Chris Worfolk's Blog

Duathlon is a multisport run-cycle-run event. I’ve never really been that into duathlons. It doesn’t have the sex appeal of triathlon. Perhaps because it is plausible that people like both running and cycling. Whereas nobody likes swimming, cycling and running so we can all suffer together.

Still, Trinity Triathlon was making it a club trip and my previous experience in Naas, for the Naas triathlon, had been a good one. This one was at the Punchestown race course and featured a 3k run, 20k cycle and 3k run.

Just as we rocked up, the freezing rain came down. Fáilte to Ireland. Luckily, it held off for the race and sat comfortably in the cold but not too cold temperature. The bike course was an out-and-back which had a long hill that, to its credit, felt longer on the way down than it did on the way up.

My splits were:

Good enough for 128 out of 178. It was on the National Championship series so everyone was annoyingly fast. I’m claiming victory vicariously because I drove Maxence to the race, and he came first in his age group.

Every year, I do an audit of the courses I teach to bring them all up-to-date. This year’s audit was bigger, though. I made significant updates to social psychology, person-centred counselling, cognitive psychology, CBT for social anxiety, and large updates to many other courses resulting in around 172 new lessons.

This has been my main focus since finishing the gestalt course around six weeks and it’s been exhausting. So, I’m looking forward to taking it a little easier until at least tomorrow!

During COVID, JP started organising a Zwift league for the triathlon club. 13 series later and it is still going! Mostly thanks to JP’s relentless organisation skills. It’s been wonderful to have a way to stay connected to the club.

I accentually got myself promoted to the top division last series which meant racing against people much better than me. And led to some exhausting evenings with Amy chasing me down for most of the race. But thanks to only three dragon league riders showing up for all five races I managed to scoop myself a bronze 😆.

Venla recently completed her 21st junior parkrun, earning her the marathon wristband (21 x 2k = 42k). She didn’t look too impressed but I think she’s mostly there for the food trucks after the run.

Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy is a book by Irvin Yalom. It presents ten cases from his work as a psychiatrist in story form.

By story form, I mean it is written as a narrative. Each case is based on a real client and their real story, but many of the details have been changed to protect their identities. Yalom writes in a compelling way that attempt to teach psychologists something but has also earned the book a great deal of popularity with the general public and would be highly accessible to everyone who wants to read some interesting stories.

None more so than the story from which the book takes its title, Love’s Executioner, which almost reads like a thrilling Agatha Christie mystery. For me, none of the other stories quite matched the first but each was interesting and I was excited to pick up the book each time.

After spending the first quarter of last year rehabbing my broken ankle, this January has been déjà vu. There isn’t even a cool story behind it: I fell over at a soft play. This year it was the opposite ankle and only a sprain. Thankfully, after four weeks of rehab, I’m now back up to running long distances.

This week sees the release of my new course on Gestalt Therapy. The idea of Gestalt Therapy is to raise a client’s awareness of their body, sensations and experience, and use this greater awareness to help them solve emotional problems in their lives. It is one of the oldest modalities in psychotherapy and is still popular today.

Learn more about the course on the Holbeck College website or watch the trailer below.

The Body Keeps the Score is a book on trauma by Bessel van der Kolk. van der Kolk makes the case that trauma is the most pressing public health crisis. It is everywhere, affects a huge number of people and is the number one treatable condition that can improve people’s mental health, give millions of people a chance to live a better life and reduce intergenerational abuse.

He discusses both PTSD, which occurs when someone experiences a traumatic event or events as adults, and childhood trauma, which affects the individual’s development, attachment style and ability to form relationships. Memories of the event(s) are often frozen in time with the individual unable to process it. By process, we’re talking about our ability to form a coherent narrative, with closure, that allows the memory to fade into the background and allow us to move on with our lives even if the scars remain.

He discusses the limitations of talking therapy, though somewhat focusing on CBT over more humanistic approaches, and explores what other evidence-based approaches may work. Notably EMDR, but given the need to physically rewrite the body, also the possibility of using yoga, theatre and other lived-out approaches.

King of the Vagabonds is the second book in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, following on from Quicksilver. When I say “following on” the story is unrelated but just the next in the series. It follows the adventures of a commoner, Jack Shaftoe, and his adventures around Europe and the world.

The Coddling of the American Mind is a book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. It makes the case that people are “anti-fragile” and that by protecting people from ideas they disagree with, we are actually doing them harm.

The book focuses on the limitations of free speech being introduced across university campuses and the idea that everyone should feel safe. This is antithetical to the way CBT works. If a client comes to therapy and says “I don’t feel safe because I think I will be killed by a tiger” we would look for the evidence around how many tigers live in their local area and whether they typically attack humans. But on many university campuses, and wider society, people are using the idea of “feeling unsafe” to try and shut down freedom of speech. This is bad foe society but also for the individual because we amplify their anxiety.

The book also argues that it creates divisions in society. It argues that teaching things like micro-aggressions and consent workshops is currently done on the basis of negatively, encouraging people to give the least charitable rather than most charitable interpretation of ambiguous actions and therefore creating a negative interpretation bias (which again is something we would try to do the opposite of in therapy).

It also touches on the idea of trigger warnings. Again, in therapy, we would typically talk about how avoidance can be a maintaining factor in mental health problems. Removing avoidance in the safety of a therapeutic alliance is somewhat different to randomly doing it in real life, but it should at least give us a moment to stop and pause and consider how many of the strategies we think are helping people are actually making things worse.

The arguments and nuances in this book are complex and it is not possible for me to do it justice in this blog post. But I would encourage you to read the book yourself because it would be fascinating to hear other informed opinions on it.