I'm woken by a particularly loud owl hoot close by.  "HOOO.  HER-HOOO".  And again.  And again.  Becoming more distant.  I lie listening to the dawn chorus.  There are voices in it that we don't get at home.  It's a bit after five in the morning and I feel I've slept well.  Content.  Lovely down sleeping bag and a sleeping mat.  Gosh camping can be a lot more easy than when I was a kid.

(this short form of the self-compassion scale is downloadable both as a PDF file and as a Word doc) 

In yesterday's post I talked generally about the presentations at the BABCP spring conference.  Today I'd like to look more closely at what for me was the day's highlight - Willem Kuyken's talk on "Compassion in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy: therapist embodiment and client change".  One reason I liked the talk a lot was that it was a good example of how painstaking research gradually adds stepping stones of knowledge across the swamp of our ignorance.  There's so much to learn.  As Ralph Sockman put it "The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder".  And it's true.  The more I know, the more questions come up about what I realize I still don't know.

Friday was the "conference" day.  A real old fruit salad of presentations.  Nearly always I find it hard to stay awake and focused during this kind of "educational event".  It does however allow a lot of speakers to throw a lot of information at the audience!  The 2007 Marinopoulos et al review on the "Effectiveness of Continuing Medical Education" commented that " ...

Yesterday, in "BABCP spring meeting, first post", I described my initial thoughts arriving at the "Collaborative case conceptualization" workshop.  Well, now it's Friday morning.  A very social time yesterday evening after the workshop.  Slept on a friend's couch.  It's fairly bright and early now and their kids haven't yet emerged.  How was yesterday's workshop?

So here I am sitting in a cafe at Euston station.  I came in on the sleeper half an hour or so ago.  I slept well, which was a blessing.  I love it.  A full day's work yesterday, travel while asleep, well set up for a full day today.  Sleepers don't always work out so well, but my old tricks of aiming to be pretty tired when I get on board and using earplugs seemed effective this time.  I didn't even resort to the further favourite of having a good slug of whisky before tucking in to the rather narrow bunk.

Here are three websites that I have recently found interesting.  The first two are possibly more for therapists, while the third can be very helpful for therapists and general public alike.

I recently looked again at Professor Michel Dugas's interesting work on Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) at Concordia University, Montreal.  On his Anxiety Disorders Lab website he writes: "Over the past 17 years, I have conducted clinical research on the psychological processes involved in the etiology of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). This line of research has led to the development of a cognitive-behavioural treatment for GAD ... which targets the four model components (intolerance of uncertainty, positive beliefs about worry, negative problem orientation, and cognitive avoidance), has now been validated in four randomized controlled trials ...