce from an adult perspective allows the client to realize that their parents' divorce was not their fault, and that the childish expectation that their behavior could somehow have mended their parents' rift was both developmentally understandable, even inevitable, but also factually incorrect, even absurd, when viewed from the perch of the grown-up perspective.

"Processing" in this context often includes not only updating and reexamining the meaning of old memories and emotions, but also developing a new language with which to describe, experience, and understand the past and present. Moving from a language of powerlessness ("I'm a victim") to a language of resilience ("I'm a survivor") is one example. Moving from self-demeaning, perfectionist language ("I made a mistake; I'm stupid, deserving of punishment ") to a language of empathy and self-nurture ("I made a mistake; I'm human, deserving of compassion") is another.

A third way to understand the notion of "processing an issue" is through the prism of cognitive developmental theory, specifically the seminal work of the pioneering cognitive theorist Jean Piaget. According to Piaget, the child is akin to a scientist, exploring her environment and experimenting with its properties in order to gain an understanding of the world and its laws. As the child experiments with objects, she learns about the character and attributes of reality itself. The child thus develops cognitive "schemas," the building blocks of her mental architecture. Piaget defined a schema as, "a cohesive, repeatable action sequence possessing component actions that are tightly interconnected and governed by a core meaning."

In other words, schemas are organized ways of interacting with the world. Through experience, our schemas over time become increasingly numerous, at once larger and more specific, and they help guide our movement in the world. Having acquired a "restaurant schema," for example, allows me to know how to behave and what to expect in any restaurant, even one I had never visited before. Because I have a "party schema," I know a party when I see it, I know how to behave at a party, and I have a set of party-related expectations by which to evaluate whether the party was any good.

According to Piaget, schemas develop through two cognitive processes: assimilation and accommodation. We assimilate when we use an existing schema to understand novel information. Accommodation happens when the new information cannot fit our current schema, and we must then adjust our schema to fit the information. My "mammals" schema may easily assimilate a lion glimpsed for the first time. But upon encountering a whale, I may need to change my schema to accommodate this new information. If your wife gives birth to a new baby boy, assimilating him into your "male family member" schema will be easy. Yet if your adult daughter decides to transition to become a man, then you may need to accommodate your old "male family member" schema to include transgender persons.

From this perspective, processing an issue in therapy amounts to an effort to assimilate and accommodate new information, to improve our ability to understand and move in the world more seamlessly and effectively.

Fourth, processing an issue in therapy requires that we engage it, think and talk about it. In doing so, we are practicing de facto exposure with regard to the emotions attached to the issue. Exposure is a therapy technique that lets a client face up to a scary or uncomfortable situation. The goal of exposure is to achieve physiological habituation, psychological mastery, and behavioral skill. Physiologically feeling your emotions and remembering your memories will result in nervous system habituation and, with that, lower anxiety. Psychologically confronting difficult memories will lead to a sense of agency, courage, and achievement. Behaviorally learning to feel, identify, express, and discuss one's emotions will lead to improved communications and interpersonal skill. Moreover, with exposure, the client learns new associations regarding the issue at hand. (Through interacting with dogs, I begin to associate them with playfulness and companionship rather than with the pain of the initial attack.)

Processing in this context can be viewed as a way to familiarize a person with unfamiliar territory. When we process an issue, we learn the terrain, thereby becoming less afraid of it and more able to navigate within it.

Working for many years in this area, the influential psychologist Edna Foa has proposed that fear is represented in memory as a cognitive structure, a program to escape danger (e. g., you see a lion; your heart races; you run away). The fear structure however, may in the course of one's life become faulty, acquiring inaccurate associations between benign stimuli and exaggerated fear response (e.g., you see a lion at the zoo; your heart races; you run away). In Foa's system, emotional processing, achieved through exposure practice, involves activating a person's fear structure and then introducing new information that is incompatible with earlier faulty associations (e.g., hanging around the lion's cage is safe; your heartbeat will eventually come down; you don't have to run).

Fifth, processing an issue in therapy means bringing the issue into the light of another's benevolent attention. Such interpersonal light is often, as it were, the best mental disinfectant. We are social animals, and we define ourselves, and our circumstances, in part by others' responses. For example, if you kill your enemies in socially approved ways (say, by becoming a soldier and going to war), then you become a hero, but if you kill your enemies in a way that is not socially approved (you poison your nasty neighbors), then you have become a murderer. It's all about how others see and judge what you have done. Receiving a 5 percent raise at work will make you feel good, but only until you find that all your coworkers have received a 10 percent raise. Your mood is determined not by what happens to you, but by how it compares to the experience of others. For good or bad, social connectivity is our foundational psychological currency. As Alfred Adler argued a long time ago, in the human psychological calculus, social connection is akin to health. Social isolation is akin to illness.

The engine of therapy is the human connection at its core. In this context, processing an issue means communicating it inside a safe, supportive interpersonal space. A secret loses much of its power to paralyze and poison us internally when shared with others who are capable of resonating with our experience, accepting and understanding it. In the act of discussing difficult matters, we become less alone, less opaque to ourselves, and thus less fragile. We manifest and build our strength when we express and own our weakness.

In sum, therapy may help you "process" a difficult issue by helping to place it inside a coherent life narrative; by reviewing past events using current tools and knowledge; by adjusting your cognitive schemas to include new information; by helping you confront previously avoided uncomfortable feelings in order to increase your competence in managing them; and by bringing the issue into the light of another's benevolent and empathetic attention, thus reducing shame, fear, and isolation.
LinkedIn Image Credit: Pormezz/Shutterstock

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How Therapy Works: What it Means to "Process an Issue"

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People are often advised to go to therapy to "process" some issue. But what does "processing an issue" actually mean? And why and how does this "processing" help? For starters, we may define "a process" as a series of actions or operations taken toward achieving a particular end.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Close your eyes for a few moments. You'll soon be aware of thoughts streaming through your mind - thoughts reminding you of the jobs you haven't done, anxious thoughts about the future, fragments of memories, images of people you know, or snatches of songs you've recently heard.

Now try to stop this stream of thought. See if you can experience a clear, empty mind, with no impressions or associations running through it.

It's unlikely that you will be able to do this. Involuntary 'thought chatter' seems to be an affliction of human beings. It's there whenever our minds aren't occupied with external things - when we're lying in bed trying to get to sleep, waiting at the bus stop or at the doctor's office. It's there when we do jobs or tasks which aren't interesting enough for us to give our whole attention to. For example, a cashier may spend her day daydreaming about her next free weekend. A boring conversation may lead a man to wonder what he'll watch on TV that night.

Thought-chatter fades away when our attention does become absorbed in external things, such as engaging in challenging jobs or hobbies, or in distractions and entertainment, like watching TV or reading a novel. But thought-chatter always starts up again the moment our attention is unoccupied.

Thought-chatter is such a normal part of our experience that most of us take it completely for granted. But why should we have a kind of voice in our heads, a noise and image-producing machine that constantly recalls our experience, replaying bits of information we've absorbed and imagining scenarios before they've occurred? Why should our minds jump randomly from one association to the next? Doesn't this mean that we're all a bit crazy?

Short periods of thought-chatter can sometimes seem pleasurable, particularly the daydreaming type. It's pleasant to lie down on a beach or on a sofa, and create mental scenarios of you satisfying your desires and ambitions, or to relive pleasant past events or look forward to future ones.

Some psychologists have also suggested that daydreaming may have a purpose as a kind of "social rehearsal," allowing us to prepare for situations and events. The daydreaming state can also be a kind of "cauldron of creativity" which gives rise to insights and ideas, such as when Einstein daydreamed the Theory of Relativity while working as a clerk in a patent office. Composers such as Brahms and Debussy purposely used daydreaming to help them compose.

But in the main, involuntary thought-chatter has more negative than positive effects. After a while, it makes us feel uncomfortable and gives rise to an impulse to immerse our attention externally in order to escape it. (I've suggested before - in my book Back to Sanity - that this is why television is so popular, because it offers a simple and effective way of immersing our attention externally, away from our thought-chatter.)

Part of the reason for this is simply that thought-chatter creates a constant disturbance inside us. Our mind is filled with the chaos of swirling thoughts that we have little or no control over. We feel unsettled and uneasy, in the same way that we do when there's a loud disturbance outside us. It creates what the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi calls psychic entropy - a lack of control over our own minds.

Thought-chatter also creates a barrier between us and our experience. It stops us from experiencing the world in an immediate way. It creates a fog of abstraction in our minds, which dilutes and obscures our experience - everything we see, hear, smell, feel, and touch - so that reality becomes a shadow. It may even create a sense of unreality, when the memories, images, and scenarios that run through our mind appear more real than our actual experience.

Perhaps the biggest problem with thought-chatter though is that it's often tinged with negativity. Thoughts about the future are tinged with worry and anxiety, thoughts about the past are tinged with regret or bitterness and thoughts about your present life situation are tinged with dissatisfaction.
Why Are We Afflicted with Thought-Chatter?
Where does thought-chatter come from? Perhaps it can be seen as a byproduct of the ability to self-reflect - the ability to talk to ourselves inside our heads, to hold an inner dialogue with ourselves, and to deliberate and interpret our experience. This self-reflection should be - and often is - very beneficial to us. These are the powers of reason which supposedly make us superior to animals, able to organise our lives, evaluate situations, make plans and decisions, and so on.

Unfortunately, this self-reflective ability seems to sometimes malfunction. Like a computer that has developed a will of its own, the mechanism has somehow slipped out of our control and produces an endless chaotic series of impressions and images.

Perhaps thought-chatter is the result of the interaction of this self-reflective ability combining with our faculties of memory, imagination, and anticipation. When self-reflection becomes automatic and random, it interacts with the faculty of memory and replays scenes from our past; it interacts with the faculty of imagination and creates imaginary realities for us to inhabit, and it interacts with the faculty of anticipation - the ability to plan and envisage the future - and allows us to create scenarios of future events. It should really be seen as a psychological aberration, a kind of quirk of the mind.
Overcoming Thought-Chatter
It seems clear that our psychological health, and our lives in general, would be enhanced if we were less afflicted with thought-chatter. In fact, this is one of the long term effects of meditation. Regular meditation practice has the effect of slowing down or quietening thought-chatter. Seasoned meditators may experience extended periods of complete mental emptiness during meditation, and in the long term, their minds will become permanently quieter (although it's unlikely that they will be able to stop their thought-chatter altogether).

However, just as importantly, meditation or mindfulness practice enables us to become less identified by our thought-chatter. It helps us to stand back from our thoughts, and just watch them flow by. Thoughts are fuelled by the attention we give to them; when we become immersed in them, their momentum increases. So this detachment itself has the effect of slowing down thought-chatter. It also means that we're less vulnerable to the emotional overspill of negative thoughts. We're able to say to ourselves, "Oh well, there goes another negative thought - I don't have to pay attention to it."

In that sense, you could see meditation as a way of helping us to become more sane.
Steve Taylor, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, UK. He is the author of The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening.

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Close your eyes for a few moments. You'll soon be aware of thoughts streaming through your mind - thoughts reminding you of the jobs you haven't done, anxious thoughts about the future, fragments of memories, images of people you know, or snatches of songs you've recently heard.

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Conflict.

One of the most loaded, open to interpretation words I regularly come across in the consulting room and organisations. Yet it is an inevitable part of the day to day. It is a dance we learn from a very early stage of our lives...

For some, it's a step back. Others chose to take a step aside. And then, there are those who take a step forward. We generally have a preference, a default: fight, flight, freeze.

And because we learn our conflict response form an early age, mostly as a response to our environment back then, as a way to protect us, we can take our responses as a given.

Its like an auto pilot - Input: conflict; output: learnt response from back then.

It is loaded, because it involves power. If we step back to often, our boundaries get crossed, we might lose our space. If we regularly step aside, we collude, nothing changes. If we regularly dive in, we might lose the relationship, hurt the other, or get hurt.

It is such a tricky dance.

And then there is culture: In some places, conflict is a no-no, avoid-at-all-costs, do it behind closed doors please. In other cultures, conflict is out-there, in-the-open or can be a sign of engagement, of interest. And in some parts of the world, conflict is just non-stop, dangerous.

But I think the most interesting thing about conflict is how often we can get entangled in it. And how we can lose perspective, not only of the other, but of ourselves too: it starts to be quite difficult to see what is mine and what is yours. Our boundaries - blurry, our sense of time - skewed. We genuinely think we respond to the here and now, but we might respond to what has happened back then.

Our unconscious process, is, by default...out of awareness.

It takes a safe space to be facilitated in order to invite willingness to engage and explore conflict, and it takes effort to change our responses. I think often we see conflict as a zero sum game, but I believe that the best resolutions are the ones that create a win win proposition.

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Conflict. One of the most loaded, open to interpretation words I regularly come across in the consulting room and organisations. Yet it is an inevitable part of the day to day. It is a dance we learn from a very early stage of our lives... For some, it's a step back.

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Accommodation - The act of a role player responding in a way that matches and satisfies the impulses and actions requests of the client in a structure/

Negative Accommodation - the act of responding accurately, congruently and appropriately, with sounds of pain and movements indicating the landed impact of a blow, kick or other angry expression directed by a client in a structure (without literal physical contact) toward a remembered hated, aspect of a negative historical figure. NB:This mode of accommodation was heavily used in the early phase of PBSP and not at all these days - Al Pesso came to realise that the use of it tended to reinforce negative history.

Positive Accommodation - the act of responding accurately, congruently and appropriately with words, movement and touch to satisfy the expressed needs of a client in a structure.

Antidote - The healing (antidotal) interaction provided by the ideal figures to counter the toxic effects of the negative history experienced with the original historic figures. The antidote usually provides directly opposite or contrasting elements found in the negative event. For instance, if the original parents were alcoholic, then the ideal parents would be sober; if the originals were abusive, the ideals would be respectful and loving, etc.

Basic Needs - People have five basic emotional needs: place, nurturance (oral/tactile), support, protection, and limits. Basic needs must be satisfied by parents during childhood in order for a child's ego to develop and for the child to be and become his or her true self.

Centre of Truth - The position from which the client is in touch with all the internal information about their personal existence that is available for consciousness and experience. The polar elements found there include emotional information regarding moment to moment affective states (inherited personal aspects - the soul) and information regarding values, attitudes and injunctions resulting from experience during significant, life shaping events (individual learned aspects - the ego).

Contact Figure - A symbolic role played fragment figure who is called upon when the client has more feelings showing on the body level than appear to be comfortably experienced and contained. The contact figure (under guidance from the therapist) places hands or body parts against those distressed surfaces.

Cycle of Becoming - Energy->Action->Interaction->Meaning - The four major steps which constitute the way we ideally process the emotional experiences that happen to us. In the first step (Energy), we have an emotional feeling and body response to the experience. Second (Action), we express our feelings. Third (Interaction), we interact with the type of people toward whom the emotion seeks to be expressed. Fourth (Meaning), we create a conscious and/or unconscious prediction model regarding how to anticipate and handle similar situations in the future.

Ego - The Psychological boundaries of a person (skin of the self) created through interactions with significant others. It "decides" what to let in and what to put out in terms of historical learning and patterns. It attempts to define and assess reality. It "chooses" what is manifested as the "I." It is conditioned by cultural and historic events. It works with symbols and abstractions. It is the source of consciousness. It is the psychological organ which makes differentiations such as: self and other, reality and fantasy, dreaming and awake etc.

Ego-Wrapping - The act of applying consciousness, names, acceptance, and place on a portion of the soul/self when it makes an appearance in a structure by a witness figure, an ideal figure, or a permission giving figure, etc.

Enactor - The person who is having the structure, also referred to as the "client" or the "Protagonist"

Energy - The source of emotional behavior showing up in structures as shifts in physical sensations such as tension, pain, heat etc.

Fragment Figure - A figure that is just a fragment of what was originally a highly complex figure. For instance, a containing figure would be a fragment of what would be a quality in an ideal figure such as an ideal mother or ideal father. Or a reproaching figure would be a fragment of what might have been included in a negative father. The fragments are easier and more precisely used rather than applying the entire complexity of those rather monolithic total figures. Includes: contact, limiting, and resistance figures.

