Posts tagged with 'group work'
'Psychological safety' - what it is, why it's important & how to build it
6th March 2025
Psychological safety is a term particularly popularised by Amy Edmonson, Professor of Leadership & Management at Harvard Business School. She defines it as a shared belief among members of a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks. This includes speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes without …
An online interpersonal support group stirs up a mix of feelings
14th April 2020
"Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel." "This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." Both quotations by Polonius in Shakespeare's …
5th international 'breaking convention' psychedelic conference: 1st morning - microdosing and group retreats & ceremonies
22nd August 2019
'Breaking Convention' - the fifth biennial international conference on psychedelics - took place at Greenwich University in London from 16th-18th August. There were apparently 1,200 or so attendees for the 6 concurrent programmes - academic, workshop, performance, cinema, entertainment & installations - as well as an art exhibition. I went …
Learning to run therapy groups
23rd November 2016
I run an annual five day training for counselling psychology students on facilitating groups. I'm using this blog post to upload some of the slides. For example here's a collection on the current state of psychotherapy & some suggestions on potentially helpful ways of moving forward. More to follow! ...
Using involvement in group discussions for (self-) assessment and learning
26th September 2016
(this blog post is freely downloadable as a Word doc and as a PDF file) I recently gave a talk on "Therapist drift: black heresy or red herring?". Although that was the title, the talk rapidly segued into an exploration of the current state of psychotherapy and what we might …
Truly excellent therapists have "grace under interpersonal pressure" - How can we assess ourselves?
19th March 2016
I wrote a post recently called "Truly excellent therapists have 'grace under interpersonal pressure - Fascinating new research". I mentioned the classic 2009 Timothy Anderson paper "Therapist effects: facilitative interpersonal skills as a predictor of therapist success". I then went on to describe three great new additions to this literature …
Truly excellent therapists have "grace under interpersonal pressure" - Fascinating new research
15th March 2016
Hemingway wrote "Courage is grace under pressure". New research underlines that "grace under interpersonal pressure" is a key ability of truly excellent therapists. Study after study has shown that psychotherapists vary considerably in how helpful they are for their clients. The slide below shows a typical set of findings: (downloadable …
Social relationships, group memberships and health: what we can do
19th February 2016
I recently wrote a blog post "Social relationships, group memberships and health: background", where I described some of the mental & physical health benefits of group membership. I mentioned too the recent research study "Greater number of group identifications is associated with healthier behaviour" where the authors write:"What is already …
Social relationships, group memberships and health: background
22nd November 2015
We know that relationships are important for wellbeing, for protection against & treatment of psychological disorders, and for improving mortality - see, for example, blog posts on this website such as "Strong relationships improve survival as much as quitting smoking", "Be the change you want to see in the world" …
Warwick BABCP conference: 2nd day - behavioural activation, Kyrios OCD, 'mind the gap', & DeRubeis on personalization (4th post)
24th July 2015
Yesterday was the second full day of the BABCP summer conference in Warwick. I've already written three earlier posts about being here - on the pre-conference workshop I attended on "Anger dysregulation", the first morning "Trauma memories & a master presentation on four decades of outcome research" and the first …