Blog

Am I still welcome if I can’t draw? Our tutor Irene Dudley-Swarbrick answers your questions. This weekend event is for practitioners in counselling and psychotherapy, education, or mental health fields. We’ll meet in a small group setting either online or at the Tara Centre in Lancaster. I am an experienced Person-Centred Expressive Art Therapist and…

As we come to the end of the school year and hopefully get some rest during August, Jill Carter reflects on what has been a particularly challenging year for many of us as therapists. How has the move online changed counselling training? And what can we do to avoid burnout? As the pandemic lessened its…

What is Expressive Art or Creative Arts Therapy? The world is showing us the importance of art and creativity. Art is above all an expression of emotion and humanity. The creative and expressive process can therefore help you and your counselling clients communicate your inner experience when you run out of words. Therapists also need…

The battle is still on to save lives during the Covid crisis. As a traumatised world, we are just trying to get through. But Jill Carter wonders how we start to tackle the mental health consequences of the trauma caused by the pandemic. I watched the faces on the news this week of the bereaved…

Counsellors and psychotherapists are going to be busy helping front line workers and clients heal after the extreme stress of Covid-19. Jill Carter suggests ways to recover from extreme stress During difficult times, it’s a natural response to try to keep going. Therefore, the phrase ‘living off our nerves’ is very apt. We are all…

Traditionally psychotherapy has meant talking therapy. But as interest in trauma has grown, counselling and creativity have integrated. Jill Carter explores expressive arts therapy Like many therapists who gravitated to expressive arts therapy, I trained in traditional talk therapy first. I enjoyed listening and talking to clients. However, I soon saw the limitations of words.…

The pandemic moved many therapists online. We can still do more than talking therapy. Jill Carter shares creative solutions with arts and sandplay via the internet In early 2020, I was teaching arts and creative therapies from a rented office in London. The room buzzed with clients and students choosing from my collection of sandplay…

Counselling Supervision This is part of the title of my PhD research project. Included in my research aims are the following questions: What is happening in supervision? Does supervision do what it claims?   In this short blog, I share in the briefest of ways, some of what I have discovered and hope to take…

Our thoughts on what is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the controversy over whether its diagnostic criteria cover what people call ‘trauma’. “A bad thing happened – I didn’t want it to happen – nobody could stop it happening” Survivor of American school shooting.   This is for me a very clear definition of…

Holiday self-care checklist As therapists, we spend our days helping people through difficult times. Our subject matter is heavy. Each hour brings a new cognitive, emotional or relational conflict for us to understand and confront. It’s fascinating work, but it takes its toll. It’s all too easy to focus on improving our clients’ self-care at the…

This post is to mark Creativity and Wellness Week, written by Emma Steadman. Creativity in supervision Creativity in supervision is a key factor in enabling us to see what we cannot see or what we only partially see. For me, creativity in supervision enables insight for the benefit of our clients. It is not the…

Sandplay therapy is an effective and proven therapy to use in counselling children, young people and adults. In simple terms, the sandplay therapist asks the client to choose miniature figures from shelves and put them into a box of sand. This creates a free and protected space. The client can express feelings, memories and traumatic…

By nature, counsellors, play therapists and psychotherapists are caring and compassionate people. We enter the field to help others. But sometimes caring can be over-done. We focus on other people’s well-being and spend hours giving, often leaving ourselves outside of the circle of care. Nutrition and stress management is an important part of re-balancing that.…

Sandplay therapy is an excellent non-verbal way to help a person with a diagnosis of dementia express themselves. To mark Dementia Action Week, Emilia who is a recently qualified Sandplay Therapist  (who trained with Jill) describes working in sandplay and dementia counselling …   Sandplay offers a safe place to support for people living with…

“We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves”.   Buddhism psychology and psychotherapy often go hand in hand. But who is the man who became Buddha and how is his life relevant to counselling today?   In many parts…

Unite and unite and let us all unite For summer is a-come unto day And wither we are going, we will all unite In the merry morning of May   Jung’s archetypes appear in The Cornish May Carol, which is one of hundreds of songs and poems celebrating May Day. Traditionally, it is a holiday…

It seems as if the Star Wars films have been around forever. If the person that the films’ director George Lucas called “My Yoda” is right, then they have been. Lucas had read the book “Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey” when he was a student and returned to his books whilst completing the original Star Wars films in…