Ideal Figure - Figures role played by group members that would be so constructed as to match the needs of a client in a structure so that those needs can be symbolically experienced and satisfied.

Ideal Father - The wished for, missing father with attributes that were longed for in ones' childhood, role played by a group member.

Ideal Mother - The wished for, missing mother with attributes that were longed for in one's childhood, role played by a group member.

Law of Opposites - This takes notice of the frequent reversals found in life and showing up in structures, such as: shape/countershape - the countershape is opposite the shape; antidoting - where the healing is done by reversing the factors of abuse and neglect; revenge - where the person wishes to reverse the attack and make it become what the attacker experiences at the hands of the victim, etc.

Limiting Figure - A symbolic figure role played by a group member applied to helping the client with non-ego-wrapped energies. When a client is feeling out of control with anger or sexuality, the limiting figure (guided by the therapist) holds the client in such a way as to allow the impulses to be felt in the body and then those movements and efforts can be pushed against or towards the limiting figures who keep that potential action from reaching the wished for or taboo figures. They allow the experience and feeling of the energy but not the negative or destructive consequences to occur.

Limits - The act of physically restraining or constraining the infant or older child from doing damage to itself, others or valuable objects. In later years this translates into verbal or psychological limits.

Map - The combination of memory and emotions that result in specific patterns of perception and response to present events associated with historical events which shaped the personality.

Nurturance - The act of caring for those infant needs that literally sustain life - such as nursing, feeding, grooming, washing, petting, caressing, etc. In later years this translates or transposes into symbolic feeding and grooming in a way that psychologically sustains life - such as giving "strokes", valuing, appreciating, admiring etc.

Omnipotence - The feeling of unlimited and unstoppable power or openness resulting from a history of absence of parenting or ego-constructing figures during important developmental stages.

Remapping - The creation of antidotal symbolic events during structures which may offset the life negating, negative patterns of perception and response created by traumatic events.

Place - A basic need of having a place with a right to live in the universe. The first experienced place is the mother's womb. The experience of place always includes being within an accepting, respecting, protecting receptacle, such as the womb, followed by being in the heart, mind and life of another.

Place - The provision to a child of a literal and then psychological/metaphoric place in the body of the mother, then lives, hearts and minds of both parents. This is first provided by the uterus, then after birth by the arms of the parents and rooms available in the homes of the parents. In later years this translates into psychological spaces such as the heart and minds of the parents. The provision of place recognizes the value of the child in having a right to live in the world as the child actually is. It implies the child being "seen" and valued for what it is and not over-run as if it were not present.

Polar Qualities - The two basic modes of human means for interacting with the world: action and receptivity. Everyone, male and female, has the capacity for feeling and expressing both types of polar qualities.

Possibility Sphere - A Psychological space within which the client is invited to work. It is an empty space that invites the client to bring out the portions of the self that have been in hiding and never before consciously known, named, validated, and internalized into the ego.

Power - One of the polarities of the soul. Represents the active, massive qualities of the client which can make an impact on the outer world both for beneficial and harmful ends.

Protection - The act of defending the soft vulnerability of an infant against physical injury by parents providing the hard shield of their own bodies between the infant and possible contact or impact with hard or dangerous surfaces. In later years this translates into psychological defense or protection, as in blocking verbal or psychological injury.

Resistance Figure - A symbolic figure used to make contact with a client's motions when the motion is just at the verge of further expression, but withheld from action due to fear or doubt about the extent or consequences of the action which would follow from the interior state experienced. The resistance figure does not stop the action but gives some resistance to the action, at the very least "ego-wrapping" that action to some extent - giving it a kind of preparatory countershape of consciousness and control.

Self - What a person has become. What is perceived as a person's identity and personality. The "I" may or may not be congruent with the true self. (Also, referred to as "What I Call Me")

Self/Self Interaction - The kinds of self-contact during structures which suggests a history which taught that gratification of basic needs from others would not be available during those developmental stages when it should have been forthcoming from caretaking figures.

Self/Other Interaction - The antidote experience for deprivation of needs which is the aimed for in structures.

Shape/countershape - If the shape is the emotion/action of a client, then the countershape is the wished-for, satisfying response for that emotion/action.

Sharing Time - The period immediately following the structure when the group members are invited to share their own experience and emotions which were stimulated by watching the structure. It is not a time for feedback, analysis, or confrontation with or toward the client who just worked.

Soul - The innate, central qualities of the personality arising from the genes, including the polarities of power and vulnerability.

Structure Leader - The therapist or person who is overseeing and facilitating the structure, providing the possibility sphere, the information about the body that will be used by the witness figure, the frames within which the work will be done, the review of the accommodation process, etc. Some therapists refer to this role as the "Guide".

Structures - The primary therapeutic vehicle in PBSP Psychotherapy. In an interactional structure an individual client under the supervision of a PBSP therapist uses group members to play role figures to create interactional settings. Ideal figures are used to provide (on a symbolic level) the positive experiences that were deficient in a person's history.

Support - The act of supporting and carrying about an infant too young to hold itself upright and move about. The arms and laps of the parents provide this support. In later years this translates into psychological support, as in "backing" up, or standing behind", etc.

True Self - A person's human potential. What a person would become under ideal physical, emotional, and societal circumstances. The true self constantly reacts to the events in a person's life, although the person may not be consciously aware of this reaction.

Unmet Needs -A state of emotional deprivation which occurs when a person does not have one or more of the four basic emotional needs met adequately during their childhood.

Validation - The act of sanctioning, approving, and accepting as good an emotional quality that is being manifested. One of the two major functions of parents is to validate the positive, healthy, emotional qualities that their children display.

Violation - An event or person which overcomes the function of ego to control what comes inside a person and what goes out. It may be emotional, such as humiliation, or physical, such as beatings.

Voice of Dissociation - evoked by the therapist when clients speak about feeling out of their body, without feeling, etc. This voice then speaks as if giving that injunction to do so, converting what is a reflexive situation to stress to a command, as if from the outside.

Voice of Negative Prediction - evoked by the therapist to externalize the client's negative expectations about their future and near future.

Voice of Truth - evoked by the therapist to externalize and repeat back basic truths or values that the client seems affected by, controlled by or leading their lives by, such as, "There is no way to be a man and also to cry." The voice of truth, although lived by, is usually counter to felt levels of affect.

Vulnerability - One of the polarities of the soul. Represents the receptive, non-moving qualities of the client which can react and by affected by the outside world, both for beneficial and harmful ends.

Witness Figure - A symbolic, caring, compassionate figure role played by a group member who sees and responds to the affective states in a client and gives them names, dimensions, license, and blessing.

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Glossary of Pesso Boyden Terms | PBSP Training UK

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Accommodation - The act of a role player responding in a way that matches and satisfies the impulses and actions requests of the client in a structure/ Negative Accommodation - the act of responding accurately, congruently and appropriately, with sounds of pain and movements indicating the landed impact of a blow, kick or other angry expression directed by a client in a structure (without literal physical contact) toward a remembered hated, aspect of a negative historical figure.

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"Talking therapies" services run by the NHS will be overwhelmed in the autumn when almost 500,000 people who did not get treated during the lockdown finally seek help, according to a major therapy provider. The warning comes as teachers predict a wellbeing crisis among children when schools return full-time in September.

Analysis by Ieso Digital Health claims there will be "an explosion" this autumn in the number of people being referred by their GP for treatment for anxiety, depression and obsessive compulsive disorder. The sharp rise in people suffering psychological conditions during the pandemic will leave England's 54 specialist NHS mental health trusts struggling to cope.

The NHS has treated far fewer patients than usual since March under its Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme, which usually gives people face to face counselling. Before Covid-19 struck about 150,000 people a month were referred to IAPT services in England, either by their GP or by seeking help directly themselves.

When lockdown began many NHS services were suspended and many people either became afraid to access care as normal or stayed away in order not to bother the NHS. Research by Ieso shows that in April - the first full month of lockdown - fewer than 60,000 referrals were made. It estimated that by the end of September just over 470,000 fewer people than would have been expected will have been referred since the start of lockdown. If all are referred for care in October, when IAPT services reopen, then that would leave services facing over four times the usual number of referrals.

Some people didn't seek a referral because they didn't want to go to their GP, or decided not to make a fuss because the NHS was so busy

Sarah Bateup

"One reason referrals to IAPT dropped during the pandemic is that people who were at home because of the lockdown were really worried about having a phone or video consultation rather than a face to face appointment," said Sarah Bateup, Ieso's chief clinical officer, who is also an experienced cognitive behavioural therapist.

"Other people didn't seek a referral because they didn't want to go to their GP, or decided not to make a fuss because the NHS was so busy. Others were more worried about Covid and keeping their family safe than they were about seeking treatment for anxiety, depression or OCD."

Ross O'Brien, the digital innovation director at Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust, one of the country's biggest mental health trusts, said: "There is the real risk that the mental health impact of Covid-19 will be more than the physical effects of the virus. This, coupled with the expected huge increase in IAPT referrals, means we are seeing a very worrying trend.

"Patient referral rates have been alarmingly low since lockdown across IAPT services in England. In London alone we have seen up to a 50% reduction in referrals in March and April," he added.

There are fears the 'talking therapies' services offered by England's 54 specialist NHS mental health trusts could struggle to cope. Photograph: Tom M Johnson/Getty/Tetra images

NHS England dismissed Ieso's analysis as "a back of the envelope calculation that relies on implausible assumptions and guesswork, which will almost certainly not turn out that way.

"No one is anticipating three months' worth of referrals materialising in a single month, and referrals are already starting to catch-up with pre-Covid-19 levels, so it is simply wrong to state that they will stay down at the end of September and create a big backlog."

A spokesperson stressed that services to help people with stress and anxiety have been available throughout the pandemic and that referrals have started to rise again recently.

Fears over a looming mental health crisis have also been raised in schools, with less than 5% of teachers expressing confidence that they will be able to effectively support an influx of vulnerable and traumatised pupils in September, according to research by the Chartered College of Teaching, the official professional body for the teaching profession.

Teachers reported that during the crisis, they were dealing with issues including domestic violence, death of students' parents and grandparents and suicide, as well as needing to direct families to foodbanks and charities for support. In many cases, they said they felt isolated and ill-equipped to provide this advice.

The study also found that a third of teachers think the crisis has negatively affected the wellbeing of most or all of their students, while 98% thought at least some of their students had been affected by partial school closures and lockdown measures.

Clear concerns emerged for pupils with mental health issues, those living in poverty, students with special educational needs and those without internet access. Around 40 per cent are planning specific support for bereaved or traumatised students. The concerns are already shaping the response to a wider reopening of schools in September. More than half of teachers said their schools were considering how to help children make transitions to new classes, with 44% discussing curriculum changes.

The discussions with teachers revealed that school staff largely want to prioritise wellbeing and rebuilding relationships with students, preferring to allow more time for re-establishing friendships, talking about their experiences and doing outdoor exercise.

Alison Peacock, chief executive of the Chartered College of Teaching, said the findings painted "a worrying picture of the education landscape". She added: "The level of anxiety about pupils' learning and wellbeing is deeply concerning."

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Therapists and teachers warn of looming mental health crisis

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"Talking therapies" services run by the NHS will be overwhelmed in the autumn when almost 500,000 people who did not get treated during the lockdown finally seek help, according to a major therapy provider. The warning comes as teachers predict a wellbeing crisis among children when schools return full-time in September.

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I don't identify as a gender essentialist. Basically, gender essentialism is the idea that there are innate characteristics which all men share with each other and innate characteristics which all women share with each other. And it leads to ideas that men are naturally aggressive, or that women are naturally nurturing and so on. And those ideas erase gender diversity. There's lots of variation among people of different genders and a lot of overlap between the genders.

Gender essentialism comes up a bit in my book because a lot of feminists have historically associated people who talk about biology as automatically being gender essentialists. That's because usually in mainstream society, people will point to biology to make the case that there are essential differences between the genders. I don't do that. I actually argue that biology, culture, and environment all come together in an unfathomably complex way to create the gender diversity that we see all around us.
How does being a biologist affect your perspective on gender?
Being a biologist has led me to realize that the whole idea of nature vs. nurture in relation to gender is completely ridiculous. Because culture can't happen outside of us as biological beings, and biology doesn't happen outside of culture, at least human biology doesn't happen outside of culture. It's well established that your culture as well as your individual experiences affect how your brain develops, so there aren't these really strict divides.

I also think that the way feminists have taken a very strict stand on the nurture side of the debate leads to a problem. It leads to the idea that if gender is just a social construct, then maybe we should all do our genders in ways that are politically righteous and will change the gender system. And I think a lot of times that can just as easily erase gender diversity as mainstream assumptions about gender being essentialist.
Has being a trans woman affected your take on the nature-nurture debate?
Yeah. The idea that some feminists have that men and women are different because of the way they're socialized doesn't resonate with me as a trans woman, because I was definitely not socialized to become the person I ended up becoming.
Your new book, Excluded, is actually not about the mainstream excluding members of marginalized groups, but is about how marginalized groups also tend to exclude people. Why make that your focus?
The book started out from me thinking about how as a trans woman I often experience exclusion in women's spaces, and also the ways that being bisexual and femme leads to me being seen as not legitimately queer in certain queer spaces.

And one of the things I think I've found is that the exclusion that goes on in particular feminist or queer spaces mirrors the exclusion that happens in mainstream society. I know that the average person might say, "Isn't this a minor problem, talking about infighting within these movements?" And I would argue that it's not, because if you're excluding people within your own movements, you're going to get a very narrow and distorted agenda.

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I don't identify as a gender essentialist. Basically, gender essentialism is the idea that there are innate characteristics which all men share with each other and innate characteristics which all women share with each other. And it leads to ideas that men are naturally aggressive, or that women are naturally nurturing and so on.

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I joined Twitter back in 2011 and, for the most part, I've appreciated the experience - it is the social media platform that I spend the most time on. It's a great place for me to get the word out about my writings and music, and to find/follow/read other people's work. But over the last few years, Twitter has become far more difficult to navigate.

For me personally, the primary reason has been the anti-transgender backlash we've been living through the last few years. Not that long ago, trans people were not in the public eye so much, and while trans-haters definitely existed online, they were not very organized. But nowadays, they are far more vocal and coordinated in their efforts. Often they will swarm transgender people's (and allies') feeds expressing hatred and misinformation. Increasingly, they've resorted to mass reporting to get trans people suspended from the platform for relatively benign things.

Then there are the usual aspects of Twitter that most of us have engaged in at one time or another - e.g., quote-tweeting articles & tweets that we disagree with (thus enabling/encouraging our followers to comment upon them as well); tagging/@-ing other people into conversations that they'd rather not be a part of. While not always done in a mean-spirited manner, these things can also make Twitter somewhat inhospitable at times.

As a writer, I am quite used to being criticized. And I understand that social media is now the new public forum where ideas will be shared and debated. While I am always open to listening to sincere constructive criticism, far more often than not, the negative comments I receive on Twitter these days are either thinly veiled (if at all) attempts to smear or dismiss transgender people and perspectives, or more general complaints about "liberals," "feminists," "SJWs," and the like. In some cases, these individuals may simply be "letting off steam" or "getting something off their chest," but the end result (whether intended or not) is that other people who are fundamentally opposed to my perspective & existence will likely find that comment and flood my feed, thus creating a hostile environment for both me and my followers.

So long story short, I have become very liberal with blocking accounts.

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writer, performer and activist Julia Serano's blog! most posts will focus on gender & sexuality; trans, queer & feminist politics; music & performance; and other stuff that interests or concerns me. find out more about my various creative endeavors at juliaserano.com

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Brain-body connection - easing social problems in autism

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Brain-body connection - easing social problems in autism

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The Kinsey Institute ebook Feb 20 V4 - 8449

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Covid19 and the fear associated with it.

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Covid19 and the fear associated with it.

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How do we conquer Covid-19 fears now we can go out again? | Life and style | The Guardian

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hen was the last time you were really scared? You might think, that time I lost my child in a shopping centre, or the moment the doctor told me it was serious, or the night I was followed home from the bus stop, or as I was walking up to the stage to give my big speech.

