The NSPCC have flagged up an increasing incidence of reported hate crime directed at children and young people. Police forces across the UK recorded 5,349 hate crimes during the period 2016 to 2018. There has been a significant spike in children reporting hate crimes during counselling sessions following terrorist attacks in the UK, calls rose a third after the attacks in Westminster. The charity has helped to provide 2,700 counselling sessions for race and faith-based bullying in the past three years. Nearly half (48%) of the sessions were with 12 to 15-year olds, 9% were 16 to 18 years old and a staggering quarter were children aged 11 or younger. Callers to the NSPCC reported bullying and cyber-bullying, verbal abuse and racist name calling. Some reported self-harming or no longer wanting to go to school because they were worried about the abuse they face. The NSPCC have launched an ‘Understand Me’ campaign to encourage young people to speak up about and challenge racism and prejudice and to seek help. It wants the government to make it a legal requirement for social media companies to prevent online bullying in order to halt the rising number of children affected.
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 Therapy offers a person a reflective space away from friends, family and colleagues with a skilled professional within a safe environment. Research has shown that regardless of the therapeutic orientation, it is the relationship with the therapist that offers the potential for transformation:
The value of relating with integrity and the co-constructing of meaning that take place in the context of trust cannot be underestimated. Truth-telling is an essential facet of our humanity. Sharing our experiences in a safe non-judgmental environment where it is held and acknowledged is both cathartic and healing.  Psychosynthesis is an integrative transpersonal psychology that provides a universal framework for incorporating one’s own body, feelings attitudes and behaviour into a harmonious, synthesised whole, that incorporates all human dimensions, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Psychosynthesis assumes we all have multiple sub-personalities that help us to function in the world mostly without much reflection of conscious choice. The techniques include guided visualisation, daily self-reflection, role playing, drawing and dream work. Users learn to become the observer and director of their own sub-personalities, so they can function in a harmonious and balanced way.
Creativity can have positives outcomes for health and well-being. Research has found parallels between creative training processes and counselling methods. Studies has shown that personal growth, confidence and enjoyment are developed through creative training and counselling combined. This leads to improvements in functioning in relationships, communication, problem solving and capacity for divergent thinking and feeling. Divergent thinking is a central feature of creativity. Divergent thinking tends to be tentative, exploratory and orientated to multiple possibilities, including the ability to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously in one’s mind while incorporating and modifying new ones. For many clients, learning and practising divergent thinking and feeling is the beginning of positive growth and change. Rogers argues that “the mainstream of creativity appears to be the same tendency as the creative force in psychotherapy”. As such, the client and counsellor, can be co-producers of ideas along with solutions that are novel and useful by creating a new way of being for the client, which is more fulfilling and empowering and ultimately creative.  Over the years there has been considerable research into why people leave or stay in therapy. A recent study, where clients were interviewed about what influenced their decision to stay or leave therapy showed that they regularly reviewed their decision to stay. The three main influencing factors were the urgency of their need to change, how they felt about their therapist and if the process was moving them towards their goals for therapy. For many clients in the study, they were strongly influenced by the extent to which their therapist had been able to present them with a credible plan to resolve their problems.
When there is an unplanned or premature ending to therapy, it leaves a lot of questions for the therapist. I believe transparency is crucial, as is engaging with the client in where you are in reaching their goals and how they are feeling about the process and their progress. When the core conditions are in place for unconditional regard, empathy and congruence, there is the possibility to explore whether their feelings and needs are being meet or not, while challenging your own work to give each individual client the best of yourself. Children as young as five will be able to get help for mild depression through apps on their smartphones after the NHS’s treatment advisers recommended the use of such devices in their care. See the full story on the Guardian website.... https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/23/nhs-prescribe-app-therapy-children-depression?CMP=share_btn_tw  When we lose a loved one, the emotions in the aftermath are often so raw they dominate everyday living. Many also fear that sooner or later, others and they themselves, will forget their loved one. For some grief looks like depression, with feelings of anger, bitterness, impatience and are irritated by friends. Others experience friends and community members avoiding them, not knowing what to say, which can lead to social anxiety.
In grief, we can discover that the people we love, and attach to, where there were mutually rewarding relationships, have affected us in ways that were not in our awareness previously. They have a fundamental impact on our sense of self, the loss creates confusion about ourselves, who we are and who have we become., as well as our sense of purpose - how to be without that relationship. Grief is a gradual, long-term process, about mourning a death and working with the rupture towards a sense of accepting a new reality, the finality of their absence, exploring ways of having a meaningful life without them, while loving and caring for them without their presence, through holding on to memories, making them part of the story to your life. Loss is intrinsic to the human experience and at the far end of the spectrum is grief which is one of the greatest manifestations of psychological pain that we can go through. When finding a profound sense of gratitude for having loved the way we did, in honouring the memory of the loved one, their legacy lives on.  Psychotherapy students are often taught theory developed back in the 50s and 60s with no reference to recent findings, and as therapists we can a get stuck in fixed theoretical positions that do not evolve and that are stagnating. Research, both quantitative and qualitative, can be a means of supporting us in getting unstuck, the problem is there is little funding available for mental health research.
