I love it when I follow up ideas from a new research paper and then break through into a whole area of helpful knowledge that I haven't come across before.  This happened recently with the paper by Srivastava and colleagues (Srivastava, Tamir et al. 2009 - see below) on the social costs of emotional suppression.  This then linked me through to James Gross's work at Stanford, but more on that in next week's post.

"There's nothing so practical as a good theory".    Kurt Lewin

So I wrote yesterday about the cathartic, emotion-focussed work that I went through.  In their classic 1973 book "Encounter groups: first facts"  the authors, Lieberman, Yalom and Miles, describe their major research on the potential benefits of these kinds of groups.  One of their findings was that people who benefited most seemed both to get strongly emotionally engaged with the group and also took time to reflect and make sense of what they had experienced.  In the weekly-format groups I run in Edinburgh, I try to encourage this reviewing process by explaining its value and then askin

Something quite deep happened to me, in me, during the group yesterday.  Third full day of the group and powerful, deep things were happening in and between a whole series of us.  Two couples have contacted particular distress.  No doubt many, maybe most, others have been moved strongly in various ways.  When there are powerful, potentially life-changing crises going on, one would need a heart of stone not to be deeply moved.

Yesterday was a fairly classic first full day of one of these four day peer groups that I've been involved with for so long.  Like a musical form ... a concerto or something ... there are usual stages to the group, phases which it typically moves through.  When I wrote about this spring peer group a year ago, I used the metaphor of a cooking pot saying "so it's crucial that people feel the pot, the container of the group is safe enough, that it can hold and allow what comes up to work through without spilling over and burning anyone badly.  So part of what we're doing can be viewed as making a container that feels caring enough, safe enough, accepting enough for members of the group to explore and work on issues that may bubble up for them.  Another aspect of this cooking pot metaphor is that it's important too that it's 'on the heat', that the way we are in the group helps people get in touch with issues, pains, conflicts, experiences that it can be helpful to work on in this environment."

It's the first morning of this year's "Mixed Group" in Cumbria.  I wrote about this group in some detail when we last met up almost exactly a year ago.  Lying in bed a little earlier on, I thought over why I'm here.  I should be reasonably clear about this by now - after all the group (with varying participants) has been meeting almost every year since 1991.

Here are three good, recently published books that are all highly relevant to the fields of stress, health & wellbeing.

Just as there were research papers on depression that stood out and got me thinking last month, so too there were particular papers on psychotherapy that I found more interesting than others.