I've just arrived from Scotland off the sleeper for the two days of the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) Spring Workshops and Conference. Today it's workshops and we have a choice of five. I'm going to Nick Grey's on "Memory-focused approaches in cognitive therapy for adults with PTSD" . The publicity reads:

"Guidelines from around the world for the treatment of PTSD in adults recommend trauma-focused CBT as a first line treatment. In essence ‘trauma-focused’ means placing an emphasis on discussing the details of the traumatic memories. This can be emotionally demanding for both patient and therapist. Despite the treatment guidelines many therapists still do not use ‘trauma-focused’, i.e. memory-focused, approaches.

Last month I used Google Analytics to identify the most read pages on this website and I wrote the post "Update on website traffic: the ten most popular blog posts". This got me thinking - "What are my own personal favourites?" I quickly realised that the posts that I've written that have had the most impact on me and my practice as a therapist are nearly always made up of sequences of blog posts rather than just individual items.  I said that glancing back over the last year or so, themes that stood out included mindfulness, therapist feedback, self-control, conflict, embodied cognition and positive psychology.

In the last post in this sequence "Angus & Greenberg's book ...

I was due to go through to Glasgow today for the fifth workshop in this seven seminar emotion-focused therapy (EFT) series.  Sadly my back has been playing up ... as it occasionally does ... and it really doesn't make good sense to travel.  The soreness is getting better nicely, but it can do with a bit more TLC as I gradually mobilise more.

(This post is downloadable as a Word doc or a PDF file).  

(This post is downloadable as a Word doc or a PDF file).  

I wrote yesterday about "Commitment contracts: another good way of helping us reach our goals".  In today's post I'd like to look a bit more at the practicalities of setting up and using commitment contracts.  I'll illustrate this by talking about my own personal exploration of this area, but I'd also like to highlight that I think these ideas and the associated web resources are potentially very useful tools for psychotherapists, counsellors, life coaches and their clients.  

(This post is downloadable as a Word doc or a PDF file).