Working as a psychotherapist or counsellor, practising as a doctor, participating in interpersonal groupwork, and at the heart of relating deeply with another human being - I have internal reminders, charts, ways of helping myself be present in as constructive a way as I can.  One inner chart or internal reminder is the jazz trio metaphor.  A bit like a musician revisiting and making fresh again their playing of a well known classical work, the jazz trio metaphor takes another look at the key, so often explored territory of the therapeutic relationship - which overlaps to a huge extent with the more universal territory of how to be profoundly present in any deep relationship with another human being. 

This is the third in a series of posts triggered by Nick Grey's workshop on memory-focused approaches in CBT for adults with PTSD.  In the second post yesterday, I wrote about " ... treatment structure".  In today's post I want to step back for a moment and get a broader perspective.  These trauma-focused treatments have much wider applicability than just for DSM-IV-TR congruent, single episode traumas, and it's this wider applicability that's a major reason for me doing this workshop.

I've just arrived from Scotland off the sleeper for the two days of the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) Spring Workshops and Conference. Today it's workshops and we have a choice of five. I'm going to Nick Grey's on "Memory-focused approaches in cognitive therapy for adults with PTSD" . The publicity reads:

"Guidelines from around the world for the treatment of PTSD in adults recommend trauma-focused CBT as a first line treatment. In essence ‘trauma-focused’ means placing an emphasis on discussing the details of the traumatic memories. This can be emotionally demanding for both patient and therapist. Despite the treatment guidelines many therapists still do not use ‘trauma-focused’, i.e. memory-focused, approaches.

Last month I used Google Analytics to identify the most read pages on this website and I wrote the post "Update on website traffic: the ten most popular blog posts". This got me thinking - "What are my own personal favourites?" I quickly realised that the posts that I've written that have had the most impact on me and my practice as a therapist are nearly always made up of sequences of blog posts rather than just individual items.  I said that glancing back over the last year or so, themes that stood out included mindfulness, therapist feedback, self-control, conflict, embodied cognition and positive psychology.