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Category Archive for 'Therapy'

There is a lot of loss around.  And I’m not just referring to people mourning the loss of  a loved person.  When someone is bereaved you would expect the mourning.  It is natural and understandable.  But apart from the loss of human beings, there are many other kinds of losses, and many people in [...]

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Beck’s Cognitive Therapy: Distinctive Features
Frank Wills
Routledge 2009
ISBN 978-0415439527 £9.99
This book sets out to provide a concise account of Beck’s work against a background of his personal and professional history. It is divided into two parts. There are 15 short chapters which examine Beck’s contribution to explaining psychopathology, and then 15 more looking at Beck’s suggestions [...]

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Chunking Up

I recently attended a two-day gathering of several hundred people. This large group could be divided into several sub-groups, with each sub-group thinking that they were the ones who were right, they had the real truth, they were the ‘pure and faithful ones’, they were the ones who could ‘really help’. You would think [...]

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Not Clearing the Fog

At the moment, anyone can claim to be a counsellor or psychotherapist in the UK.  The titles are not a protected ones, like ‘doctor’. There are, of course, professional bodies that reputable practitioners will belong to. The major professional bodies (the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, for example) are careful to distinguish [...]

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I caught part of BBC’s Songs of Praise last night. Well, it was on the TV, and I have spent enough years in my former life as an active Christian to have a strong cultural resonance with some of the music, and there was nothing else in particular to do, so I watched.
In the [...]

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There was a pile of dog poo on the pavement.
As they walked to work, four men trod in it and messed up their shoes.
The first man felt very sad. He looked at the mess and smelled the smell and said to himself: “You know, this just about sums me up. This always happens [...]

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Anxious Thoughts

Sometimes (perhaps especially when on holiday) we often long for an anxiety-free existence.  However, in my book, that would be a bad thing.  Human beings have powerful emotional systems and anxiety is a natural feeling that arises in response to stress.  It is part of the natural flight-or-fight response that have enabled the human race [...]

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The Monkey Man

Have you heard the story about the man and his monkey?
One day John was sitting in his office, minding his own business, when suddenly his boss opened the door and threw in a monkey. “Here,” said his boss. “Here’s a new monkey for you. You’ve got to keep this one.” And [...]

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Are you a seagull?
Albert Ellis, a cognitive therapist, cited by the American Psychological Association in 2003 as the second most influential psychologist in the twentieth century, used to argue that most people had strong tendencies to be like seagulls. As a psychotherapist he was quite unusual in his methods and often did and said seemingly [...]

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I’m not quite sure what ‘normal’ is, but I’m pretty sure that I’m not it. When the roulette wheel of life flung out its genes, mine fell somewhere near the far edge of the distribution curve, not in the middle.  I am learning to live with that.  At times it has been unpleasant: at other [...]

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