All of those moments can prompt good old-fashioned fear, but what you probably won't instantly recall is all the other times when fear has been present inside you: the many moments when fear has been controlling you, without you knowing it. It's there when you feel unfulfilled, as if there's something missing; when no amount of success is quite enough. And it's also there when you feel jealous, judge people, are overcome by perfectionism, or feel the need to crush a colleague.

After working for 20 years as a performance psychologist and culture coach, helping people find better, happier ways to work and play, I have reached the conclusion that all of us are driven by fear. All of us. It's a matter of degree. I've spent most of my time in locker rooms and boardrooms, trackside, poolside and pitchside, and in my daily conversations the same themes have come up time and time again: shame, inadequacy, loneliness, dissatisfaction and fear.

Now we find ourselves in a time when fear has become our new currency. Throughout the pandemic there has been a constant dripping of fear, a sense of catastrophic possibilities. There is a deep feeling of something having shifted, and we're not quite sure what it means yet. Humans don't like ambiguity very much, and we especially don't like a freefall into the future. Much of the fear is logical. Is it safe to go to a restaurant or a pub again? Is it less likely we'll catch it now that we're more cautious about going out? Will the "new normal" always look like this?

Fear, by design, is a warning system that puts us on alert and demands attention. It is a necessary neurobiological response to a stimulus that says: "Heads up, get ready to assess and act". When we watch the news, listening to a breaking segment about the crisis on our doorsteps, we are priming ourselves to react. We are wired for fear. But even with the very real fears of a pandemic, we don't need nearly as much of it as we experience. So how do we manage it?

Freediving doesn't scare me, I see the risk as calculated

The first step is to notice ourselves, pay attention to our thought processes. Many of us fall into a pattern of repetitive thinking which is largely negative. If you stop to study your thoughts over an hour, you'll be shocked at how many of them are on a loop, draining and judgmental. The more we let go of our awareness and allow ourselves to be carried by this tide of incessant thinking, the more room we give to fear. One of the most useful things we can do is to learn to check our emotional and physical responses. If you are tense from lockdown and money arguments, exhausted and Zoomed-out, stop and reflect, listen to the loop of thoughts in your head and recognise them.

Once you're more aware of these patterns, a helpful approach is to tackle these irrational thoughts with logic - a technique that freediver William Trubridge has perfected over the years. Freediving is an extreme and experimental sport because it's about pushing the physical body to its limits. It's also a good example of harnessing the mind and finding out what it is capable of. A freediver has to descend on a single breath to the deepest, darkest depths that they can tolerate physiologically and psychologically before turning to make the dangerous ascent back to the surface.

The mindset that underpins Trubridge's beyond-human aquatic feats is the absolute opposite of fear. It's the ability to truly experience each moment. I call it mental freedom.

In May 2016 Trubridge dived 122m in the ocean in the Bahamas, a dive of four minutes and 24 seconds.

For most of us, just the thought of being that deep in the sea would be beyond terrifying. Some high-profile divers have lost their lives. But Trubridge says that isn't what worries him. "In freediving itself there is very little that scares me," he says. "I see the risk as a calculated one that's quite minimal in cases where we are training with adequate safety or in competitions."

Like Trubridge, you can make a choice of considering whatever's happening in terms of possibilities, not risks. We only have a finite amount of attention; use it deliberately. He's coldly rational about the risks and the safety measures. "People often ask me, what would you do if something happened at depth? If you were down there by yourself? What if something goes wrong? When I consider that, I can't come up with any scenarios that aren't provided for that have any degree of probability. Although obviously freak things can happen."

He remains resolutely logical. "In freediving, the water is the same at the surface as it is at depth. The only other variable is yourself. You are completely in control. You can provide for the risks that you know about. People think what I'm doing is on a death wish or is kamikaze, but if anything it's the exact opposite."

I learned to control my fears with the thought: nerves aren't real

Trubridge relies on a rationalising technique called "nerves aren't real", which he developed after realising that his nemesis is not a fear of the actual dive, but a fear of failure. It's important to be able to distinguish between the two.

He says: "When I felt the fluttering sensation that heralds this anxiety, I didn't shy away from it, but rather looked for a concrete source in the present moment, and when I couldn't find one it was further confirmation that nerves aren't real. Gradually, rather than being at the mercy of these nerves, I was able to keep them in control and brush them aside with a cursory thought, 'nerves aren't real.'"

Trubridge also had a second rationalisation technique ready, called "the other extreme". Instead of trying to minimise his fear of failure and embarrassment, he ramped it right up. He imagined that people would die if he didn't succeed. "When compared to those kind of stakes, the fear of simply being embarrassed is laughable."

He didn't let himself get sucked into catastrophic thought. Rather, he says: "I entertain the idea for just long enough to put in perspective how frivolous this circus-style record attempt really is; how silly I was to let something so trivial affect my emotional state."

While Trubridge's approach is designed to tackle fear in the moment - rather than the long-term anxieties of living with the pandemic - there are still lessons to be learned. He recognises that most of what we fear is a projection of what might happen in the future, not something that is happening to us in the moment, and crucially, it may never happen at all.

Three ways to fight fear

1. Now is all Trubridge says that in his sport - as in life - it's easy to get caught up in "what if?" thinking, where your mind can take you into unwanted drama. You are not your thoughts, and a lot of your fear-filled thoughts are simply rubbish you habitually recycle. It is impossible to do that if you are only in the present moment. Trubridge gets there by repeating a mantra. "The idea is, you have these words with powerful connotations so they can very quickly get you into the necessary state," he says. One he often uses: "Now is all."

2. Judge a bit less Many of us get defensive when we are stressed and fearful. Not only is there a rupture that threatens our stability, we are conditioned through life to never lose control, and invest heavily in having things our way. When they aren't, one of the ways that people use to regain a sense of control and power is to take a position and stick with it. To maintain our position as "right" we judge and shame other people as wrong. Sometimes when we judge, it is fear taking control.

3. Conserve your energy We waste emotional energy regularly on fear, shame, negativity and doubt. This is especially likely when we are in the grip of changes that we didn't want. Remember, the thoughts you give preference to when fear and anxiety comes up will play a big role in dictating your emotional experiences. Don't add perfectionism to your Covid-19 to-do list.
Fear Less: How To Win at Life Without Losing Yourself by Dr Pippa Grange (Vermilion, £16.99) is available from 23 July at guardianbookshop.com at £14.78

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How do we conquer Covid-19 fears now we can go out again?

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hen was the last time you were really scared? You might think, that time I lost my child in a shopping centre, or the moment the doctor told me it was serious, or the night I was followed home from the bus stop, or as I was walking up to the stage to give my big speech.

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Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, in the interest of safety of our trainers, delegates and staff, Wimbledon Guild has cancelled all face to face training events between Sept - Dec 2020.

We are instead offering an online programme of CPD events (see below).

We need your help...

Socially isolated people across Merton are depending on us for immediate and practical support with food deliveries, telephone befriending and much more. In what is a difficult time for everyone, help us support vulnerable people who are likely to feel the impact most.

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Socially isolated people across Merton are depending on us for immediate and practical support with food deliveries, telephone befriending and much more. In what is a difficult time for everyone, help us support vulnerable people who are likely to feel the impact most.

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The Internal Family Systems Model (IFS) has evolved over the past twenty years into a comprehensive approach that includes guidelines for working with individuals, couples, and families. The IFS Model represents a new synthesis of two already-existing paradigms: systems thinking and the multiplicity of the mind. It brings concepts and methods from the structural, strategic, narrative, and Bowenian schools of family therapy to the world of subpersonalities. This synthesis was the natural outcome that evolved after I, as a young, fervent family therapist, began hearing from my clients about their inner lives. Once I was able to set aside my preconceived notions about therapy and the mind, and began to really listen to what my clients were saying, what I heard repeatedly were descriptions of what they often called their "parts" -- the conflicted subpersonalities that resided within them.

This was not a new discovery. Many other theorists have described a similar inner phenomenon, beginning with Freud's id, ego, and superego, and more recently the object relations conceptions of internal objects. These ideas are also at the core of less mainstream approaches such as transactional analysis (ego states) and psychosynthesis (subpersonalities), and are now manifesting in cognitive-behavioral approaches under the term schemata. Prior to IFS, however, little attention was given to how these inner entities functioned in relation to each other.

Since I was steeped in systems thinking, it was second nature to begin tracking sequences of internal interactions in the same way I had tracked interactions among family members. As I did, I learned that parts take on common roles and common inner relationships. I also learned that these inner roles and relationships were not static and could be changed if one intervened carefully and respectfully. I began conceiving of the mind as an inner family and experimenting with techniques I had used as a family therapist.

The IFS Model, which evolved as a result of this exploration, views a person as containing an ecology of relatively discrete minds, each of which has valuable qualities and each of which is designed to -- and wants to -- play a valuable role within. These parts are forced out of their valuable roles, however, by life experiences that can reorganize the system in unhealthy ways. A good analogy is an alcoholic family in which the children are forced into protective and stereotypic roles by the extreme dynamics of their family. While one finds similar sibling roles across alcoholic families (e.g., the scapegoat, mascot, lost child), one does not conclude that those roles represent the essence of those children. Instead, each child is unique and, once released from his or her role by intervention, can find interests and talents separate from the demands of the chaotic family. The same process seems to hold true for internal families -- parts are forced into extreme roles by external circumstances and, once it seems safe, they gladly transform into valuable family members.

What circumstances force these parts into extreme and sometimes destructive roles? Trauma is one factor, and the effects of childhood sexual abuse on internal families has been discussed at length (Goulding and Schwartz, 1995). But more often, it is a person's family of origin values and interaction patterns that create internal polarizations which escalate over time and are played out in other relationships. This, also, is not a novel observation; indeed, it is a central tenet of object relations and self psychology. What is novel to IFS is the attempt to understand all levels of human organization -- intrapsychic, family, and culture -- with the same systemic principles, and to intervene at each level with the same ecological techniques.

Managers, Firefighters, and Exiles

Are there common roles for parts across people? After working with a large number of clients, some patterns began to appear. Most clients had parts that tried to keep them functional and safe. These parts tried to maintain control of their inner and outer environments by, for example, keeping them from getting too close or dependent on others, criticizing their appearance or performance to make them look or act better, and focusing on taking care of others' rather than their own needs. These parts seemed to be in protective, managerial roles and therefore are called managers.

When a person has been hurt, humiliated, frightened, or shamed in the past, he or she will have parts that carry the emotions, memories, and sensations from those experiences. Managers often want to keep these feelings out of consciousness and, consequently, try to keep vulnerable, needy parts locked in inner closets. These incarcerated parts are known as exiles.

The third and final group of parts jumps into action whenever one of the exiles is upset to the point that it may flood the person with its extreme feelings or make the person vulnerable to being hurt again. When that is the case, this third group tries to douse the inner flames of feeling as quickly as possible, which earns them the name firefighters. They tend to be highly impulsive and strive to find stimulation that will override or dissociate from the exile's feelings. Bingeing on drugs, alcohol, food, sex, or work are common firefighter activities.

The Self

One other key aspect of the IFS Model also differentiates it from other models. This is the belief that, in addition to these parts, everyone is at their core a Self containing many crucial leadership qualities such as perspective, confidence, compassion, and acceptance. Working with hundreds of clients for more than two decades, some of whom were severely abused and show severe symptoms, has convinced me that everyone has this healthy and healing Self despite the fact that many people initially have very little access to it. When working with an individual, the goal of IFS is to differentiate this Self from the parts, thereby releasing its resources. When the individual is in the state of Self, we can work together to help the parts out of their extreme roles.

I had no clue about the Self until I began this journey almost twenty years ago. Like many other young people in the sixties, I had experimented with meditation for respite from my inner cacophony. From these experiences, I sensed other dimensions of myself but had no framework to understand them. I was also an athlete and, on the football field and basketball court, had occasionally entered that delicious flow state in which my mind was still and my body could do no wrong. Like most people, however, I was primarily concerned with finding ways to counter the undercurrent of worthlessness that ran through my psyche. I believed the inner voices telling me I was basically lazy, stupid, and selfish. That's who I thought I really was.

I was led to knowledge about the Self less through direct experience than, later as a therapist, through witnessing what happened to my clients as I helped them explore their inner worlds. I had several clients in the early 1980s who began talking about different parts of them as if these "parts" were autonomous voices or subpersonalities. As a family therapist, these inner battles were intriguing to me, and I began asking clients to try to alter them in the same ways I'd been trying to change their family's communication. It seemed that many clients could actually converse with these thoughts and feelings as if they were real personalities.

For example, I had a client, Diane, ask her pessimist voice why it always told her she was hopeless. To my amazement, Diane said it answered her. It said that it told her she was hopeless so she wouldn't take any risks and get hurt. It was trying to protect her. This seemed like a promising interaction. If this pessimist really had benign intent, then Diane might be able to negotiate a different role for it. Yet Diane was not interested. She was angry at this voice and was telling it to just leave her alone. I asked her why she was so rude to the pessimist, and she went on a long diatribe, describing how that voice had made every step she took in life a major struggle.

It then occurred to me that I was not talking to Diane, but rather to another part of her that constantly fought with the pessimist. In an earlier conversation, Diane had told me about an ongoing war inside her between one voice that pushed her to achieve and the pessimist, who told her it was hopeless. It seemed that the pushing part had jumped in while she was talking to the pessimist. I asked Diane to focus on the voice that was so angry at the pessimist and ask it to stop interfering in her negotiations with it. Again, to my amazement, it agreed to "step back," and Diane immediately shifted out of the anger she had felt so strongly only seconds before. When I asked Diane how she felt toward the pessimist now, it seemed as though a different person answered. In a calm, caring voice, she said she was grateful to it for trying to protect her and felt sorry that it had to work so hard. Her face and posture had also changed, reflecting the soft compassion in her voice. From that point on, negotiations with the pessimist were easy.

I tried this "step back" procedure with several other clients. Sometimes we had to ask two or three voices to not interfere before my client shifted into a state similar to Diane's, but we got there nonetheless. I began to get excited. What if people could get extreme voices to step back simply by asking them to, not only in negotiations with other parts, but with family members, bosses, anyone? What if the person who was left when the parts stepped back was always as compassionate as Diane and these other clients had become? When they were in that calm, compassionate state, I asked these clients what voice or part was present. They each gave a variation of the following reply: "That's not a part like those other voices are; that's more of who I really am -- that's my Self."

Without knowing it, I had stumbled onto a new way of helping people access the Self that is well-known in many spiritual traditions, but I didn't realize this until years later. At the time, I was thrilled to have found a way to make therapy so much more effortless and effective for my clients, as well as for me. Diane and the others began relating to their parts in ways that the parts seemed to need. Their emergent compassion, lucidity, and wisdom helped them get to know and care for these inner personalities. Some parts, like Diane's pessimist, needed to hear from her that, while at one time she had been very hurt and needed to withdraw, she no longer needed it to protect her in that way. Subpersonalities, like the pessimist, seemed like inner trauma victims, stuck in the past, their minds frozen around a time of great distress. Other parts needed to be held, comforted, loved, or just listened to. The most amazing thing of all was that, once in that Self state, clients seemed to know just what to do or say to help each inner personality. It gradually became clear that I didn't have to teach them how to relate differently to these thoughts and emotions they were calling parts because they would either automatically begin doing what the part needed, or they would begin asking questions that would lead to ways of helping the part. My job was mainly to try to help them remain in the state of Self and then get out of their way as they became therapists to their own inner families.

