Call for participants – trainee and qualified therapists

Teresa Lawless is undertaking a Masters in Psychotherapy in Dublin Business School, Ireland, and would like your help with her research. Here is her recruitment advert: I am doing a quantitative research thesis looking at changes in Emotional Intelligence which may occur during and post Psychotherapy and Counselling training . I am working under the

Bending the rules: the secrets I rarely confess

or Ruling the bends: authorising ourselves to practice In this post, guest writer Emily Brookes, and Dr Russel Ayling discuss Emily’s experience of ‘bending the rules’, and Russel’s re-thinking of this idea: understanding our bentness, perhaps, or rather, ‘ruling our bends’.  The more I have talked to my psychology friends the more I have come

No eating near the portfolios! Handing in the baby

Our guest writer, Emily Brookes, is a soon-to-be-vivaed final year trainee counselling psychologist. Do feel free to check out our website for details of our clinical supervision register and our research support services! My proof reader really has done an excellent job. She’s changed things I wouldn’t even have thought of and as I read through

Branding counselling psychologists!

Medics often brand themselves as illness specialists: we suffer because we’re ill; a bit of us is broken, we’ll fix that by cutting something off or adding a pill; if you’re lucky, you’ll be cured. I polarise, of course, and many medics such as Joanna Moncrieff and David Zigmond (see his blog post in the

Is it a word? It sounds like a word! The final stages of writing-up

I’m in the final stages of writing-up my thesis. More accurately, I’m swirling round the dark abyss that is thesis-prison. I’ve dropped so far down the rabbit-hole that I’ve turned to creative writing as a break from the research. It’s like doing anything too different would have disastrous consequences. I’d be coming up to the

Sadism, masochism and the DCoP conference

On reflection, I am not sure why I had left it until my final stages of training to attend the Divisional conference. I am a final year trainee at City University, and after taking a couple of year’s maternity leave, I came back to the course to finish writing up my research. Having been “out

“I’m a clinician, not a researcher!”

I hear this phrase a lot in my work as a research supervisor and director of studies.  Luckily, no-one’s (yet) been foolish enough to say it to me when I’ve been an examiner in a viva, but I’ve sensed it! It’s a badly-kept secrets that many counselling psychology trainees (and some clinical psychology trainees too,