Miranda Wolpert, professor of evidence-based practice and research at University College London says ”therapy research is too much focused on competing modalities and what goes on in the counselling room, instead of looking at external factors in clients’ lives and the resources that contribute towards client behaviour change, then therapy can build in the counselling relationship”. We also need to explore clients ability to manage their mental health issues when not in therapy, what works for them in and out of therapy and how to tailor those findings to specific needs of others .In Person-Centered therapy listening to the client tracking what is going on, looking at what is being communicated is research in itself. Counselling is exploring human distress and its meaning while supporting the clients to find their own answers.. With the need to have scientific evidence based evidence, we can lose the art form of therapy and being creative in the process, due to the pressure of winning contracts within the NHS. Evidence from numerous studies shows that across all populations and all types of presenting issues, different therapies achieve roughly the same outcome. Mick Cooper, Professor of Counselling and Psychotherapy at Roehampton University says randomised controlled trials (RCT) give us an indication of the average effect and cost effectiveness of a particular intervention and allow comparison of when you do something and when you don’t and that is what commissioners want to generally know. We need studies showing what we do is effective so we do evolve moving forward.  A study at Kings College London on genetic links to anxiety and depression is breaking new grounds by exploring not just the genetic links with depression but also the social and environmental risk factors, therefore improving an individual’s treatment.
Therapygenetics, the study of genetic predictors of response to psychological therapy, is able to predict treatment response. Looking at the future, it is hoped therapygenetics will deliver a risk index for patients visiting a GP with anxiety or depression, to provide the treatment option that would work best for them, medication or talking therapy, rather than a trial and error approach. Several studies have provided evidence that individuals respond differently to different psychological interventions and that genetic differences are capable of predicting these different susceptibilities to psychotherapy. What has been found is that your genes put you in a certain place on the spectrum of emotional vulnerability to stress but when taught psychological techniques, it can increase a person’s resilience while reducing vulnerability. Genes cannot be changed but environmental changes can support the management of life’s stressors. Given, that for many people that drugs are the first line of treatment, genetic research offers a way of working out what will and will not work for them. We are in currently in an epidemic of distress with poverty, social isolation, social inequality, bereavement and loss creating anxiety and depression. We need to offer people the opportunity to be heard and to make sense of their life, while supporting them to find their own answers on how to move forward, developing a stronger resilience and self-esteem. Therapygenetics promises to deliver that opportunity more efficiently. Mentalizing is the ability to understand actions by both other people and oneself in terms of thoughts, feelings, wishes and desires, such as seeing ourselves from the outside and others from the inside. It supports us in making sense of ourselves and others.
An example of this, is when the US president, Barack Obama, had a commemorative photo-shot taken with two young ladies along with their serious boyfriends, which he learnt about during their introduction, and he suggested the two young ladies had another photo without their boyfriends, ‘You know just in case’ he said jokingly. He said it playfully and no one was offended. He was being very thoughtful, thinking if the relationships did not work out, they still had a commemorative photo without the boyfriends. He hinted that he remembered being younger and that relationships do not always last. If we have a good mentalization capacity like this, we tend to enjoy better interpersonal relationships and intrapersonally (self-to-self), we tend to self-regulate better and have a healthier sense of self, where the two worlds interact. Knowing who we are, helps not being exploited by others. Mentalization often happens automatically without thinking about it. It requires imagination, involving mental states which are an invisible collection of someone’s subjective experiences. It helps to gain insight into ourselves and others and how we interact. Source: Barley A. (2018). Holding Mind In Mind. Therapy Today. 29 (7), 34.  A growing number of children are being diagnosed with mental health disorders such as anxiety, separation anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and many more and this labelling can make a child deeply misunderstood. While the 21st century brings numerous benefits to young people in the western world, it has also brought contaminated areas such as the pressure to succeed, social media promoting unattainable images of perfect bodies, along with gender and sexual norms - many young people have viewed pornography by the age of fourteen and parents cannot always protect their children with the ubiquitous access presented by the digital age.
Countless factors contribute to difficult family life such as poverty, child abuse, violence, neglect, mental health difficulties, along with the pressure to be successful. We need to help young people by understanding the context of their difficulties and the impact it is having on their mental health. Empowering children to understand their behaviour is a natural response to their difficult experiences and may help them develop a more accurate acceptance of their strengths, while developing the vehicle for change and finding meaning. This will allow them to be all they can be and enable them to love and be loved. |
AuthorJacinta Bourke is a counsellor and psychotherapist operating in the Ealing W5 and surrounding areas. She is a member of BACP - the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. Archives
August 2021
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