Since I was still a family therapist, I also experimented with this Self-leadership approach to interpersonal relationships. When I could help family members get their parts to step back and let their Selves communicate, they resolved long-standing issues on their own with little guidance from me. Rather than reacting to each other's extreme views and positions, the Self in each partner seemed to have an automatic empathy for the other, just as individual clients had for their own parts. They could sense the hurt behind their partner's protective walls and weren't afraid of losing face by apologizing for how they might have contributed to that hurt. I began to see the potential of Self-leadership for healing but was frustrated because these flights into Self-leadership often would not last long, and in subsequent sessions the inner and/or outer family systems would revert to their old patterns. Plus, many clients couldn't attain Self-leadership to begin with. Their parts wouldn't step back or would do so only temporarily. I would later learn that for Self-leadership to be a lasting presence, we needed to heal the parts that swam in their inner pools of pain and shame. To access those parts, however, we had to get permission from the parts that protected them. Not knowing that then, I could only glimpse the vision of what helping people access their Self could do, but that glimpse was so exhilarating that I devoted my professional (and much of my personal) life to pursuing it.

The Self-Led Person

I was also finding that the Self wasn't just a passive witness state. In fact, it wasn't just a state of mind, but could also be an active healing presence inside and outside people. It wasn't only available during times when, in therapy or meditation, people concentrated on separating from or witnessing their thoughts and emotions. Once a person's parts learned to trust that they didn't have to protect so much and could allow the Self to lead, some degree of Self would be present for all their decisions and interactions. Even during a crisis, when a person's emotions were running high, there would be a difference because of the presence of Self energy. Instead of being overwhelmed by and blending with their emotions, Self-led people were able to hold their center, knowing that it was just a part of them that was upset now and would eventually calm down. They became the "I" in the storm.

Over the years of doing this work, it becomes easier to sense when some degree of Self is present in people and when it's not. To rephrase a joke, you get the impression that "the lights are on and someone is home." A person who is leading with the Self is easy to identify. Others describe such a person as open, confident, accepting -- as having presence. They feel immediately at ease in a Self-led person's company, as they sense that it is safe to relax and release their own Selves. Such a person often generates remarks such as, "I like him because I don't have to pretend -- I can be myself with him." From the person's eyes, voice, body language, and energy, people can tell they are with someone who is authentic, solid, and unpretentious. They are attracted by the Self-led person's lack of agenda or need for self-promotion, as well as his or her passion for life and commitment to service. Such a person doesn't need to be forced by moral or legal rules to do the right thing. He or she is naturally compassionate and motivated to improve the human condition in some way because of the awareness that we are all connected.

Whenever I begin describing this Self-led person, it triggers parts of me that feel inadequate. While there are times when I can remember embodying some of those qualities, there are more times when I'm a far cry from that person. I believe that this is one of the mistakes that some organized religions make. They hold up the image of a saintly person as a model of what their followers should be, yet they provide little practical advice on getting there, other than by using willpower or prayer. As a result, people feel chronically inferior and get angry at their emotions and thoughts that aren't so evolved.

Qualities of the Self

Let's continue examining this presence we call the Self. To clarify this discussion, I find it useful to differentiate between what people report while meditating -- while being reabsorbed into the ocean -- and what people are like when their Self is actively leading their everyday lives. If meditation allows immersion into a seemingly Self-less oceanic state, then the Self is a separate wave of that ocean. It is that oceanic state which seems so difficult to describe. People report feeling as if they have no boundaries, are one with the universe, and lose their identity as a separate being. This is accompanied by a sense of spaciousness in body and mind, and can be an experience of great contentment, often with moments of bliss. They often feel a pulsating energy or warmth running through their bodies and may sense a kind of light in or around them.

People encounter different levels and stages as they deepen their meditative practice, which the different esoteric traditions have explored and charted. Here we are more concerned with what people are like when they bring some of that awareness, spaciousness, and energy to their daily tasks and relationships -- again, when they are a wave rather than the ocean. What qualities do they report and display when they live in the world yet hold the memory of who they really are? What are the characteristics of Self-leadership? I don't know the entire answer to that question. After twenty years of helping people toward that Self-leadership, I can describe what my clients exhibit as they have more of their Self present. As I sifted through various adjectives to capture my observations, I repeatedly came up with words that begin with the letter C. So, the eight Cs of self-leadership include: calmness, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, creativity, courage, and connectedness.

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Evolution of The Internal Family Systems Model By Dr. Richard Schwartz, Ph. D. | IFS Institute

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The Internal Family Systems Model (IFS) has evolved over the past twenty years into a comprehensive approach that includes guidelines for working with individuals, couples, and families. The IFS Model represents a new synthesis of two already-existing paradigms: systems thinking and the multiplicity of the mind.

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Counseling Reflection Worksheets & Teaching Resources | TpT

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Browse counseling reflection resources on Teachers Pay Teachers, a marketplace trusted by millions of teachers for original educational resources.

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Are you experiencing bully type behaviours? 

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Are you experiencing bully type behaviours? 

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The move of many of our interactions online means we are having less face-to-face communication; psychologists have long known that this decreases empathy, while anonymity—or the illusion of it—makes it easier to misbehave. And in a time of deep polarization, the tone of public discourse has grown more antagonistic.

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I have something to say to the guy who pulled up behind my VW Beetle recently in a jacked-up pickup truck, honked furiously while I waited for a pause in oncoming traffic to make a left turn, then followed me for blocks so close on my tail I could see the sweat on his brow while he yelled obscenities at me out the window.

You don't scare me.

People...

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Why It Seems Like Bullies Are Everywhere-and How to Stop Them

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I have something to say to the guy who pulled up behind my VW Beetle recently in a jacked-up pickup truck, honked furiously while I waited for a pause in oncoming traffic to make a left turn, then followed me for blocks so close on my tail I could see the sweat on his brow while he yelled obscenities at me out the window.

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Well being advice from the NHS

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NHS mental wellbeing support package available for staff tackling Covid-19

The NHS has launched a mental wellbeing support package for its 1.4 million staff; to help them as they help people deal with the pressures faced during this global health pandemic. This includes a new mental health hotline ( 0300 131 7000) which is open between 7:00 and 23:00 every day. Calls offer support for mental health, financial help, bereavement, care and coaching. Staff can also text FRONTLINE to 85258 for support 24 hours a day. The hotline and text service is staffed by more than 1,500 trained volunteers.

Prof Simon Gregory DL, Deputy Medical Director, Primary and Integrated Care, HEE, said: "I encourage everyone to make full use of these professional resources. It is vital staff feel supported and employers have the right procedures in place to offer all the help that may be needed."

The NHS has been working with charities, such as Samaritans and Hospice UK, to deliver this support.

A website england.nhs.uk/people is also available.

Want to know how to stay safe?

The Healthcare Learners Coronavirus Advice Guide contains useful hints, tips and advice on staying safe while at work, commuting and at home.

The content was collated from questions posed to HEE and experiences shared by learners working on the front line. Read more about this topic.

Professional and wellbeing support for postgraduate medical and dental trainees is provided in each HEE regions: London and Kent, Surrey and Sussex Thames Valley East of England East Midlands North East and North Cumbria West Midlands Yorkshire and the Humber
South West - Peninsula Deanery, Severn Deanery
Wellbeing apps
NHS staff have been given free access to a number of wellbeing apps to support their mental health and wellbeing.

This includes access to Cityparents (positive and practical support for working parents), #StayAlive (asuicide prevention resource), Daylight (provides help to people experiencing symptoms of worry and anxiety), Sleepio (a sleep-improvement programme), Unmind (helps you measure and manage your personal mental health needs) and Headspace (helps reduce stress, build resilience, and aid better sleep).
Staff Common Room
The staff common room is an opportunity for NHS people to come together virtually and support each other during this difficult time. The staff common rooms are a safe and supportive environment through which colleagues can continue to stay mentally well. They are open to anyone working in the NHS.
Join a staff common room Tips for mental health professionals
If you're a mental health professional helping frontline health care workers who are providing care to people affected by COVID 19, Professor Neil Greenberg, from Kings College London, offers three important things to think about.
Had a hard day?
Make use of our Going home checklist

Below is a selection of resources to help you in your everyday life:
Five steps to wellbeing
Evidence suggests there are 5 steps you can take to improve your mental health and wellbeing. Trying these things could help you feel more positive and able to get the most out of life. They are:

1. Connect with other people

2. Be physically active

3. Learn new skills

4. Give to others

5. Pay attention to the present (mindfulness).
Every Mind Matters
Every Mind Matters is a national Public Health England campaign, which has expert advice and practical tips to help you look after your mental health and wellbeing. Answer five quick questions to get your free Mind plan, which offers tips to help you deal with stress and anxiety, improve your sleep, boost your mood and feel more in control. This has been updated recently to include advice to those who are worried about coronavirus and maintaining their mental health.
What are anxiety disorders?
This information from MIND explains anxiety and panic attacks, including possible causes and how you can access treatment and support. Includes tips for helping yourself, and guidance for friends and family.
Depression
Depression is a common mental health problem that causes people to experience low mood, loss of interest or pleasure, feelings of guilt or low self-worth, disturbed sleep or appetite, low energy, and poor concentration. Find out more on the Mental Health Foundation website.
Helping someone else
It can be hard to know what to do when supporting someone with a mental health problem. This information from MIND is aimed at helping friends, family, carers and others to give support and take care of themselves too.
MindED Coronavirus Staff Resilience Hub
MindED has selected the best advice and tips for this Coronavirus Staff Resilience Hub from a large panel of international experts. This is for all frontline staff, created with Health Education England in partnership with NHS England and NHS Improvement and supported by Skills for Care.

Topics include: tips for managers and team leaders, stress and fear, trauma and distress and end of life bereavement.
Types of mental health problems
If you've been diagnosed with a mental health problem you might be looking for information on your diagnosis, treatment options and where to go for support. Mind's information pages will help you learn more.
Mental Ill Health Disclosure
It is important that learners experiencing mental ill health know they can talk about it with their supervisor and receive help if they need it. Those in a position of authority should also know what is required of them and how they can help if they are approached by someone who is experiencing mental ill health.

Two films have been produced, the first encourages learners to come forward if they are living with mental ill health and to inform them of the help they can access. The second is aimed at supervisors, giving them the information they need to support learners.

To view the films and other resources on this topic click here
Want to learn more about key statistics?
The Mental Health Foundation has a selection of the key statistics on mental health. Want to know how rates of mental ill health differ between men and women or what the stats say about homelessness and mental health? This is also broken down into Anxiety, Depression, Bipolar, Schizophrenia and Stress.

Bereavement support line
A confidential bereavement support line for NHS staff is up and running. Operated by Hospice UK. It is available from 8:00am - 8:00pm, seven days a week. Call 0300 303 4434.

A team of fully qualified and trained bereavement specialists are available to support you with bereavement and wellbeing issues relating to loss experienced through your work. You will be offered up to three sessions with the same counsellor and onward support to staff mental health services if you need.
Bereavement and suicide support apps
We recognise that some staff, including those with existing mental health concerns, may be particularly struggling during lock down given the changes to every day routine, and we are therefore offering free access to a suicide prevention and support app for all NHS and social care staff:

Grassroots is a charity who aim to prevent suicide through open and direct conversations. Its free app is an easily accessible suicide prevention resource, packed full of useful information to help colleagues stay safe. Colleagues can use it if they are having thoughts of suicide or if you are concerned about someone else who may be considering suicide.

Support Now also has other general mental health and wellbeing self-help apps available.
Bereavement and trauma support line for our Filipino colleagues
After engaging directly with colleagues from the Filipino community, a new NHS bereavement and trauma line, supported by a team of fully qualified and trained Tagalog speakers is now available. The confidential, free to access line is available from 8:00am - 8:00pm, seven days a week. Call 0300 303 1115. You do not need a referral.

Tagalog speaking specialist counsellors and support workers are available if colleagues: have experienced a bereavement, wellbeing has been affected by witnessing traumatic deaths as part of your work or you need to discuss any other anxiety or emotional issues you may be experiencing as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
10 steps for managers in the event of a death or suicide in service Practical steps in the event of a staff death Further resources

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) programme was created by Health Education England e-Learning for Healthcare (HEE e-LfH) in response to the global pandemic and has been launched more than 1,200,000 times since it went live in March. The programme includes key materials to help health and care workforce respond to Coronavirus. New content is added daily for specific professions, which includes nurses, midwives, radiologists, doctors, care workers, support workers, final year medical students and allied health professionals, to name a few.
We Can Talk - new online training for hospital staff
HEE is proud to support We Can Talk, which offers children and young people's mental health training, advice and resources for hospital staff. This was developed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Find out more. For further information email info@wecantalk.online.
Wellness Induction Guidance
These different types of guidance provide wellness champions, learners and NHS organisations with the purpose, structure, framework and resources for conducting Wellness Inductions.

HEE is proud to support Making Every Contact Count (MECC). The fundamental idea underpinning the MECC approach is simple. It recognises that staff across health, local authority and voluntary sectors, have thousands of contacts every day with individuals and are ideally placed to promote health and healthy lifestyles.

MECC focuses on the lifestyle issues that, when addressed, can make the greatest improvement to an individual's health: stopping smoking, drinking alcohol only within the recommended limits, healthy eating, being physically active, keeping to a healthy weight and improving mental health and wellbeing.

Learn more about MECC.

HEE's Population Wellbeing Portal is a central location for free e-learning and other training and education resources in population health, wellbeing and prevention. Resources include e-learning, toolkits, videos, webinars and various publications. Whatever your involvement with the public, these will support you in expanding your knowledge and skills to enable you to influence the health of the population. The portal links with All Our Health, Public Health England'sframework of evidence to guide healthcare professionals in preventing illness, protecting health and promoting wellbeing.

Resources subjects includes: smoking, alcohol, nutrition and obesity, infection management, wellbeing and mental health prevention, relevant national policies and guidance and health improvement.

Related Documents

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NHS mental wellbeing support package available for staff tackling Covid-19 The NHS has launched a mental wellbeing support package for its 1.4 million staff; to help them as they help people deal with the pressures faced during this global health pandemic.

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André Wheeler cringed at the idea of connecting through a camera but he needed to clear the fog inside his head.

My pandemic epiphany: how I fell in love with online therapy
Article written by Andre Wheeler. August 7th 2020
Therapy is the pinnacle of awkward. You spend an hour talking about the deepest parts of yourself, to a person you barely know, and then you pay them and carry on with your day. I always leave with the same guilt and self-consciousness that comes with an accidental overshare. Did I talk too much about my childhood? Does she view me as overdramatic? What does she think of my new haircut? I couldn't imagine undergoing the same process virtually.

Then the pandemic hit. Trapped inside my Oakland studio apartment, I was trying to survive a shelter-in-place order with no clear end date. Devastating news reports, combined with personal pressures, caused a thick fog to enter my head. I was not depressed, per se, but I was closer to an episode than I was far. I knew I needed help, but I had doubts about unpacking my sadness while sitting inside the same four walls that housed it.

Then I decided to give virtual therapy a try.

Exactly one week into the pandemic, I sat in the "kitchen" of my studio apartment, wiping my clammy hands on my jeans and waiting for the therapist to enter the Zoom room. My therapist entered, an older, stern white woman, with her hair pulled back tightly, wearing a sensible floral top - and I wondered whether she and I, a queer, ostentatiously dressed black man in my 20s would get on.

We made small talk at first.

She told me about her own attempts to cope with quarantine by purchasing workout equipment and exercising at home. I showed off the French bulldog I had gotten a few weeks before lockdown.

Then, step by step, she chipped away at the looming problems in my life. The process was so subtle and masterly, that before I knew it intimacy and trust developed between us. I felt she was in the room with me, performing the act of kindness I so desperately needed: listening.

Good therapy means having your problems met with seriousness and compassion, no matter how big or small, mature or petty. My therapist did not berate me for feeling a lack of motivation, or for viewing the pandemic solely through how it was inconveniencing my life. She took notes as I vented, like a student preparing for a test.

"We are going to come up with a plan to get you back to where you need to be," she said, at the end of our first session. After weeks of flux and uncertainty that was exactly what I needed. A plan.

I could tell my therapist about how the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor left me feeling untethered. I don't know whether she could identify with my anxieties, but she could recommend small adjustments to help me cope.

We discussed healthy hobbies to develop during lockdown: establishing a better sleep schedule, and breathing exercises to practice in the morning. Slowly but surely, the fog began clearing from my head.

I left those first sessions buoyed, as if I had gone for a run or danced to my favorite pop song. I was surprised. In my life, everyone was using webcams to pretend we were fine - here I could be real.

