Therapeutic Implications of Religious-Related Emotional Abuse

Religion can play a positive role in preventing all types of abuse. Consequently, it is often difficult to believe that religion or a particular manner of religious awareness can also be conducive to the degradation and humiliation of individuals, and that it can be maneuvered to justify abusive behavior. In this article we discuss the emotional repercussions of religious-related abuse in the family, an aspect that is rarely documented in the field of psychotherapy, but has many negative consequences. Religious-oriented emotional abuse is traceable to several levels of human functioning: the individual's internal level of experiencing themselves, the interpersonal and systemic levels, where the individual enters relationships, as well as within the framework of the individual's relationship with God.     

Current Treatment Strategies for Dissociative Identity Disorders in Adult Sexual Abuse Survivors

SUMMARY

During the past decade, increasing numbers of clinicians and researchers have suggested that the dissociative disorders, including dissociative identity disorder (DID), may be more prevalent than previously hypothesized. The “rediscovery” of DID is due, in part, to the recognition that early childhood trauma in conjunction with the propensity to dissociate, are etiologic factors for the development of DID. The purpose of this article is to raise clinical consciousness regarding DID, discuss the definition and etiology of the dissociative disorders, their assessment, and an approach to treatment of the sexual abuse survivor who has DID. This treatment program, while integrating some of the techniques recommended by others, is unique in its step-by-step flexible organization as well as its multifaceted format. The author's experience to date suggests that the sooner that a dissociative disorder can be identified in the adult sexual abuse survivor client, the more rapid the therapeutic progress.     

Solicited diary studies of psychotherapy in qualitative research–pros and cons

Diary studies are scarce within the field of qualitative psychotherapy research. In this article arguments for and against the employment of solicited diary studies in qualitative psychotherapy research are investigated. The strengths of diary studies are presented along with arguments concerning their pertinence to the field. Limitations and potential critiques regarding the use of diaries are also addressed.     

The integrative attitude–a personal journey

The origins of clinical psychotherapy date from the beginning of last century and the development of broadly four foundational schools–psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioural, humanistic and transpersonal psychologies. The imperative to integrate these schools, however, is relatively recent and in the last 25 years a professional integration movement has developed, exemplified by the formation of SEPI and the UKAPI, and ‘integrative psychotherapist’ is now the most popular nomenclature used in the profession. This article gives a brief history of the integration movement, reviews some issues raised by developments so far, and discusses the personal dilemma that integration evokes in the would-be integrative practitioner. Using my own journey I espouse an integrative attitude that is based on the nature of integration as an evolving personal process rather than an ideal, fixed, profession-wide position. I describe three interweaving modalities of integration I call constructive, complicit and contiguous integration, which form a developmental framework that aims to encourage the individual activity of questioning, inventing, researching and interrogating the discipline within its philosophical, professional and social context. In concluding, this article exhorts the profession to see integration as a personal journey, as a way of being that is constantly becoming and unfolding in relation with the therapist's training, experience and interaction with peers and clients. The result is indefinable and unnameable, and perhaps represents the soul of integrative psychotherapy.     

Universities are not a good place for psychotherapy and counselling training

This paper outlines eight aspects of institutional practice in university teaching that are at odds with the ethos of therapy: the linearity of university training has consequences for conceptual and cultural issues that may be antithetical to genuine therapeutic practice; certain notions about what reality is and what counts as truth may be reinforced by university trainings; academic knowledge in universities is standardized so as to sabotage therapeutic work; the university privileges a cognitive account; the university trains therapists in ways that are antithetical to the ethos of therapy; universities keep alive hierarchies that sit uneasily with the project of therapy; university training encourages the therapist to develop an identity that is anathema to many traditions in therapy; and compartmentalization of ethics in university-based trainings would run against the ethics of therapy.     

Mindfulness reconsidered

Mindfulness has recently become a popular addition to the range of methods available to counsellors and psychotherapists, especially in the field of stress reduction but is the method being over-sold? This article reviews the origins of mindfulness, attempts a balanced review of what mindfulness is and is not good for, looks at the question of whether the meaning of the term has mutated or suffered dilution as its popularity has grown and considers what that popularity and possible mutation tell us about the current state of thinking in the psychotherapy field. In the process, it puts the usefulness and nature of mindfulness in a new perspective, challenging a number of commonly held contemporary views on the subject.     

Uses and abuses of theory: a group analytic perspective

Group therapy occupies a curious and ambiguous status in the overall mental health field: groups are recognized and marginalized, sought after and avoided, respected and dismissed as second best to individual therapy. Groups are now practised widely in many services, probably because of the pressure of referrals and increased concern about funding, but even then have a secondary status. The under-recognition of both the value and complexity of groups seems to parallel the problems of theory which are part of the group psychotherapeutic culture. Rather than attempt a comprehensive theory of groups in this article, I intend to present some of the problems about theory and its link to practice, focusing particularly on the ambivalence about groups that I see as a continuing concern. I do so from a position which values theory, seeing in theory the container of understanding which guides psychotherapeutic practice. I do not identify with a critical position which rejects theory. This position recognizes fully the risks and dangers of over-theorizing, the potential to distort human contact through a rigid adherence to theory; however, I write in the spirit of appreciating theory thoughtfully applied as without theory, our work might be impoverished and even impeded.