BeINg the world

I’ve just returned home from a two-day, walking adventure: hiking over to Alfriston, and making the return to Lewes the next day. It’s a replication of a trip my wife and I did two months ago. As a comparison of the blog header image reveals, we are transitioning into another phase of summer: and I …

Try a little tenderness

This week I have been queuing up ideas around how my approach to therapy might fit with a description of bio-psycho-social-spiritual; building on the ideas of Engel (1977) who first proposed the “biological, psychological, and social, must be taken into account in every health care task”. A philosophy of clinical care (a way of understanding …

Integration not integrative

I’m a little under halfway with the project of short essays that will form Part 3 of my book on humanistic psychotherapy. The next collection is entitled “with a little help from our friends”, and will consider how the humanistic practitioner might benefit from engaging with ideas from other therapeutic modalities. As a tutor on …

Murmuration and…

Back in 2023 I had a brief back and forth exchange with Gestaltist, Ruella Frank. I had approached her with a question that had come up in a peer supervision / study session with a colleague: a curiosity about Frank’s use of the word transubjective to describe the relational quality between therapist and client. Along …

Wisdom energies

Yesterday was our teaching team’s annual “away day”. Impacted by the retirement of one of our senior faculty and the changes in the curriculum this would be necessitated, this year’s theme was coming back to the philosophical underpinnings of our psychodynamic and humanistic courses. I was delighted to have this opportunity to discuss the very …

Bridging the gap

Settling into my new environment, post retreat, entering the mandala…each pointing to something starting afresh, a toward becoming. The demands of spring dissolve into expectations and hopes for the summer ahead. Hence why on Wednesday this week I took myself “out on a date”, a mini writing retreat over in my old town of Eastbourne. …

Due South

On the boat back home. My original intention was to use the ferry crossing France ahead of my retreat to draft a post. But such was the choppy sea, that plan soon drained away! However, there was also a lack of intrinsic motivation to write. At first, I watched my mind try to work out …