I could tell my therapist about how the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor left me feeling untethered. I don't know whether she could identify with my anxieties, but she could recommend small adjustments to help me cope.

We discussed healthy hobbies to develop during lockdown: establishing a better sleep schedule, and breathing exercises to practice in the morning. Slowly but surely, the fog began clearing from my head.

Two weeks ago, I met with my therapist again. I took stock of how comfortable I had grown logging on, angling my webcam just right and diving into our conversation with ease. I praised the fitness app she recommended last session; she asked how my puppy was doing. As the session came to a close, my therapist beamed. "You just have such a glow now!" She examined my image on her computer screen and nodded once. "I think we got you back where you need to be."

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My pandemic epiphany: how I fell in love with online therapy | WhereToTalk

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André Wheeler cringed at the idea of connecting through a camera but he needed to clear the fog inside his head. My pandemic epiphany: how I fell in love with online therapy Article written by Andre Wheeler. August 7th 2020 Therapy is the pinnacle of awkward.

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Millions of workers are doing their day jobs from makeshift set-ups in their living rooms and kitchens, while those in England who can't work from home are now encouraged to go back in if they can do so safely.

But how exposed to coronavirus might you be in your job? And how does that compare to others?

Data from the UK's Office for National Statistics, based on a US survey, puts into context the risk of exposure to disease, as well as the amount of close human contact workers had before social distancing and other safety measures were introduced.
See how your job ranks by using the search below.
While most jobs require people to work relatively closely to others - somewhere in the range between arm's length and a shared office environment - there are very few that typically involve exposure to disease more than once a year.

It's important to note that the data on both exposure to disease at work and how close people are to others is based on interviews that took place with US workers before the pandemic broke out and social distancing recommendations were introduced.

Some jobs may find it easier to adjust than others and there may be slightly different working practices and conditions in the US for certain occupations. The results can be expected to be broadly the same in most developed countries.

Almost all the jobs that have a high exposure to both disease and other people are healthcare professions, while those who scored low on both measures include artists, lawyers and those in more typical office jobs like marketing, HR and financial advisers.

Cleaners, prison officers and undertakers are among those who have relatively high exposure to disease without so much close interaction with other people.

But the people who might be most at risk to a new infectious disease like Covid-19, are those who have lots of close contact with people, but aren't used to being exposed to disease.

Bar staff, hairdressers and actors fall into this category, as well as taxi drivers and bricklayers.

What do I need to know about the coronavirus?

Other figures released by the ONS this week showed that deaths in the healthcare sector in the UK are no higher on average than those in the wider community, although social care workers were dying at higher rates. Given that these healthcare occupations are so exposed to both disease and other people, why have there not been more deaths?

This could be because workers in these jobs are more likely to be using personal protective equipment (PPE) like masks and gloves, says Ben Humberstone, deputy director for health analysis at the ONS. They also follow regular hygiene measures like washing hands.

One of the jobs which had many more coronavirus deaths than the average was taxi drivers. That's a job which scores highly in terms of closeness to other people, particularly among those jobs which are still actually possible to do at the moment. Bar staff, hairdressers and fitness instructors all score higher, but with bars, gyms and hair salons shut, most of these people will be isolating.

As taxi drivers are less exposed to disease in normal times, there may not be an existing culture of regular hand-washing and wearing PPE. Some firms are trialling partition screens and distributing gloves and masks to protect their drivers and customers.

Methodology

The data in the look-up comes from this release by the ONS.

The figures on proximity to others and exposure to disease come from a survey carried out by the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) in which they asked respondents in the US to place themselves on a 1-5 scale for the following two questions.

1. How physically close to other people are you when you perform your current job?

2. How often does your current job require you to be exposed to diseases or infection?

For exposure to disease, a score of one means they are never exposed, while a score of five means they are exposed daily. It's referring to any disease, not coronavirus specifically.

For the physical closeness question, one means the respondent works more than 100ft away from the nearest other person, while five means they need to touch or be near to touching other people at work. The survey was carried out before social distancing measures were introduced and workers in certain jobs will of course find it easier to adjust than others.

The responses for people in the same jobs were averaged together and extrapolated to form a score of 100. We've looked at these scores out of of 100 and given each job a ranking.

If any two jobs had the same score we've given them a tied ranking.
By Daniel Dunford, Sean Willmott, Marcos Gurgel and Katie Hassell.

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Millions of workers are doing their day jobs from makeshift set-ups in their living rooms and kitchens, while those in England who can't work from home are now encouraged to go back in if they can do so safely. But how exposed to coronavirus might you be in your job?

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Counselling & Psychotherapy WHERETOTALK WAS FOUNDED BY DR ZARA KAY BENAMOR. CHARTERED PSYCHOLOGIST. CPSYCHOL.

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Counselling Online Guide - A Self Teaching Guide to Counselling Online.

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This is a self learning guide about counselling online. Learn all you need to know about providing counselling online in the comfort of your own home.

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When you suffer from Complex Trauma or PTSD, being hypervigilant and "on alert" is built into your system as a survival mechanism.

Relaxation through meditation will likely feel as though you are letting your guard down. And, you will internally perceive that as vulnerable and possibly even dangerous.

Meditation can become, then, an act filled with conflict. There is a part of you that sees that being under stress wears down your health on various levels and wants to relieve the pressure; there is another part of you that stays on "high guard" and "high energy charged" because of an uncompleted fight-flight survival activation due to the particular traumatic incidence or period you went through.

When suffering is persistent you tend to project towards its opposite-towards wanting to find a way to overcome it, to get rid of it, to forget about it, to relax, to let go, to understand it cognitively in the hope that the suffering will lessen-to feel better through seeking temporary pleasures and continuous occupations, and so forth.

Unfortunately, none of this works in the long run.

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When you suffer from Complex Trauma or PTSD, being hypervigilant and "on alert" is built into your system as a survival mechanism. Relaxation through meditation will likely feel as though you are letting your guard down. And, you will internally perceive that as vulnerable and possibly even dangerous.

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When I penned an article and a book chapter on the classic Gloria Films some years ago I never dreamed these pieces would continue to bring me a seemingly endless string of correspondence. Indeed, this classic video influenced the psychotherapy training and subsequent practice strategies for thousands and thousands of helpers.

To this day the battle rages on about whether this work of art was the savior of psychotherapy, or psychotherapy's worst nightmare.

Recently a graduate student contacted me with a string of seriously good questions. In this blog I shall share those questions with my answers to shed a tad more light on this major artifact of the 20th century counseling and psychotherapy movement. Okay, let's do this!

Question: Is the Gloria Film the actual name of the training video? I couldn't find an official reference for it?

Answer: No, the actual title was Three Approaches to Psychotherapy I, II, and III, but folks dubbed it the Gloria Films.

Question: Is the work really as old as it looks? I mean it comes across as ancient.

Answer: That's because it is ancient. The actual filming took place in 1964 and the movie was released in 1965. In 1964 the Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show and in 1965, "The Sound of Music" was a big hit at the box office, and the mini-skirt was just released.

Question: Who came up with the idea for the project?

Answer: The mastermind (aka the producer and director) behind the flick was a California psychologist and psychotherapist of note, Everett.L. Shostrom. He created some self-actualization inventories and two years after the Gloria films he authored a successful book, Man the Manipulator.

Question: Why do you think Dr. Shostrum got involved in this project?

Answer: At that time a shroud of secrecy had permeated professional psychotherapeutic helping. The books gave mountains of information about theories, but there was very little literature about what therapists actually said to clients. In 1950 Shostrom recorded the late, great Carl Ransom Rogers with a client on a magnetic wire (yes, go ahead and laugh, this predated digital, cassettes, reel to reel, and eight-track recordings). But: It was not to be. The recording was lost forever when the head of the history department recorded his own presentation of Adam and Eve on the wire recorder! I mean seriously, could I make that up?

Question: Why did Dr. Shostrom choose Albert Ellis, Carl Rogers, and Frederick (Fritz) Perls as the therapists?

Answer: Well, quite frankly, it was an all-star line-up. A lot of folks in the field felt these three helpers were the dream team . . . the best in the world, if you will. Perls created gestalt therapy; Ellis pioneered RET or rational emotive therapy (abbreviated RT at the time of the filming); while Rogers was the father of nondirective counseling which in today's world is often called person-centered counseling.

Question: Why do my professors always call the approach by Ellis REBT? Is that the same thing as RET?

Answer: Late in his career Ellis added the "B" to stand for behavior based on the longstanding recommendation of a well-known psychologist and psychotherapy book author Raymond J. Corsini.

Question: Had Gloria met Perls, Rogers, and Ellis prior to the filming and what did she know about them?

Answer: No. She just knew they were prominent therapists and would each have approximately 15 or 20 minutes to cure her of what ailed her.

Question: Was Gloria a real client or merely an actress pretending to be a client?

Answer: Oh definitely, a real client. In 1963 Shostrom put together a film titled "Introduction to Psychotherapy." The film featured an actress who was pretending to be a real client. Shostrom was not happy with the movie, nor the acting, hence a real client, Gloria, was cast for 1965 project.

Question: I thought Perls acted like a jerk during his session. Do you have any evidence that Perls was aware of how he was coming across? I am totally sure my current internship supervisor would never allow me to treat a client in such a mean manner.

Answer: I can say with great certainty that Perls was aware of his actions. At one point in the session he quips, "Well, Gloria, can you sense one thing? We had a good fight?"

Question: So how do experts who practice gestalt therapy defend the practice of this theory?

Answer: Well, generally speaking, they say something like, "You don't need to do therapy exactly like Perls to be a gestalt therapist." To be fair, I have heard top practitioners say precisely the same thing about Ellis, though to be sure they are not talking the way Ellis came across in this movie. If you ever witnessed a therapy session or workshop conducted by Ellis he was often prone to use a little off color language, and that's putting it mildly!

Question: Okay, well here is my biggest question and the one I really want to know the answer to. In the movie, Rogers comes across in a very warm moving way. Ellis, is seemingly a tad less empathic, but not bad, while Perls is flat out mean to her. After Gloria experiences therapy sessions with all of them she is asked which therapist she would most like to continue therapy with and she chooses Dr. Perls. I was shocked. I mean, I just thought Rogers was the hands down winner. What in the world was going on here?

Answer: You were surprised, I was surprised, my entire graduate class at the time we viewed the films was surprised, and seemingly countless others who viewed the sessions were in shock and awe. There was just something not quite right about her choice of Perls. I didn't buy into it then and I sure don't buy it now. In fact, it was her strange choice of Perls which piqued my interest in researching the movie.

Personally, I thought it was the strangest response (from a client who was not psychotic) I had come across in the entire field of psychotherapy, and that's saying a lot!

Question: Did you find it difficult to research this film?

Answer: Do birds fly? Absolutely. Lots of people were trying to piece this puzzle together with very little success. Perhaps the most remarkable was a fellow I corresponded with in another country who was actually offering small rewards for information. Seemingly folks with connections to the film just were not talking. On one occasion a person who actually knew Shostrom told me he insisted I share anything I came up with him before I had it published! He wanted to approve or disapprove of what I was going to write. What? (Excuse me, but when did America stop being a free country? Just asking.) He also refused to give me any information and told me it wasn't relevant why Gloria chose Perls. This made me even more suspicious and made me want to research this even more!

Question: Did Gloria ever see Perls after the interview and if so what transpired? I hope the transaction was more cordial than the therapy session.

Answer: Yes they saw each other, but no it wasn't pleasant! According to Gloria, after the cameras stopped rolling and the experts and movie crew were preparing to depart, Perls used Gloria as a human ash tray (not a misprint). He motioned for her to hold her hands cupped with her palms facing up. He then flicked his cigarette ashes into her hand.

Question: Geez, that's downright abusive, wouldn't you agree?

Answer: Yeah! At the very, very least I could safely say it is behavior that was unbecoming of the father of a major psychotherapy modality.

Question: Lots of folks on the web accuse Gloria of having an affair with Rogers or Ellis. Some even suggest she married one of them. Any truth to the rumors?

Answer: Totally false. Junk science. Not a shred of evidence to support these claims. In fact, to the contrary, Gloria became very close to Rogers and his wife.

Question: Okay, so I can't wait another moment. Why did Gloria pick Perls as her favorite? Rogers came across so empathic. Wasn't he surprised when Gloria did not choose him? I have heard therapists say that Perls was chosen because she realized she needed a tough helper and he would not allow her to remain disturbed.

Answer: Rogers did admit he was baffled. In my mind Rogers gave a flawless performance. I'd give him five stars. Six if I could. As the session began to wind down Gloria says, "Gee, I'd like you for my father." Rogers replies, "You look to me like a pretty nice daughter." As you remarked earlier, it was very moving and Rogers came across as an ideal billboard advertisement for his own theory. Moments after the session with Rogers Gloria announced that, "All in all I feel good about this interview."

Three years before he passed away, Ellis told me that Gloria hated Perls for the rest of her life. Ellis revealed that the movie was "a fake" in the sense that, prior to the filming Gloria had seen Shostrom for four years of psychotherapy. When the film was produced Rogers didn't know this either. At the time, Shostrom was a supporter of Perls. To quote Ellis, "He [Shostrom] got her to say it was Perls who helped her, when he actually didn't." Was Gloria experiencing positive transference toward Shostrom? Was it just that she didn't want to disappoint her therapist? Could it have been that she was petrified of Perls? I don't have the definitive answer, but I think all of the aforementioned issues most likely entered into this. Just for the record Ellis felt he tried to cover too much in his own session with Gloria, and thus while his intervention was not horrific, he was clearly not at the top of his own psychotherapeutic game.

Question: So what is the take-away message you think counselors and therapists need to know?

Answer: Well, first let me be 100% crystal clear that there are occasions when a helper must be direct and use confrontation. No argument about that. Not now, not ever. However, after watching the movie, countless generations of therapists came away with the false notion that a sarcastic, up in your face, card carrying mental judo therapist (in this instance Perls) will walk away with the grand prize. Over the years I routinely heard therapists, supervisors, and my own students brag, "I got right up in the client's face and came across like Perls in the movie," thinking that was the best approach. According to Gloria's daughter (referred to as Pammy, just a fifth-grader at the time of the film), who authored Living with the 'Gloria Films': A daughter's memory in 2013, these Perls wannabes got it oh so wrong. After perusing her book it is safe to say the brief session with Perls negatively impacted her for the rest of her life.

Question: Is Gloria still alive?

Answer: Sadly, Gloria passed away in her mid-forties after a battle with cancer. I believe Gloria said it best herself as she was fond of saying, "Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear." Every aspiring and practicing therapist who wants to complete the emerging gestalt should see this film.

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When I penned an article and a book chapter on the classic Gloria Films some years ago I never dreamed these pieces would continue to bring me a seemingly endless string of correspondence. Indeed, this classic video influenced the psychotherapy training and subsequent practice strategies for thousands and thousands of helpers.

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What to expect

The guests featured here appear on Esther Perel's online training platform, Sessions. They share their wisdom and experience on grief, loss, stress, and health to help you and your clients navigate change and difficult conversations.

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Growing Through Discomfort: A Mental Health Professional's Guide

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The guests featured here appear on Esther Perel's online training platform, Sessions. They share their wisdom and experience on grief, loss, stress, and health to help you and your clients navigate change and difficult conversations.

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https://drchatterjee.com/the-power-of-pain-with-julia-samuel/

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Hub of Hope - mental health support networks

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Hub of Hope - Mental Health Support Network provided by Chasing the Stigma

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Chasing the Stigma (CTS) has launched the Hub of Hope - a national mental health database, bringing help and support together in one place, with a focus on grassroots organisations.

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How can we think differently about the impending winter and more lockdown?

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hen Kari Leibowitz first arrived in the Norwegian city of Tromsø, she was both intrigued by, and fearful of, the approaching winter. Two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, the city does not see the sun from mid-November to mid-January. It was a far cry from the state of New Jersey, where she had grown up, or Stanford, California, where she had been studying before travelling to Norway.