Saint George is most associated with football, patriotism and of course (sorry) Brexit.   George is England’s Patron Saint. He is also one of the most common Jungian archetypes or symbols. We don’t however know much about him. Various writers place him in the Middle East, Persia or Russia. He could have lived in the…

What comes to mind when you think about working creatively? Painting? Sandplay? Interpretative dance? Do you have to have artistic skills in order to find art therapeutic? If you are a counsellor or psychotherapist, do you think you need to be able to paint or draw to be an expressive arts therapist? One of the…

Contrary to popular belief, trauma is not just a psychological issue; it can have a profound effect on our physical health too. This is because the mind and body are inseparably linked. Indeed, the mind influences the body through many biological mechanisms, including the nervous system, the immune system and hormones. In the case of…

  Yoga is an ancient form of exercise that focuses on strength, flexibility and breathing to boost physical and mental wellbeing. Science proved the power of yoga for healing trauma to help with a wide range of health conditions, from anxiety & stress to inflammation and chronic pain. Indeed, a growing body of evidence suggests…

Dance has played an important role in human culture for centuries. Before the evolution of the written language, it was one of the methods people used to recount traumatic events and pass the stories down from generation to generation. It’s an ancient and powerful way for people to express themselves and deal with painful feelings…

When I started this business, I had a pretty definite idea of what creative therapy was. It was things like sandplay, art, movement and dance. But the more I think about it, the more I see creativity in many things that we do. I find fascinating by a survey of three and a half thousand…

It goes without saying, yet is worth saying, that in counselling and psychotherapy we hold a lot of responsibility and emotional processes. Often, we do this in isolation as we may be the only therapist working in a school or organisation or on our own in private practice. Supervision courses for counsellors have an important…

I have been away on a meditation retreat for the last few days, so today my overactive brain finds the world very loud. It’s a funny thing stepping out of the day-to-day world.  When I first arrived at the retreat, my mind was buzzing with the hundreds of things I could/should/would be doing. If only…

Article by Emma Steadman   Mental health in schools is a priority It is really important to lay the foundations of a good relationship at the beginning, so give time to contracting with the school leaders. Many of the places you work may not have had counsellors at the school or may not have thought…

It doesn’t rely on words If you have ever asked a child how his/her day was at school or asked a teenager how they are feeling, you will already know that words have limits! Sandplay works because it is a great way of helping someone to express himself or herself without having to talk to…

Written by Cara Williams   As busy therapists, we spend a lot of time dealing with other people’s problems. Our own creativity and wellbeing can suffer as a result. While we’re trained to protect ourselves using  boundaries, some client work is very emotionally draining. This is as true in sandplay therapy and creative trauma work…

As we pause to remember the centenary of World War One, we reflect on how post traumatic stress disorder treatment has developed in those 100 years.   We hold in our minds and hearts the millions who died in the Two World Wars and many other conflicts. 20,000 British soldiers lost in the D-Day Normandy…

I am reading Brené Brown’s new book “Dare to Lead”, which is all about the importance of feeling vulnerable and owning it in business. The book leaves me thinking about the role that vulnerability plays in counselling, sandplay and creative arts therapy. Supervisors and teachers tell us (consciously or unconsciously) that feeling emotionally doesn’t help…

This week is Halloween, but it’s also All Saints Day and the Day of the Dead. Traditionally this is a time to let all our ghouls and ghosts and skeletons out. We celebrate them, give them sweets and lay them to rest. Children love this time of year, but some adults find the rituals morbid.…

Whether you’re a counsellor, teacher, social worker or psychotherapist, you are dedicating much of your life to looking after others. Whilst this can be extremely rewarding, it can also be very stressful and emotionally draining. Especially if you are also a parent or caring for a family member. It’s therefore easy to ignore the signs…

If you are interested in sandplay therapy training, you have probably looked at many different courses. Sand play is described as Jungian Sandplay in most places and integrative sandplay therapy in a few. What’s the difference? Sandplay sprang up organically in the 1920s when counsellors in London noticed young child clients started putting toys into…

In my years teaching sandplay and creative play courses, I have seen many people meeting their traumatised parts for the first time in a sandtray. There in that little wooden box are the lost parts that call out in our dreams. Now we see them in all their 3-D numinous glory. Once a kind witness…