Posts Tagged ‘psychology’

Counselling Adolescents: The Proactive Approach is a textbook on youth counselling by Geldard & Geldard. It’s one of the classic textbooks on counselling young people.

It’s an interegrative counselling philosophy. There are bits of SFBT, Person-Centred, Transactional Analysis, psychodynamic and behavioural approaches in here. It’s also a little dated but not out-of-date. That said, I didn’t find it quite as useful as many of my colleagues have.

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.

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.

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.

Man’s Search for Meaning is a book by Viktor Frankl. The majority of the book talks about his experience as a Nazi prisoner of war and his experience in the concentration camps.

The second part of the book discusses logotherapy, which is Frankl’s own form of therapy. It is similar to existential therapy and looks to find meaning in life. Life is suffering but if you can find meaning in the suffering, it becomes bearable.

One of the techniques, paradoxical intention encourages clients to do the opposite of what they fear. For example, if you are worried about blushing in public, go out into public and try to blush as much as possible. Similar experiments are often described in modern CBT textbooks.

Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes. In this course, we will cover all of the core topics in cognitive psychology including perception, attention, memory, learning, language, decision-making, emotion and much more. We’ll also look at research methods and how neuroscience is allowing us to see inside the brain.

Preview the course on Udemy or watch the trailer below.

Metacognitive Therapy (MCT) is an evidence-based psychotherapy looking at cognition. While Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) traditionally looks at what we think, MCT looks at how we think. It explores meta-beliefs such as needing to worry to keep ourselves safe, whether change is possible, and whether thoughts can be harmful.

When we understand the neural systems that lead us to engage in these cycles of worry and self-doubt, we can give the client (or ourselves) new processes to avoid engaging in these unhelpful patterns.

Metacognitive Therapy is highly effective at reducing worry and rumination and proven to reduce anxiety, PTSD, OCD and depression. In this course, we will learn what MCT is, how it works, how to use it in practice and how to apply it to each condition.

Preview the course here.

The Chimp Paradox is a book by Dr Steve Peters. In it, he describes his model of the mind as two parts: the chimp, an irrational emotion-driven strong animal, and the human, the higher part of our brain that we often like to pretend is the “real us”.

It is a generalist book in that it is a useful read for anyone, not just those struggling with their own mind, but more of a popular self-help book with applications for every day relationships and problems.

I found it an interesting read, most of the time, but I don’t think I ever made it to the end.

One of the major factors that influence insomnia is emotion and expectation. If you think you should be able to sleep, you are going to struggle. If you have little expectation of sleep, you actually find it easier.

Storms and Nisbett demonstrated this in a study where they gave two groups a placebo. The first group were told they had been given caffeine pills while the second group were told they had been given relaxation pills. The first group found it easy to get to sleep while the second group found it harder.

This came up in a group discussion recently where someone suggested a great tactic for being the effect: try to stay awake. She found that if she stopped trying to sleep and started trying to stay awake, she fell asleep pretty quickly. With the results of the above study, perhaps we should not be suprised.

I finished my masters degree last year (with a distinction and 82% in my final project, thanks for asking :D). Because it takes the exam board a few months to award the degree, and then you have to wait for the next set of graduation ceremonies, that meant nearly a year’s wait.

Earlier this month, the day finally arrived.

Beckett is currently holding their degree ceremonies at the Leeds Arena. This is not as pretty as the Headingley campus but did mean there were enough seats for everyone. This was critical as it meant I could take Elina and not have to decide which one of my parents I loved the most.

The ceremony itself was long and dull. There were 1,000 students graduating in the same ceremony. Some in absentia, but that still a lot of people. And, because of the way they lay things out, I was almost last. Literally, I was sat next to the three PhD graduands whose presentations are reserved for the end. However, the vice-chancellor did give a good speech at the end.

After the ceremony, we headed over to the Rose Bowl where they had turned the car park into a reception area with some food and drink stalls and places to take photos.

All in all, a nice ceremony, but not a patch on Leeds University. When I graduated for my bachelors, the whole school got together and put on refreshments and all the staff were there to congratulate us. This was very different. It was all run centrally, very busy, expensive, I saw almost nobody from my course because of the size of the group and there was no school-specific stuff or any of the faculty there.

I did get a video, though, including a slow-motion relay: