UKCP has withdrawn from the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy. This is my response and current thoughts.
A memory comes into my awareness:
I am 15 back in my hometown, going to the cinema with some friends. As I'm crossing the road, a car with an England flag in the windscreen pulls up. I throw my arms wide and yell "England" at the driver, who beeps his horn several times in celebration.
That was…
UKCP recently issued a press release urging NICE not to publish its guideline for depression in adults. They provide a bullet pointed list of highlighted concerns, including definitions of depression used, and the focus on Randomised Control Trials to the exclusion of other valuable evidence.
Of particular concern is the proposal to limit first-line treatment to…
This year, Mental Health Awareness week is themed around stress. As part of this, the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) is running a series of articles zooming in on the idea of millennial stress. A boiled down version of this post appears on the UKCP blog here: What (some) millennials think about millennial stress.
As…
One of the core concepts in gestalt psychotherapy is contact. Specifically, gestalt therapists are interested in what happens at the contact boundary; itself an emergent phenomenon that arises wherever self meets other.
In gestalt's founding text, Perls Hefferline & Goodman's Gestalt Therapy (PHG), the self is defined as "the system of contacts at a given time".…
The Swan Project in Bristol are looking for a new Service Manager:
"A small, warm and unique charity in the heart of Bristol are looking for a Service Manager to help run our project and manage the day to day running of the organisation. We are a specialist in providing counselling to those with addiction issues…
The Golden Arrow is a heuristic tool I've been thinking about for a while now to help frame my understanding of what is happening in therapy at a given time. Really, it's an app running off the gestalt cycle api; the theoretical cycle of gestalt formation and destruction chunters away in the background, and gets…
My first encounter with what pre-gestalt Fritz Perls would have recognised as concentration therapy, came in the form of two exercises from a book called Concentration & Meditation. These were exercises designed to lead into wider Buddhist practice, but I was using them to still and focus my otherwise drastically scattered mind.
One of these exercises…
the bristol therapist facebook page digest - january 2018
Quite a while back, I got excited and over-committed myself to an in-depth process of chewing over everything I read online that would culminate in a weekly digest. The two main outcomes of that experiment were an inability to get beyond week two, and a consequent reduction…
Every theoretical system has its biases, and gestalt is no exception. Along with gestalt's bias towards here and now experience, gestalt also has a bias towards emotion and feeling.
There is a general wisdom in gestalt that emotions are Good Things, and that feeling one's emotions is better than not feeling them. Whilst I agree with…
