My way of working with clients involves seeing them (and myself) as made up of different parts. While we may think that we are unified, coherent personalities, when we pay attention to what is going on inside us we often discover a collection of many different parts, or sub-personalities.
The power in therapy of ‘talking to yourself’
One of the revelations that many who enter therapy experience is that the process becomes not just talking to the therapist but also, in a deeper, way talking to themself.
This was highlighted recently by artist and cultural commentator Grayson Perry, in the BBC Radio Four programme Start the Week. (see link at bottom of this post).
Why detaching from conflict can kill a relationship
Many people believe that fighting is bad in a relationship and of course that’s true if the arguing is toxic and non productive. However, for a couple therapist the worst indicator for the relationship is when one of the partners seems to have given up.
This partner may have got to the stage where everything seems to hopeless that they detach from the relationship – they no longer even care enough to get angry.
Read more: Why detaching from conflict can kill a relationship
John Bradshaw – championing your inner child
This is a great talk by psychologist John Bradshaw about the inner child, in which Bradshaw talks about the importance of “championing” that part of ourselves. This idea is developed in his book Homecoming, published in 1990.
Bradshaw, who died in 2016, was from Texas and has the style of a Southern preacher in his public talks.
Developing a healthy ‘internal leader’
Is there a hierarchy of grief?
I recently attended a talk given by Julia Samuel, a grief psychotherapist and author of Grief Works, Stories of Life, Death and Surviving.
She talked about a ‘hierarchy of grief’, in which certain kinds of loss are deemed to be worse than others. For example, when someone dies we mostly assume that those most affected will be the person’s close family – especially spouse and children.