As a health psychologist, Leibowitz's aim was to understand the ways that Tromsø's citizens coped with the long "polar night". In many countries, the short days of winter are thought to cause lethargy and low mood, resulting in "seasonal affective disorder" (SAD). This is sometimes assumed to have a purely biological basis - levels of mood-regulating neurotransmitters such as serotonin are generally lower in winter than in summer, and last week a study suggested that people with more neurotic personalities are particularly susceptible to low winter moods. SAD is often treated using standard antidepressant drugs, as well as psychotherapies.

During the darkest periods of the polar night, Tromsø only receives two to three hours of indirect sunlight, shining into the sky from below the horizon. Yet its inhabitants do not show the kind of wintertime depression you might expect of a city cast in darkness. One study by May Trude Johnsen at the University of Tromsø found that the citizens' wellbeing barely changed across the year. Their sleep was a bit more disturbed without the daily rhythm of the rising and setting sun, but they reported no increase in mental distress during the winter.

So what's their secret? Of the many potential explanations, Leibowitz's work suggests that one vital component may be a particular "mindset" that arms the citizens against the stresses of the long polar night.

Tromso at night. Photograph: RelaxFoto.de/Getty Images

These lessons could not be more timely. We may not live in the far north, but many of us in Europe and the US find winter to be the cruellest of all seasons - and that's without the shadow of a global pandemic. Last week the Observer reported that as we face the daunting prospect of a second lockdown in cold dark conditions Brits have been stocking up on patio heaters and fire pits but, consumerism aside, what might we learn from the Norwegians' psychological resilience?

Leibowitz's findings build on decades of previous research showing that the mental framing of stressful events can powerfully influence the ways we are affected by them. People who see stressful events as "challenges", with an opportunity to learn and adapt, tend to cope much better than those who focus more on the threatening aspects - like the possibility of failure, embarrassment or illness. These differences in mindset not only influence people's mood, but also their physiological responses, such as changes in blood pressure and heart rate, and how quickly they recover after the event. And the impact can be long-lasting, even during major transitions: one Israeli study found that immigrants' stress appraisals can predict how well they adjust to their new country. They also seem to determine how well police officers in Australia cope with the stresses of their work.

Needless to say, our appraisal of whether an event feels like a threat, or an opportunity, will depend on our circumstances and our resources to handle the problems we encounter. But it is sometimes possible to change our appraisal of a situation consciously. In one memorable experiment, Alison Wood Brooks, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, asked participants to face their fears of public speaking. Brooks found that simply asking the participants to repeat the phrase "I am excited" helped to reduce their anxious feelings and led to a better overall performance, since it encouraged them to view the situation as a new challenge rather than a threat. Many psychotherapies, such as cognitive behavioural therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy, have also been found to increase our resilience by helping us to reframe stressful events in more constructive ways.

To test whether a difference in outlook could also explain the resilience of Tromsø's residents, Leibowitz designed the " wintertime mindset scale ", which asked participants to rate how much they agreed or disagreed with statements such as

There are many things to enjoy about the winter

I love the cosiness of the winter months

Winter brings many wonderful seasonal changes

And

Sure enough, she found that participants' answers predicted their wellbeing over the coming months; the more they saw the winter as an exciting opportunity to enjoy a glacial climate, the better they fared, with high levels of life satisfaction and overall mental health.

Amazingly, Leibowitz found that these attitudes actually increase with latitude, in the regions where the winters will be even harsher. People in Svalbard (at 78 deg north) had a more positive mindset than the people in Tromsø (69 deg north), who took a more optimistic view than people in Oslo (60 deg north). In other words, the positive wintertime mindset is most common where it's most needed.

Most people don't realise their beliefs about winter are subjective. They feel there's nothing they can do about it

Kari Leibowitz

These positive attitudes were apparent in Leibowitz's casual conversations; indeed, she says that many of her friends struggled to understand why you would not enjoy winter. They embraced the possibility of skiing or hiking in the mountains, and savoured the chance to practice koselig - a Norwegian version of Denmark's - which might involve snuggling under blankets with a warm drink in the candlelight. Far from dwindling in the dark, Tromsø's community flourished in the long polar night. "There is this interaction between the culture that you're part of, and the mentality or mindset that grows out of it," says Prof Joar Vittersø, Leibowitz's collaborator at the Arctic University of Tromsø.

Surrounded by Norwegian positivity, Leibowitz soon found her own mindset shifting; she learned to love long walks with a headlamp to guide her path. And rather than yearning for sunlight, she came to appreciate the "soft, peaceful" appearance of the city in the darkness. "When it was snowing, I would always try to go out and enjoy the fresh snowfall."

She suspects that many other people could follow suit, once they find out about this research. "Most people don't realise that their beliefs about winter are subjective," says Leibowitz, whose research is currently under peer review. "They feel like they're just someone who hates the winter and there's nothing they can do about it... But once you put it in people's heads that mindsets exist, and that you have control over your mindset - I think that that's tremendously powerful."

Leibowitz conducted her initial studies long before the new coronavirus left Wuhan - and she is realistic about the challenges of trying to see the positive in the pandemic. "A change in mindset is not a cure-all for everything," she emphasises. It can't simply eliminate our anxieties about the job insecurity or the fear of losing a loved one, and we should not attempt to suppress those emotions.

Even so, she suspects that adopting the positive wintertime mindset could make a second lockdown a little less daunting for those who worry about keeping their mood buoyed in the bad weather. We might recognise, for instance, that it's a time for baking comfort food or cosy evenings curled up under a blanket in front of a box set - practising a little bit of the Norwegian koselig. And if we normally exercise on a running machine, we might try to find value in a bracing jog in the elements. Since the risk of contagion is much lower outside, we might also adapt to the Scandinavian way of outdoor socialising (lockdown regulations permitting). Tromsø, for example, has an open-air cinema, so residents can enjoy atmospheric film screenings in the eerie Arctic darkness. As the Norwegians say: "There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes."

This time, we do at least have the advantage of knowing what did and didn't work during the first lockdown, so we can be more realistic in our expectations of what we can and can't achieve, focusing our efforts on the small actions that bring the most comfort, rather than aiming to write a bestselling novel, say.

A recent study by Prof Hannes Zacher, a psychologist at Leipzig University, shows that our personal framing of the pandemic has already had a small but significant effect on our responses during the crisis so far.

'The more people saw the winter as an exciting opportunity, the better their wellbeing.' Photograph: DieterMeyrl/Getty Images

The survey, which was set up before the crisis, ran from December 2019 to May this year - and as you might expect, there was a significant drop in life satisfaction and positive mood after the pandemic hit Europe. But certain psychological characteristics and coping strategies seemed to protect some people from the worst effects. This included "active coping" - such as setting up a proper office at home, scheduling home-schooling times for the children, and making sure to eat well, sleep well, and exercise, Zacher says. As the previous research predicted, the most resilient participants also managed to recognise the potential opportunities in the crisis - such as "learning something from the experience, or trying to grow as a person as a result from the experience," Zacher explains.

Like Leibowitz, Zacher emphasises that the aim is not to sugar-coat the situation or to deny the difficulties that we will face; we can't hide from the shadow cast by the pandemic, any more than the citizens of Tromsø can pretend that the sun is still rising. By recognising our own capacity to control our responses to the lockdown and the changing seasons, however, we may all find some hidden reserves of strength and resilience to see us through the days ahead.

* David Robson is a science writer and author of The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions (Hodder & Stoughton £9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Dreading a dark winter lockdown? Think like a Norwegian

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hen Kari Leibowitz first arrived in the Norwegian city of Tromsø, she was both intrigued by, and fearful of, the approaching winter. Two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, the city does not see the sun from mid-November to mid-January.

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Do you find yourself being incredibly hard on yourself? Do you secretly want revenge on people who have slighted you - but you hold onto resentment instead of doing anything about it? Or do you work relentlessly, to the point of exhaustion? These behaviours are typical masochistic traits within the personality. By masochistic we don't mean sexual sadomasochism (where one is dominant, the other submissive). From a psychological perspective, the self-defeating behaviours that a masochist endures are often done by the self to the self. In other words, masochists inflict pain and humiliation on themselves.

Understanding the origins of a masochistic personality structure

The masochistic personality structure is also called the 'self-defeating personality'. The roots of this personality structure come from a 'battle of will' between the developing child and over-controlling parents.

Parents seek to retain control at all costs. They require obedience and compliance at all times. There is no room for the child to express his own opinions and needs. Love is conditional on being good. Taken to extremes, parents may abuse, chastise and humiliate the child, threatening to abandon or punish if the child does not toe the line.

Growing up like this can have a profound impact. Children can hold onto their hurts, wishing to get back at their parents but lacking the power to do so. Any attempts at revenge are done furtively or passive aggressively. The intrusive or critical behaviour of parents can become the internal voice of a bullying inner critic. Masochists as adults can also become incredibly compliant, losing touch with their creativity, and choosing jobs that are demanding but dull.

Masochistic personality traits

Here we identify the typical traits of a masochistic personality, which you may recognise in yourself or others:

You work to the point of exhaustion, just to meet your targets. This is abusive to the self, as you push yourself to your limits and beyond.

You feel humiliated inside - you're the same as everyone else, remember - but you take extra steps never to show others how you really feel.

You feel unloved in the world: you always had to work that extra bit harder to be accepted by those around you, and that was never enough.

Your inner critic attacks everything you do, pushing you to further extremes to prove your worth.

Your body may be solid, symbolising your defences to the abuse or intrusiveness you experienced in childhood.

You find it impossible to say no or to assert yourself. You instead try to please but are shaking with resentment inside.

You complain about your lot in life but never do anything about it, even refusing attempts to help you.

You may be attracted to abusive relationships where you continue to be humiliated and shamed. Enduring this pain, and not showing that it hurts, is the masochist's way of maintaining some sense of pride in the self.

You feel trapped in endless cycles of self-defeat. It's impossible to enjoy pleasure without guilt or shame accompanying it. You feel hopeless about the future.

How to help yourself if you have masochistic personality traits

Find a therapist. Therapy can help you understand the patterns from your past that may be self-defeating and destructive. Through that awareness of your past you can begin to make conscious choices in your present by becoming aware of your triggers.

Manage your anxiety. It can be terrifying when you start to make changes in your life. After a lifetime of not taking risks, anxiety can kick in when you start to do something for you. A therapist can help with strategies for your anxiety, as well as offering a safe space where you're not going to be punished for speaking your truth.

Tackle your inner critic. What does it want? When does it get triggered? Whose voice is it? Understanding your inner critic can be the first step to managing it and stopping it ruining your life.

Take personal responsibility. You can take charge of your emotions and feelings and actions without blaming other people for them. That includes getting in touch with your anger about what happened to you as a child and finding constructive ways to express it. Again, your therapist can help you find a way.

Grieve for your past. You may feel sad for the love you never had from your parents in childhood, and perhaps never will have. Working through childhood wounds and allowing them to heal is incredibly painful work. But, with the support of a therapist, grieving your past can free you to live a life of your own choosing.
For confidential advice and support, and to discuss booking an appointment with one of our therapists, please call 020 8673 4545 or email info@theawarenesscentre.com

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Are You A Masochist? Here's How To Tell... And What To Do About It

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Do you find yourself being incredibly hard on yourself? Do you secretly want revenge on people who have slighted you - but you hold onto resentment instead of doing anything about it? Or do you work relentlessly, to the point of exhaustion? These behaviours are typical masochistic traits within the personality.

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Winter Lockdown: How To Look After Your Mental Health - The Awareness Centre

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With the Covid rates climbing, the thought of a winter lockdown is looming. We offer practical tips on how can we protect our mental health.

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Winter Lockdown: How To Look After Your Mental Health - The Awareness Centre

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With the Covid rates climbing, the thought of a winter lockdown is looming. We offer practical tips on how can we protect our mental health.

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Winter Lockdown: How To Look After Your Mental Health - The Awareness Centre

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With the Covid rates climbing, the thought of a winter lockdown is looming. We offer practical tips on how can we protect our mental health.

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Jennifer Maravillas for HBR

You know the moment: a mood-veering, thought-steering, pressure-packed interaction with a colleague, boss, or client where the right thing to say is stuck in a verbal traffic jam between your brain and your mouth.

Sian Beilock, president of Barnard College and author of , found that this analysis paralysis occurs when your brain suddenly becomes overtaxed by worry or pressure. Consequently, you find yourself unable to respond to a mental, psychological, or emotional challenge, and you fail to execute in the critical moment.

Many people experience this at work. But there are certain phrases you can keep in your back pocket when these moments come. Route your response with them, and redirect the situation to regain control.

Situation #1: Someone takes credit for your idea.
Katie is the COO of a hospitality company. She has a keen strategic mind. In a contentious moment, she recommends that the C-suite move toward a new talent strategy. The idea is met with resistance. Then Dave, the head of IT, restates her idea in his own words. The rest of the C-suite supports him in "his" idea.
It's not a matter of if this situation happens, but when: You competently make a point. It goes unacknowledged or is tersely rejected. Minutes or days later, a colleague or manager misrepresents your point as their own, restates it identically, and is praised and credited for making it.

What you should say: "Thanks for spotlighting my point."

Why it works: Spoken with composure, it:

prevents you from being trivialized by serving notice about the misappropriation of your contribution

allows you to reclaim your idea without aspersion

gives you the upper hand when addressing the matter with a manager

provides an opportunity for greater ownership, if delivered in front of others, by offering detail or clarification for impact

Katie didn't skip a beat. "Thanks for spotlighting my point, Dave. There are a couple other topics worth considering in tandem with this. I'll review those quickly and we can delve into more detail in the next meeting." The group refocused their attention on Katie, and moved along to viewing her as the point person for the conversation.
Situation #2: You're asked to stay late when you're about to leave the office for a personal obligation.
Heather is a physician at a large urban hospital. Wednesdays at 4 PM she attends a one-hour clinic administration meeting. If Heather leaves by 5 PM she arrives home in time to allow the nanny to get to her own children's after-school program on time. At 5 PM, Heather stands up to leave. One of the clinic administrators asks if she can stay a few more minutes until they are done. Heather dreads saying she has to leave to relieve the nanny, because she knows her colleagues may judge her as having a poor work ethic.
What you should say: "Excuse me, I have another commitment."

Picking up your child from daycare, moving a parent into a care facility, or attending a surgery consultation with a dear friend are time sensitive, must-do things - especially when someone you love is depending on you. No matter how family-friendly a workplace claims to be, explaining family matters to colleagues can cause resentment.

Why it works: This sentence will minimize your risk of backlash because it:

serves as an implicit, respectable request for confidentiality

establishes an information boundary that puts anyone who crosses it at risk of appearing intrusive

eliminates oversharing about the reason for your departure

Gathering her laptop and bag, Heather said, "Excuse me, I have another commitment." Another physician asked, "Where are you off to? Anything fun?" Walking toward the conference room door, Heather grabbed her water bottle with the parting phrase, "It's just something I committed to long before this meeting was scheduled. I'll swing by tomorrow to get caught up."

You and Your Team Series

Conflict

Situation #3: In a pivotal situation, a trusted colleague snaps at you.
Manuel and Alvin run their website out of their home. Manuel writes content. Alvin designs and formats. Manuel realizes Alvin's work often requires longer hours to tend to. In appreciation, he frequently buys Alvin lunch, occasionally gifts him chiropractic treatments for chronic back problems, and sometimes surprises him with an addition to his wardrobe. One day Alvin approaches Manuel and tells him he wants to make a major career shift. Manuel says nothing. Feeling ignored, Alvin repeats his intention and asks, "You have nothing to say about this?" Dismissively, Manuel responds, "About what?" Alvin feels disrespected by Manuel's lack of concern or consideration. Despite Manuel's many acts of appreciation, Alvin regularly feels shortchanged in comparison with the focus, regard, and responsiveness Manuel shows to paying customers. When Alvin addresses it, Manuel snaps back, "Look at how much I do for you!"
What you should say: "This isn't about what you do for me. It is about what you did to me."

You know when a valued colleague, someone who almost always does right by you, damages your good rapport? Frustration follows when your attempt to address it is met with a retort and a guilt trip. Though their concerns may be valid, it doesn't mean they should be rude.

