The British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) encourages the formation of Special Interest Groups (SIG's) in areas that members want to particularly focus on.  There has been discussion recently about a possible SIG on Compassion.  If you're a member of the BABCP and you would like to be involved, do please let me know (if you haven't done so already).  I've made some suggestions about the kind of territory a Compassion SIG might cover (see below), but I very much understand that people who are interested in the SIG, may well not be interested in all the areas I've suggested ... and they may have additional suggestions to add.  The aim would be discuss all this further once we see if there at least 15 of us who would like to support the SIG's establishment.

(this blog post is downloadable as a Word doc or as a PDF file)

(this post is downloadable as both a Word doc and as a PDF file).

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The genius of Tulku Urgyen was that he could point out the nature of mind with precision and matter-of-factness of teaching a person how to thread a needle and could get an ordinary meditator like me to recognize that consciousness is intrinsically free of self ... I came to Tulku Urgyen yearning for the experience of self-transcendence, and in a few minutes he showed me I had no self to transcend ... Tulku Urgyen simply handed me the ability to cut through the illusion of the self directly, even in ordinary states of consciousness.  This instruction was, without question, the most important thing I have ever been explicitly taught by another human being.  It has given me a way to escape the usual tides of psychological suffering - fear, anger, shame - in an instant.

” - Sam Harris

Here are a set of handouts and questionnaires that I often use when I'm running interpersonal process groups.  Also on the left of this page you'll find links to a session-by-session description of one such group.  As the "Group therapy, background information" leaflet (see below) comments: "Group therapy simply means that therapeutic work is done in groups rather than one-to-one. Many different types of therapy have been tried in group format. Rather than construct a long list of such therapies, it may be more helpful to divide the many types of therapy group into two general categories - structured groups and process groups. Structured group therapy often involves the transfer of skills and knowledge. It may feel a bit like a classroom situation. Frequently, structured groups are used as a cost-effective way of delivering similar forms of therapy to individual one-to-one work.

See the earlier blog post "Interpersonal group work 1" for comments and handouts particularly orientated to pre-group assessment.  It's usually time very well spent, orientating would-be participants to what interpersonal process groups are likely to involve.  This both speeds up the time it takes new group members to start engaging helpfully in group interactions, and reduces drop-out rates.  Participants who know roughly what the group is going to be like, why the experience is relevant to what they want to change in their lives, and how they can best engage with the group to gain most benefit, are likely to be participants who get most from the group experience.  Below I've listed various handouts that can be relevant in this orientation process.

“ Circumstances are beyond human control, but our conduct is in our own power. ” - Benjamin Disraeli

Relationships are right at the heart of human health and wellbeing.  The first four sets of handouts listed below highlight the increased death rates, poorer psychological health and lowered wellbeing in those with worse relationships.  There is a rather confusing plethora of different questionnaires for assessing relationship networks.  I like the large amount of helpful information one can elicit from the "Personal community map" and associated sheets (below).  Sheldon Cohen has argued convincingly that social intimacy, social integration, and social conflict all make independent contributions to our health and wellbeing - we want higher scores for intimacy & integration and (usually) lower scores for conflict.  The community map overall question sheet and the associated brief three question current a

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger. Franklin Jones