"You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done."                                                                                                                                                      Aldous Huxley                

             "Be regular & orderly in your life so that you may be violent & original in your work."     Gustave Flaubert                

                                    "Fall down seven times. get up eight."   Japanese proverb

                      "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right."     Henry Ford                

                        "Knowledge is only rumour, until it is in the muscle."   New Guinea proverb

"When I get to heaven, they will not ask me 'Why were you not Moses?'.  They will ask 'Why were you not Susya?  Why did you not become what only you could become?'"                    Susya, a Hasidic rabbi

          "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."                                                                                                                                Jalal al-Din Rumi

I'm running a ten-session training, starting next week, called "How to live well - a shared exploration".  Here's a link to a description of the first evening - "How to live well: 1st meeting - values, self-determination theory, roles & goals".  Before, during & after the course, there's encouragement to fill in questionnaires.  This is suggested for at least three reasons.  One is that when we measure something, we tend to pay more attention to it.  Keeping track is often a therapeutic intervention in its own right.  Secondly we're using questionnaires to see if changes in our behaviours actually produce the improvements we're hoping for. 

A major new research paper was published in the Lancet last week - "Alcohol use and burden for 195 countries and territories, 1990-2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016."  It's the biggest and best overview of damage caused by alcohol that has ever emerged.  It's available in free full text and it makes concerning reading.  Here's the abstract:

All counsellors & psychotherapists in the UK need to have regular supervision if they want to maintain their professional accreditation.  A central reason for this is to support therapists in being as helpful as possible for their clients.  Unfortunately current approaches to supervision don't seem to do this particularly well.  In a recent issue of the Cognitive Behavior Therapy journal, Alfonsson et al in their article "The effects of clinical supervision on supervisees and patients in cognitive behavioral therapy: a systematic review" clearly state "No study could show benefits from supervision for patients."  And this depressing conclusion simply affirms what previous research has already highlighted for psychotherapy more generally ...