In counselling and psychotherapy, we have the opportunity to ‘tell our story’ to someone who is able to hear it; someone who can help us think about it in new ways and support us while we are doing so. But what about outside the consulting room? What else can we do…
In 1968, Stephen Karpman first referred to the Drama Triangle model as a means of describing and analysing human interaction. Karpman’s ideas often prove useful in helping us identify the roles we ourselves play when stuck in unhelpful repeating patterns of communication with others – and how to step out of those roles.
Authenticity is a term that is often bandied around by counsellors and psychotherapists as something worth having. But just what does it mean in the context of counselling and psychotherapy and what are the implications of trying to get it? For me, authenticity involves being true to one’s own beliefs,…
I’m a bit of a Grinch when it comes to positive thinking. When we are sad I don’t think it is helpful to feel like we always have to put a brave face on things.
It can be hard to ask for help and particularly so if you are someone who has become used to dealing with your own difficulties alone. You may be making the assumption that asking for help is somehow a sign of weakness and that by allowing yourself to be vulnerable in front…
For individuals, working with a counsellor or psychotherapist for the longer term – 12 months or more – can feel very different to a short burst of counselling sessions that help us get through a crisis of some sort. When we have had the time to tell our story (what…
If, as children, we felt repeatedly hurt, humiliated, abandoned, suffocated or ignored by someone close to us and on whom we depended for survival (usually a parent), we might have made the perfectly logical decision – at least from a four-year-old’s point of view – to keep other people at bay.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi We all have barriers to protect ourselves from emotional
Ever so often I take a look through my special “ah-ha!” lenses and see a concept that has been bothering me with completely fresh eyes. Well, sort-of, anyway. Usually, somebody says something and I think to myself: “Yes, of course – why didn’t I think of that?”
I’m waiting to pay at the supermarket check-out. I can feel the guy behind me’s breath on the back of my neck. From time to time the corner of his basket digs into my right kidney. He huffs, puffs and sighs. This man is in my personal space!
