Essays some will open as a pdf in a separate window. With some of these essays I will ask for you to please register. Simply, I would like to have contact details for communicating and also for ethical awareness ... for more information go to Marketing
Indicates: available to all
Indicates: available to members
The Function of Aggression in Therapy
The rationale for this has come out of repeated experiences with clients being accused of aggression. I believe the client has not intended to hurt or scare; to be angry or aggressive. So what is going on?
Suicide and Therapy Essay
Behind every suicide is an untold story of intolerable isolation. In front of every suicide is a sense of desolation,grief,and helplessness shrouded in shame.
Exploring the Client's Words in Therapy
Through the creative use of language, we are able to communicate our feelings, thoughts, needs and experiences. However, in the verbal communication of our experience the language used has the facility to remove the experience itself, leaving only the labelling – the assigned meaning. “We lose something when assigning meaning too quickly, attempting to put the experience in a tidy labelled box” (Cyndi, 2009, p. an online conversation).
Roots Identity Personality
I want to draw attention to this relationship of Roots and Belonging, and to do so by hyphenation so instead of Belonging there is Be-Longing, drawing attention to the longing that exists for each of us is wanting ‘to Be’. The context here is the sense of searching and exploring who we are in the world and the sense to Be, to Be myself, to ‘just Be'
Purpose of Research
Lincoln and Guba (cited by Brown, J. R. 1997, p73) give five axioms of qualitative research:
-
Realities are multiple, constructed, and holistic
-
Knower and known are interactive, inseparable
-
Only time- and context-bound working hypotheses (ideographic statement) are possible
-
All entities are in a state of mutual simultaneous shaping, so that it is impossible to distinguish causes from effect
-
Inquiry is value-bound
Sand tray in Therapy
The Contacting Process
Rather than me/self being a structure, e.g., composed of id ego and super ego, Perls et al, the founders of Gestalt view Self as a process, and most importantly consider Self to be “the system of contacts at any moment”. (Perls et al., 1951 p235)
“the self (is) the function of contacting the actual transient present”. ”. (Perls et al, 1951 p371)
Self is Discovered at The Contact Boundary
Touch in Therapy
Imagery and Creative Work in Therapy
The power of imagery and creative work in therapy is that it provides a route that can bypass a client’s constructed thoughts and behaviours that limit or deny their felt experience.
The danger of imagery and creative work in therapy is that it provides a route that can bypass a client’s resistance to explore thoughts, behaviours and feelings.
Intimacy and Love in Therapy
As humanistic counsellors we seek to foster ‘intimate’ relationships with our clients because we believe that that is the vehicle that can enable therapeutic change for our clients. ‘Confidentiality, and therefore privacy, is an implicit part of the encounter, as is a level of intimacy that sometimes reaches, if not exceeds, that of parent and child or husband and wife. We are privy to the secrets the client is barely willing to share with himself.’ (Kottler, 1993, p. 3)
Therapeutic Practice:
Proximity Disclosure Ending and Appreciation
The Contact Cycle
Based on reading from Gestalt Counselling in Action by Petruska Clarkson
Different reading have given variations on the phrasing or naming of the turn around of events or experiences that make up the phases of contact by the self with the environment.
Additionally the full context and meaning is better brought out in consideration of the creative-adjustment styles in this cycle, so read in conjunction with Cycle Disturbance