Exemplar Submissions: Workshops

Words Are Too Good To Be Wasted: A Journal Exercise to Blow Your Mind (*Hopefully…)

Do you journal, blog, tweet or faceache as something therapeutic? If you write a personal journal, or ask clients to do the same, this workshop is for you!

Purpose: This workshop offers a short and sharp experiential thought experiment, involving personal journal writing from an unconventional perspective. Consider why you keep a diary. What is the point of journalling our thoughts and feelings onto virtual or actual paper? The aim of this session is to offer an exercise in journal writing with a distinctive and potentially life-altering twist, and discuss the possibilities.

Expectations: Please bring a pen & paper, an open attitude and respectful boundary between you and members of the participation group. Although speaking is optional, and your written notes will remain entirely private, be prepared to engage in the process with full and honest emotional investment. This workshop is for those unafraid to step into uncharted waters. You will have the support of your community in a challenging yet safe environment.

Outcome:

There is no scientific research used here, and this workshop is most certainly not ethically approved. You may experience a mildly magnificent existential shift and develop a different perspective on the purpose of reflective writing.

DBT for Adolescents at the Maudsley: Adaptations, Reflections

The National Specialist CAMHS Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) Service at the Maudsley Hospital in South London was established in 2009 to meet the ever increasing demand for a specifically tailored evidence based service for young people with a history of suicidal behaviour and

Emerging Borderline Personality Disorder.

In this workshop we will describe the development of a DBT service adapted for young people and their families, share some service user experiences of the programme, and reflect on how young people and their carers are beginning to work with us in partnership to shape the future of the service.

This workshop will include practical exercises and tools for clinicians, as well as video clips and case examples that offer a taste of our service, and how we have adapted the programme to meet the needs of our young people and carers.

Exemplar Submissions: Papers

Women's experiences of communications with medical staff during complicated pregnancy

Intro: Complicated pregnancy is associated with increased likelihood of psychological difficulties. This suggests women and their infants might benefit from psychological support. The focus of this study is on women’s relationships with medical hospital staff during this time as they are ideally placed to offer relational support, potentially preventing longer term problems. Methods: In depth interviews were conducted with 6 women who had experienced serious pregnancy complications and given birth to a healthy infant within the previous 2 years. They were audio-recorded, transcribed and analysed using interpretive phenomenological analysis. Validity checks based on the self-correcting strategies of Morse et al., (2002) were employed during the process together with a research diary and memo writing to document the multiple levels of the process throughout. Results: Three superordinate themes emerged. These were, ‘Empathic failure’, ‘Information difficulties' and ‘Disempowerment'. All participants referred repeatedly to feeling that the majority of staff failed to demonstrate empathy. Women felt isolated and unseen with staff focused on tasks rather than holistic treatment. Crucial information was withheld, private details were discussed in public spaces and key aspects of women’s experiences were omitted from their hospital notes.Several participants spoke of feeling disempowered and manipulated by staff, with particularly high levels of anxiety at times due to infant formula being withheld or not being 'allowed' to accompany their babies for example. Finally, women described how their relationships with themselves, partners, health professionals and crucially, their infants had been impacted. Conclusion: Participants’ accounts may represent a gap in the care of women who experience the trauma of serious pregnancy complications. Findings may suggest a role for counselling psychologist in providing training for medical staff in supporting women and infants.

Sexuality in the therapeutic relationship: An interpretive phenomenological analysis of the experiences of gay male therapists

Rationale: Gay male therapists self-disclosure of sexuality can be therapeutically beneficial for clients who identify as LGBTQ or as heterosexual. There is evidence that LGBTQ clients have experienced heterosexist/homophobic attitudes, but such experiences have seldom been discussed for gay therapists.

Aims: An idiographic exploration into the perceptions and experiences of gay male therapist's purposeful self-disclosure and of working with heterosexual clients in comparison to clients identifying as LGBTQ.

Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted and were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA).

Participants: Seven gay male therapists took part in this study, who had previously worked with both heterosexual and LGBTQ clients.

Main Results: Six major themes emerged from the data: (i) An affinity for working with gay clients; (ii) Heterosexual males resistance to the therapeutic process; (iii) The impact of homophobia within the therapeutic relationship; (iv) Empathy through shared humanity; (v) Utilising therapist sexuality as a tool within the therapeutic relationship; and (vi) The fundamental rule, the client's needs always come first.

Conclusions: Gay therapists have unique difficulties within their therapeutic relationships associated to their sexual orientation, but this sexual orientation also provides them with a unique 'tool' that can be utilised as an intervention for a positive therapeutic outcome with particular clients (whether LGBTQ or heterosexual).

Resilience to Reoffending: Young Men's Experiences of Overcoming Adversity

Within the UK, one in four young men will re-offend on release from prison. Previous research within criminal justice has begun to offer a valuable contribution to our understanding of the factors supporting desistance from crime. However we still do not know enough about how underlying protective processes or mechanisms contribute to positive outcomes for young men who have engaged in antisocial behaviour. Neither is there sufficient research and practice development debate discussing how counselling psychologists can best work with these young men.

Within this research through narrative enquiry eight young men who had previous involvement in the criminal justice system were recruited from various organisations and the enquiry aimed to understand the processes and mechanisms that support young men to turn their lives around after engaging in criminal behaviour. The study drew on Hart and Blincow’s Resilient Therapy Framework (2007), to categorise the data and support the development of new practice perspectives.

With respect to counselling psychology practice this research presents a challenge to individualised therapeutic interventions and results demonstrated the importance of working at both an individual and social level with young men in order to facilitate their resilience to re-offending. Through illustrations of the young men’s stories and the RT (Hart and Blincow, 2007) framework, the research promotes a systemic application of mechanisms targeting both micro- and macro-level processes, offering an extension to counselling psychology practice necessary to promote resilience to reoffending.

The Challenge of 'Living with Dying'

Objectives: to demonstrate how the application of an innovative qualitative methodology employing object elicitation together with existentially-informed hermeneutic phenomenological analysis generated novel insights into the experience of living with advanced cancer.

Design: Object elicitation was used to assist data collection in order to facilitate participants’ reflections on the quality and texture of their lived experience.

Method: Data was generated by conducting individual semi-structured interviews with twelve (three male, nine female) participants who had been diagnosed with advanced cancer. Participants were invited to bring along a collection of objects that held special meaning for them during the current phase of their lives, and to reflect on their relationship with these objects. Results: All twelve participants shared a sense of having to rise to the challenge of ‘living with dying’ as their own mortality had become foregrounded and death awareness had entered their everyday lives.

Conclusions: The use of a research methodology that can capture research participants’ own categories of meaning and develop a structured understanding of these is ideally suited to the study of ethically sensitive, emotionally charged experiences such as those associated with terminal illness. ‘Living with dying’ constitutes an existential challenge which demands that the individual concerned finds a way of coming to terms with the very parameters of human existence. Counselling psychologists can support this process by offering a supportive, non-directive, non-judgmental setting which allows the individual to rise to the challenge of ‘living with dying’ in their own way.