Why it works: When stated without emotional inflammation, this sentence can quickly reduce frustrations by:

limiting the scope of the exchange to the isolated misstep, and not being derailed by an exchange about a history of mutual consideration

quickly dealing with the fact-based, cause-effect dynamics of the exchange

allowing for an opportunity to establish mutually affirming conduct going forward

Alvin took a deep breath. "This isn't about what you do for me. It is about what you did to me." He went on to acknowledge Manuel's appreciation for his work, and then addressed his partner's unresponsiveness. Manuel apologized, realizing he hurt Alvin by not being more mindful and considerate when Alvin came to speak to him.

Situation #4: You have to say "no."
Sam sends Julia a text at 9 PM on Saturday night, with an idea that could give the company an edge in customer service's call hold times. Julia has been asked to work more collaboratively with Sam, but she has been avoiding it because Sam is unreliable.
What you should say: "This is a good launching point."

Saying no is tough to do, especially when trying to demonstrate you are hardworking and a team player. It often seems easier to say yes to appease others, flash the right optics, or get the task out of the way.

Why it works: Spoken with a tone of enthusiasm and flexibility, this positive statement allows you to bow out of the initial request, while protecting your reputation by:

reframing their idea as a starting point

allowing you to entertain the request without committing to it

creating the option to shape the request

doling out diplomacy not rejection

Julia texted Sam "This is a good launching point! I'll get my team together to prepare the data, and reach out to you with ideas of how we can approach the call hold times."
Situation #5: You have to give negative or awkward feedback to someone you're close with.
Tony is a purchaser at a chocolate factory. For two years Jay has been both his manager and his friend. Lately, many other employees have asked Jay to tell Tony that he has halitosis. The situation has become intolerable for many, even off-putting to vendors.
What you should say: "I'm here to be for you what someone once was for me."

When you are giving sensitive feedback, no matter how much you try to position yourself as an advocate, people tend to become defensive. It makes you question if giving the feedback is even worth it.

Why it works: Delivered in a calm and candid tone, this sentence can save a career, or life-altering moment, from becoming a decimating event with an alienating outcome by:

giving the other person a moment to brace themselves

leading by sharing a personal account of a tough feedback situation you experienced, which endorses the value of receiving and listening to criticism

instantly unifying you with the other person through your shared vulnerability

shifting them from hearing the message as disparagement to hearing it as encouragement or concern

Jay approached Tony at his desk and let him know he had some quick feedback. "Tony, I'm here to be for you what someone once was for me. You may have noticed that I take a step back when we talk. I and others have experienced, on several occasions, that your breath isn't always the best. It could just be dehydration, but I'm concerned it could indicate something you might want to discuss with your dentist or doctor." He handed Tony a pack of breath mints. Tony, though a bit embarrassed, smiled and thanked him. Jay shook Tony's hand and headed back to his desk.
Situation #6: You need to push back on a decision you believe is wrong.
Mae-Li is a partner and the head of the most important research team at a pharmaceutical company. Her team is the only group in the company that is almost entirely Chinese and majority female. When the office is undergoing a redesign, a few top managers are tapped to decide which groups will be moved to the less desirable basement level. Without asking for her input, Mae-Li's group is selected to move to the basement. She feels slighted.
What you should say: "This is my preference."

Sometimes, when something bothers you, addressing it can leave you feeling apprehensive and conflicted. You can spend time analyzing and detailing a defense for your perspective, but it may just overcomplicate matters.

Why it works: It will allow you to direct the conversation toward a desired change, while still conveying openness for other approaches by:

clearly communicating your concern and what you want

reasoning rather than offering a defiant dictate

demonstrating you are willing to get involved with a potentially sensitive topic

giving others the heads-up that the outcome matters to you enough to track it as it develops

Mae-Li popped her head into her manager's office. She explained that since she wasn't consulted by the moving committee before being directed to move, she wanted to share her perspective, in the hope that her manager would share it with the committee. "I realize that some of the teams are going to have to move, but it's unclear why mine was selected for the basement. I want my team to stay on this floor. This is my preference." Her manager took notes, confirmed Mae-Li's perspective, and let her know that he would advocate for her team.
Situation #7: You need to escalate a serious issue.
Eva is an engineer in Silicon Valley. While away at an industry event in New York, she returns to her hotel to find her manager in the hotel lobby. He tells her that he flew there to spend time with her because he has strong feelings for her. When Eva reports this to Abe from the HR department, he tells her that her manager is one of the top performers at the company, that he has been there for many years without incident, and that she probably misinterpreted what he said.
What you should say: "Your response gives me cause to take this further."

When it comes to serious issues like sexual harassment, there is still inconsistency with how managers and HR departments handle complaints. This can leave you worried and troubled about being mistreated again, about losing opportunities for promotion, and even about losing your job.

Why it works: This serious statement, delivered in a calm and matter-of-fact tone, informs the offender and managers that you will not be complicit and compliant with misconduct, and that you will figure out a way to take further action, by:

establishing that the issue isn't going away, whether they elect to handle the situation themselves or answer to someone else about it later

being transparent about your plan to escalate

demonstrating that you expect the offender to suffer consequences for committing the poor conduct, and that you will not suffer consequences for reporting it

empowering you in the moment, rather than demoralizing you in the aftermath

Eva was not deterred by Abe's response. She wrote his words verbatim in her notebook and said, "I shared the facts with you. Your response gives me cause to take this further." Abe raised his eyebrows and asked, "Are you sure this is a battle worth fighting with your manager?" Eva again wrote Abe's words verbatim in her notebook. She responded, "Yes, I'm sure," and repeated, "Your response gives me cause to take this further." She thanked Abe and left the office to email another executive at the company, with the intent to pursue redress.

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7 Tricky Work Situations, and How to Respond to Them

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You know the moment: a mood-veering, thought-steering, pressure-packed interaction with a colleague, boss, or client where the right thing to say is stuck in a verbal traffic jam between your brain and your mouth. Sian Beilock, president of Barnard College and author of , found that this analysis paralysis occurs when your brain suddenly becomes overtaxed by worry or pressure.

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Terminal cancer means I won't see the other side of lockdown | Coronavirus outbreak | The Guardian

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s I was lying in a hospital bed last July after complications arising from chemotherapy, my oncologist entered the room with my scan results. Hospital had become familiar to me but his next words weren't. The treatment wasn't working. There was little else that could be done. I pressed him to be more specific and was told bluntly that I wouldn't last a year. I would be lucky to have half that time. This was nine months ago, before Covid-19, and I'm very unlikely to be alive to see the other side of lockdown.

Almost two years ago, as summer in London was just beginning, an ultrasound to investigate a bladder infection found a large tumour on my right adrenal gland that had spread to my lungs. I was diagnosed with adrenocortical carcinoma, an extremely rare and aggressive cancer. It is in desperate need of research; when it is advanced there is very little effective treatment. This was not something I expected in my late 20s. Early on, after reading the bleak statistics, I started preparing myself for the inevitable. But treatment began positively and my focus changed to getting better. When death isn't staring you in the face, it is easy to push back the difficult thoughts and conversations. Dying was something to address later.

Now my oncologist has said I cannot have further treatment. His reasoning is that it would leave me vulnerable to becoming ill at a time when there are not enough resources to help, and also because the nurses normally available are busy helping others. I'm still feeling good, better, in fact, without chemo. But I feel like I'm living on borrowed time. I no longer look like the archetype of someone with cancer - I'm back to my natural weight and have a full head of hair. I often feel like the old me, except with an awful attempt at a moustache.

Last month, before all this started, I took the opportunity to go to Colombia. I explored that beautiful country, danced badly to reggaeton and met people from around the world. The sun was shining and most of the time everything felt normal. But the dark clouds of coronavirus were looming, and when I arrived home, the reality hit that this was the final stage of my journey.

Whenever I had thought about the last few weeks of life before, I always pictured them being surrounded by friends and family. I'd eat at my favourite restaurants, go to south London parks where I've shared kisses and lazy days. I'd get to watch the bands that soundtracked my life in London's festivals, and frequent the bars and beer gardens that, for better or worse, have defined my adulthood. Crucially, I'd spend time with the people whom I had shared those experiences with; who made me the person I am today. When I became sicker, we would watch films, listen to music, laugh, cry, talk - about both the big things and the little things. It would be a period that maybe only tends to come in times of tragedy, where vulnerability and urgency create connections at a higher level. Where the bittersweet feelings of love and loss exist simultaneously and we are at our most human.

Others feel time is standing still right now, but for me it is slipping through my fingers

None of this can happen right now. This "good death" described above is being denied to me due to the pandemic, and instead I face a steady decline into nothingness. Currently I am cut off from my family; my sister, who I live with, works for the NHS so is temporarily staying with friends to avoid bringing home any infection. I am one of the many vulnerable people being protected for their own benefit.Just stuck in my flat, alone. Waiting.

I'm taking each day as it comes. I wake up and take a few moments to be grateful that I'm still feeling well. I eat well, exercise and have days filled with video calls and Netflix, like everybody else. After many months of chemo I'm quite used to being housebound. I'm not bored; I oscillate between feeling pensive and flat. I can't help my thoughts sometimes running away and turning to everything I will miss out on. Planned weddings that I now can't attend. Friends' children I'll never meet. People I thought I'd grow old with that I'll never see again. Let alone what my own future would have brought. In these moments I feel devastated, and frustrated that there is no one to blame. Others feel time is standing still right now, but for me it is slipping through my fingers.

I do expect to spend some quality time with my family soon. I still plan to have conversations with friends so that when I go, nothing is left unsaid, even if they are not held face to face. On top of that, I am still grateful for so much within these four walls - listening to music, learning new things or even simply looking at the beautiful view from my window.

Before cancer I considered myself very independent. This man was an island. It has been humbling to learn how much I depend on people, both physically and emotionally. I feel so fortunate to have had my people over this period, and facing the future without them is truly daunting. Whether times are good, bad, or worse, it is ultimately the people whom you love and care about that get you through. For me, these people didn't just get me through the last two years, but somehow made them two of the best years of my life.

Real connection is something that I think a lot of people in the country are missing right now. As much as possible, it is vital we keep that going, even if it is limited, and help those most in need of this - for example, elderly and homeless people: those who suffer isolation outside of an enforced lockdown.

Politicians and medical experts talk about the light at the end of the tunnel. People will eventually open their doors again and restart their lives as the country attempts to move back to normality. For me, and I'm sure plenty of others in a similar position, there is no light to give me hope. The tunnel is all that there is, and I'm having to find my way in the dark.

* Elliot Dallen is from Cardiff and has worked in finance in London since graduating

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Terminal cancer means I won't see the other side of lockdown | Elliot Dallen

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As I was lying in a hospital bed last July after complications arising from chemotherapy, my oncologist entered the room with my scan results. Hospital had become familiar to me but his next words weren't. The treatment wasn't working. There was little else that could be done.

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Mindfulness may not always be the answer for some ..

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Mindfulness may not always be the answer for some ..

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Mindfulness and meditation can worsen depression and anxiety | New Scientist

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People who feel like a "junior" member of a group experience a temporary decrease in IQ. (As in most situations, confidence matters a lot.) People who feel their contributions won't be valued experience a temporary decrease in IQ.

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Safeguards
Why Smart Bosses Make Remote Employees Communicate Less, Not More

Research shows less 'face time' leads to increased creativity, better problem-solving, and higher productivity.

By Jeff Haden, Contributing editor, Inc. @jeff_haden

If many or all of your employees have been working remotely, you're probably concerned about the loss of actual face time. Not just in terms of leadership, but in those formal and (theoretically all-important) casual interactions and collaborations and ad hoc problem-solving moments among team members.

(You know, like when Marcy runs into Mark in the hallway, he shares his struggles with a project, and her "outsider" perspective provides the aha! breakthrough Mark desperately needs.)

Fortunately, technology offers substitutes. Slack. Teams. Zoom. Trello. Asana. Clockwise. Calendly. Instant meetings, whether formal or informal, mean instant collaboration, instant problem-solving, and instant creativity.

For one thing, meetings are definitely overrated. One 2012 Virginia Tech study found that meetings make people dumber: When people were placed in small groups and asked to solve problems, their individual IQs dropped by an average of 15 percent.

The problem? The feedback, even if only implicit, that meetings are intended to enhance.

Examples: People who feel like a "junior" member of a group experience a temporary decrease in IQ. (As in most situations, confidence matters a lot.) People who feel their contributions won't be valued experience a temporary decrease in IQ.

And people whose contributions have been criticized, however gently, experience a temporary decrease in IQ. (Which then causes that person to feel "junior," and that their contributions are less valued, making it even less likely they'll contribute meaningfully the next time.)

In short: Not only are large meetings a waste of time for most of the participants, large meetings make it extremely unlikely to get the best from most of the people who participate.

Especially where solving problems is concerned.

A 2015 Boston College study explored the value of connectivity and information flow in large teams. Fifty-one teams of 16 people each were given the same task: to discover and piece together clues that would help predict a fictional terrorist attack.

Some teams had individuals share information with the entire team; think one big group chat. Other teams required individuals to only share information with one or two other team members; those individuals could then pass that information received on to one or two more people if they chose.

As you would expect, the "mass communication" teams did better at gathering and sharing clues, and as a result all had access to the same "data."

But then things fell apart. Instead of struggling to agree on a common theory of how the attack would take place--you would assume more people naturally means more opinions--the opposite happened: Those teams quickly settled on one (usually incorrect) theory.

The problem wasn't diversity of opinion. The problem was groupthink.

Because members of the less-connected teams couldn't collaborate as easily, they were less likely to reach a quick consensus. They had time to think. To create their own theories. To brainstorm on their own. To kick around and refine ideas with one or two people before presenting them to the entire group.

As the researchers write, "Dense clustering encourages members of a network to generate more diverse information but discourages them from generating diverse theories; that is, clustering promotes exploration in information space but decreases exploration in solution space."

Or in non-researcher-speak, brainstorming and initial problem-solving is much more effective when people first come up with ideas by themselves, or with one or two others.

That will lead to greater diversity in ideas, better analysis of the pros and cons of those ideas, and much greater odds of the larger group eventually identifying the best idea.

How to Make Your Remote Teams More Effective

Of course, that doesn't mean you should do away with meetings altogether. Information still must be shared. Collaboration still must occur. Problems still must be solved.

Just be thoughtful about how you make those things happen.

Holding one short, daily "all-hands" meeting to provide brief updates, status checks, etc.

Creating digital bulletin boards (Trello, MS Flow, Asana, etc.) so everyone on your team knows who is working on what, and how it's going.

Clustering meetings instead of spreading them throughout the day so everyone can take advantage of large blocks of uninterrupted work time.

Creating collaboration "windows" within which people are available for chats, calls, etc. (Very few conversations need to happen right now; too many people mistake "urgent" for important.)

Then your meetings will be more productive.

And so will your employees. Engagement and responsibility aren't created by constant connectivity. Ownership starts with a feeling of control, independence, and authority.

People care the most when they feel trusted to make things happen.

And when they have the time -- the uninterrupted time -- to make things happen.

If many or all of your employees have been working remotely, you're probably concerned about the loss of actual face time. Not just in terms of leadership, but in those formal and (theoretically all-important) casual interactions and collaborations and ad hoc problem-solving moments among team members.

(You know, like when Marcy runs into Mark in the hallway, he shares his struggles with a project, and her "outsider" perspective provides the aha! breakthrough Mark desperately needs.)

Fortunately, technology offers substitutes. Slack. Teams. Zoom. Trello. Asana. Clockwise. Calendly. Instant meetings, whether formal or informal, mean instant collaboration, instant problem-solving, and instant creativity.

For one thing, meetings are definitely overrated. One 2012 Virginia Tech study found that meetings make people dumber: When people were placed in small groups and asked to solve problems, their individual IQs dropped by an average of 15 percent.

The problem? The feedback, even if only implicit, that meetings are intended to enhance.

Examples: People who feel like a "junior" member of a group experience a temporary decrease in IQ. (As in most situations, confidence matters a lot.) People who feel their contributions won't be valued experience a temporary decrease in IQ.

And people whose contributions have been criticized, however gently, experience a temporary decrease in IQ. (Which then causes that person to feel "junior," and that their contributions are less valued, making it even less likely they'll contribute meaningfully the next time.)

In short: Not only are large meetings a waste of time for most of the participants, large meetings make it extremely unlikely to get the best from most of the people who participate.

Especially where solving problems is concerned.

A 2015 Boston College study explored the value of connectivity and information flow in large teams. Fifty-one teams of 16 people each were given the same task: to discover and piece together clues that would help predict a fictional terrorist attack.

Some teams had individuals share information with the entire team; think one big group chat. Other teams required individuals to only share information with one or two other team members; those individuals could then pass that information received on to one or two more people if they chose.

As you would expect, the "mass communication" teams did better at gathering and sharing clues, and as a result all had access to the same "data."

But then things fell apart. Instead of struggling to agree on a common theory of how the attack would take place--you would assume more people naturally means more opinions--the opposite happened: Those teams quickly settled on one (usually incorrect) theory.

The problem wasn't diversity of opinion. The problem was groupthink.

Because members of the less-connected teams couldn't collaborate as easily, they were less likely to reach a quick consensus. They had time to think. To create their own theories. To brainstorm on their own. To kick around and refine ideas with one or two people before presenting them to the entire group.

As the researchers write, "Dense clustering encourages members of a network to generate more diverse information but discourages them from generating diverse theories; that is, clustering promotes exploration in information space but decreases exploration in solution space."

Or in non-researcher-speak, brainstorming and initial problem-solving is much more effective when people first come up with ideas by themselves, or with one or two others.

That will lead to greater diversity in ideas, better analysis of the pros and cons of those ideas, and much greater odds of the larger group eventually identifying the best idea.

Of course, that doesn't mean you should do away with meetings altogether. Information still must be shared. Collaboration still must occur. Problems still must be solved.

Just be thoughtful about how you make those things happen.

Holding one short, daily "all-hands" meeting to provide brief updates, status checks, etc.

Creating digital bulletin boards (Trello, MS Flow, Asana, etc.) so everyone on your team knows who is working on what, and how it's going.

Clustering meetings instead of spreading them throughout the day so everyone can take advantage of large blocks of uninterrupted work time.

Creating collaboration "windows" within which people are available for chats, calls, etc. (Very few conversations need to happen right now; too many people mistake "urgent" for important.)

Then your meetings will be more productive.

And so will your employees. Engagement and responsibility aren't created by constant connectivity. Ownership starts with a feeling of control, independence, and authority.

People care the most when they feel trusted to make things happen.

And when they have the time -- the uninterrupted time -- to make things happen.

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Why Smart Bosses Make Remote Employees Communicate Less, Not More

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Safeguards By Jeff Haden, Contributing editor, Inc. @jeff_haden If many or all of your employees have been working remotely, you're probably concerned about the loss of actual face time. Not just in terms of leadership, but in those formal and (theoretically all-important) casual interactions and collaborations and ad hoc problem-solving moments among team members.

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"There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self." - Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac, 1750.

Franklin was writing over 250 years ago. Surely we humans have learned strategies since then to aid self-insight - and avoid well-known pitfalls. Most of us are familiar, for example, with the better-than-average effect, the finding that most of us rank ourselves above average at everything from driving ability to desirable personality traits (even though of course we can't all be right). So armed with this kind of knowledge, are we better placed now to view ourselves accurately? And if not, how can we get better at this - and what benefits can we expect? The following studies provide some illuminating answers...
I feel like I'm smarter than other people
The better-than-average effect may be old news, but results from a recent systematic survey of Americans' beliefs about their own intelligence (the first to be conducted in 50 years) found that about 70% of men and 60% of women agreed with the statement: "I am more intelligent than the average person." The team was forced to conclude that Americans' "self-flattering beliefs about intelligence are alive and well several decades after their discovery was first reported." Other work has found that our over-estimates of our intelligence can be staggeringly huge - around 30 IQ points, on average, according to a study by Gilles Gignac and Marcin Zajenkowski published last year (which also found that we tend to over-estimate our romantic partner's intelligence even more than our own). The sobering lesson is that you're probably a lot less smart than you think are.
OK, but I at least know the limits of my knowledge
The "Dunning-Kruger effect" relates specifically to the tendency of people who are poor at a task to over-estimate their ability at it. As David Dunning has written: "The scope of people's ignorance is often invisible to them." (Although see Gignac and Zajenkowski again, with a paper from this year arguing that the effect is (mostly) a statistical artefact).

This over-confidence can be dangerous both to the individual, and to others. For example, a US study of student pilots found that those who'd scored lower on a pilot knowledge test "grossly overestimated their ability" while higher-scoring students tended in fact to under-estimate theirs. The same effect has been noted among other groups such as chemistry students. In this case, students who'd scored less than 50% on one exam had predicted that they'd get an average of 69%, while their actual average mark was just under 37%. That's a massive discrepancy. If you don't know that you're under-prepared for a test, this is clearly a problem.
Fine. But you can't deny that I know who I am!
How well do you know your own personality as it fluctuates from moment to moment? This was explored in a recent study, which found that participants had self-insight into their momentary levels of extraversion and conscientiousness, but weren't great at rating how agreeable they were being at any given time. As the researchers write: "This apparent self-ignorance may be partly responsible for interpersonal problems".

However, when it comes to personality in general - your fairly stable, trait levels of extraversion, agreeableness, and so on - there's some rare good news when it comes to self-insight. According to a large-scale review of data on self-reports of personality vs personality ratings from others, published in Psychological Science in 2018, we're actually pretty good at judging ourselves in this way. In fact, the work revealed that if anything, we're harsher judges of our personality than other people are. This was a surprise to the researchers, who'd assumed, based on other work in this field, to find a positive self-bias.
But I know what I like, right?
If you love salt and vinegar crisps, say, but hate cheese and onion, then fair enough. No one's going to argue that you're mistaken. But if you tell me you love coffee, I might be less accepting. It turns out that it's not always that easy for us to tell the difference between liking something and wanting it. A study published this year found that "heavy" coffee drinkers (people who drank three or more cups a day) actually want coffee a lot more than they like it. The implication is that they drink it mostly or entirely to feed their addiction, rather than for pleasure.
How can I get better at knowing myself?
Well, the people around you could be more honest: in general, other people don't help us to correct our biases. Too often, feedback from employers, family, and friends is vague, and overly positive, according to research led by Zlatan Krizan at Iowa State University. "As a society, we make the wrong trade-off by thinking that boosting self-esteem is going to boost performance, and that rarely happens," Krizan says. "That empty praise of telling someone they're great, or pretending there are not skill differences when there are, can really become a problem."

As well as seeking honest feedback, and bearing in mind the better-than-average effect, it could also be worth practising humility. Research published in the journal Self and Identity suggests that people who are more modest about their degree of self-knowledge actually know themselves better.
But is it important to have accurate self-knowledge?
No one likes a narcissist. But there could be some benefits to thinking you're better than you are. They relate to the optimism bias - the fact that we tend to over-estimate the likelihood of positive events in our lives, like getting a top promotion, and under-estimate our chances of suffering everything from a divorce to a car crash. Optimism is important for mental and physical health. So perhaps having inflated self-views is important for our wellbeing, too. In fact, according to the results of a study published last year in Nature Human Behaviour, this may well be the case. The participants completed various tests of cognitive and emotional abilities and then reported how well they thought they'd done on all these tests. They then spent a week completing daily diaries, in which they reflected on their levels of satisfaction with their career, relationships and life in general.

The researchers found that having accurate self-insight was not related to higher levels of satisfaction in any of these areas. The data even suggested that people who most over-estimated their abilities had the highest levels of life satisfaction. Still, it's worth noting that feeling great about your life and performing to your highest level are two different things. People with accurate self-knowledge may be more driven to improve, and achieve more.
A word of caution
Our understanding of the potential pluses or minuses of accurate self-insight is, according to a recent review, "clouded" by all kinds of issues, including differences between studies in the way self-insight is measured, and also fundamental differences in types of self-deception. (Self-deception may sometimes stem from an individual's desire to defend their self-esteem, but other times exist simply because a person hasn't really engaged in close self-assessment.) Jennifer Beer and Michelle Harris write that the currently available research "does not allow us to confidently conclude that self-insight has advantages over some types of self-insight failure (or vice versa)." They conclude by calling for "more systematic investigation of why, when, where and for whom self-insight is costly or beneficial."
Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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How Well Do You Know Yourself? Research On Self-Insight, Digested

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"There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self." - Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac, 1750. Franklin was writing over 250 years ago. Surely we humans have learned strategies since then to aid self-insight - and avoid well-known pitfalls.

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some useful people to listen to.

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Action for Happiness Events
UPCOMING EVENTS
Tues 6 July: Julia Samuel via Zoom, 7pm UK time BST ( see your time zone here)

Tues 20 July: Grace Marshall via Zoom, 7pm UK time BST ( see your time zone here)

Tues 10 Aug: BJ Fogg
via Zoom, 7pm UK time BST ( see your time zone here)

Thurs 9 Sept: Angela Duckworth
via Zoom, 7pm UK time BST ( see your time zone here)

For the latest information and to book tickets visit our Eventbrite page.
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UPCOMING EVENTS Tues 6 July: Julia Samuel via Zoom, 7pm UK time BST ( see your time zone here) Tues 20 July: Grace Marshall via Zoom, 7pm UK time BST ( see your time zone here) Tues 10 Aug: BJ Fogg via Zoom, 7pm UK time BST ( see your time zone here) Thurs 9 Sept: Angela Duckworth via Zoom, 7pm UK time BST ( see your time zone here) For the latest information and to book tickets visit our Eventbrite page.

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The Psychology Behind Video Calls - And Why They Mess With Our Minds - HuffPost UK

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We're exhausted, oversharing and taking things the wrong way. Here's how video meetings change the way we communicate.

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The Psychology Behind Video Calls - And Why They Mess With Our Minds - HuffPost UK

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We're exhausted, oversharing and taking things the wrong way. Here's how video meetings change the way we communicate.

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#119 – Terry Real: Breaking the cycle of shame, anger, and depression

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Resilience and transactional analysis drivers 

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Resilience and transactional analysis drivers 

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EMDR

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What is EMDR Therapy and how can it help?

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The effect of the pandemic on our sense of self 

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The effect of the pandemic on our sense of self 

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The calendar has turned to September, and leaves have begun to change color, but before completely turning my attention to fall, I want to reflect on how strange a summer it's been. Due to COVID-19, I have had to grapple with more unwanted changes in my psychotherapy practice than ever before. It is best summarized as the summer of "No." In an attempt to capture the breadth and depth of my experience, I've created a list of the Nos that have been hardest for me.

No break. As a psychotherapist, summer is typically the time of a reduced schedule for me. Between my own vacation plans and those of my patients, I usually have more openings in my schedule. Typically, the warmer weather also decreases the number of new patient inquiries. For those like me who practice in parts of the country where summer sun invites us to be outside, there is less demand for psychotherapy. In contrast, during the summer of 2020, the demand for psychotherapy increased as people tried to cope with the impact of the pandemic. It was hard to say no to those seeking help when the need was so great.

No office. I, like many other therapists, became a front-line responder even as I moved out of my office and online. The scramble to learn Zoom, fashion a home office offering some semblance of professionalism, and establish new protocols with patients I've never met in person was a steep learning curve. Questions about HIPPA and collecting co-pays electronically became a common thread on listservs. As I lost the separation between my private and professional domains, my life became limited by lock-downs. The line between working and not-working was blurred. The dreaded commute looked less awful from the rearview mirror of nowhere to go. Six months out, my beloved office has become a very expensive post office box where I go and collect my mail on a weekly basis. Each time I open the door, I feel a bit like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations-the calendar says March, and the magazines are out of date. The water in the cooler is no longer cool or potable, most likely.

No variety. One of the deep satisfactions of my work is the individuality of my patients. The variability of the human experience set against the sameness of my physical space has kept me engaged in my work. But this summer, each session was characterized by universal angst about the pandemic. The particulars were different-the patient who was stuck in an unhappy relationship versus the mother surrounded by bored children-but the plea for reassurance was similar. Even more striking was the lack of separation between my own worries and those of my patients. I suffered from pandemic dreams and changed my routines to avoid falling ill.

No reset button. Every therapist I know complained of feeling burnt out, with little prospect of finding a way back to equilibrium. With gyms closed, travel out of the question, and social activities greatly curtailed, I found it increasingly challenging to practice self-care. As I lost track of the date and the day of the week, it was difficult to determine how to take care of myself. With no museums, movies, or plays, finding ways to let my mind rest and reset took unusual effort.

No way to meet new people. People struggled with the isolation of living alone. Figuring out how to date during the pandemic made dating apps feel even scarier than usual. Women worried about the window of fertility closing without an opportunity either to find a partner or feel safe to get or be pregnant during the pandemic. All of these fears were real, and trying to sort out how to encourage growth for my patients while respecting the reality of living through a pandemic was painful.

No joy. There was so much loss-deaths unattended, weddings canceled, and newborns not held by grandparents. There were no graduations, no proms, and no parties. Summer holidays were scaled back or nonexistent. It was hard work to find the joy in activities that now required masks and social distancing. Four of my patients, however, did get married this summer. After scaling back their plans, in the end, each celebration was a testament to flexibility and changed priorities.

No faith in our leaders. People searched for answers they could trust. Mask or no mask? Six feet apart or ten? Was flying safe or not? The discouragement and at times outrage about the failure of our leaders to lead kept our sessions focused on current news cycles with an abundance of hopelessness.

No more only pretending that Black Lives Matter. Pretending no longer passed as good enough, and although this was a positive change, the challenge was great. The reckoning of how to understand our country's long, sordid history of racism was dissected within the safety of the therapy relationship. For many of us, especially those of us who are white, the painful and raw experiences of racist feelings and behavior were relatively new to include in our conversations.

No jobs. As patients were furloughed or laid off, economic worries became paramount. Some careers all but disappeared, such as event planners who found themselves not only without a job, but also without a career future. Recent graduates' dreams of starting a new life were dashed. Older patients felt the sting of ageism in the workforce. For some people, it became a matter of choosing between their jobs and risking their health.

No end in sight. There was no timeframe I could offer for when things would be better. Future plans remained uncertain, and even now there is still no end in sight. Exploring topics of mortality and challenging our very American notions of invincibility and superiority evoked existential crises about the meaning of life. Patients pleaded with me for assurance that things would be all right. Holding out hope, but not false promises, for the future required striking a tenuous balance.

As I and others steel ourselves for the one-two punch of the pandemic and the election this fall, it is worth pausing and acknowledging the toll COVID-19 has taken on our own well-being, not just that of our patients. It has been exhausting. I am committed to find a way to greet the crisp, cooler autumn air and fulfill my professional responsibilities. For despite all the "Nos," one thing I do know is that human connections are what make life worth living, especially during challenging times like these.

File under: Musings and Reflections,COVID-19 Blogs

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The calendar has turned to September, and leaves have begun to change color, but before completely turning my attention to fall, I want to reflect on how strange a summer it's been. Due to COVID-19, I have had to grapple with more unwanted changes in my psychotherapy practice than ever before.

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Hub of Hope - Mental Health Support Network provided by Chasing the Stigma

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Chasing the Stigma (CTS) has launched the Hub of Hope - a national mental health database, bringing help and support together in one place, with a focus on grassroots organisations.

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The program shares powerful writing tips, while also ensuring they are simple and fun. It will not leave you lost and overwhelmed with literary rules of grammar or the like. It is not that sort of program. It is about delight, after all!

The lessons and exercises are designed to leave you feeling good about your writing, and are easy to follow and embrace.

It is a supportive program, regardless of if you never plan to share your writing with anyone or you want the whole world to read it!

Whatever level, there is something for you.

In addition to tips for improving your writing, Write for Delight includes a module on publishing options and marketing suggestions.

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The program shares powerful writing tips, while also ensuring they are simple and fun. It will not leave you lost and overwhelmed with literary rules of grammar or the like. It is not that sort of program. It is about delight, after all!