The 7th biennial European Conference on Positive Psychology (ECPP) began here in Amsterdam yesterday.  Four years ago, I went to the 5^th European Conference in Copenhagen.  It was pretty special and I wrote extensively about it in this blog - see, for example "European positive psychology conference in Copenhagen: arriving, opening speeches & reception".  

(this blog post is downloadable as a handout both in Word doc and in PDF format)

Professor Ken Sheldon is a bit of a hero of mine.  I've followed his research for many years and have great respect for his work and what I've gleaned about the way he leads his life.  I have just been looking at the recording of a lecture he gave at the University of Missouri a little while ago. The points he makes about how to flourish more fully are still pretty much bang on.

I'm just back from four days away with friends down in Cumbria.  I have been going to these long residential Spring weekends on the edge of the Lake District for well over twenty years and have written a lot about them too ... see for example the sequence of posts from a couple of years' ago beginning "Peer groups, Cumbria spring group: first morning - arriving".

It’s about six in the morning.  A cuckoo is calling repeatedly and I’ve just woken.  I’m warm in my sleeping bag, but it’s quite cold in the tent.  How am I feeling?  Frightened!  Externally I’m fine, but when I look inside there’s a constriction.  When I explore it more awarely I get an image of a cold, heavy snake lying down the length of my body and most obviously there’s a constriction around my heart.

It's coming up to the two year anniversary of one of the major potential traumas of my life - see "Walking in Skye & Kintail: mountain rescue, helicopter winches, and avoiding death & PTSD."  I felt there was so much to learn from this experience that I try to re-read the description every month to help me remember the precious lessons that were involved.

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”    Rainer Maria Rilke "Letters to a young poet".

I wrote a blog post yesterday about recently published IAPT psychotherapy data and how it provides a fascinating set of targets which one can use to assess the effectiveness of one's own therapeutic practice.  When one gets down to the nitty-gritty of what data from one's own practice to collect and how, then it can be a bit tough.  Lots of questions to clarify here, but part of the good news is that there is also lots of IAPT guidance on how to do this.

I wrote a blog post in the autumn - "Improving therapeutic success rates: UK IAPT data gives us a clearer set of targets" - highlighting that, if we want to improve how effective we are at an activity, it's likely to be crucially important that we monitor how well we're actually doing and whether or not our outcomes are getting better.

In yesterday's post on "Keeping up with the literature", I wrote about the wealth of updated knowledge that has emerged with publication of the third UK National Survey of of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal) and about useful qualitative research on why most health professionals (including psychotherapists) tend to be poor at providing help for sexual difficulties.  I would now like to say a little about some new findings in exposure therapy, and some additional insights into mindfulness, relaxation & reappraisal.