Category Archives: Uncategorised

It’s Late It’s Late It’s Late but Not Too Late

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We look forward to meeting applicants to our ACAT accredited Practitioner Training in Cognitive Analytic Therapy tomorrow in Manchester.  This is an initial round of interviews for the 2017- 2019 intake.  In case anyone was delayed in getting their application in, or is regretting having missed the initial deadline, the course team will still consider further applications.  Please feel free to contact us if you have any enquiries or last minute questions.   Full details of the Practitioner Training can be found here.

Facing a Final Goodbye: CAT and Mortality

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When Mandy Wildman suggested running her study day on Mapping Mortality in CAT, she included this reflective piece as part of her proposal.  We abridged it in order to advertise and promote the event – #CATmort17.  We reproduce her original version here to coincide with Dying Matters Awareness Week.

As psychotherapists, practitioners and clinicians we concern ourselves with the human dilemmas, difficulties, fears, distress and other preoccupations that life brings.  Perhaps we could say our work is often about trying to understand our human condition.  Whether in our work or in other aspects of our lives we constantly manage the tensions between opposites. We move between confidence and doubt, belonging and isolation, sickness and health, life and death.  In our Western culture, mortality is often not a subject that we find easy to approach, either with ourselves or with our clients and patients, but it is woven into every part of our life story.

Initiatives such as the international Death Cafe movement, Dying Matters Awareness Week in the UK, and more local community events such as Pushing Up Daisies invite changes to this cultural censure on exploring mortality.   Is it becoming more possible to join with others to explore such difficult thoughts and feelings?  Does this give us an opportunity to think about what our mortality means to us in a uniquely personal way?

The harsh realities of life can’t always be avoided and can bring us face to face with our limitations and our limited capacity to control our existence, however hard we try.  Life events such as a loss of a relationship or job, migration, bereavement, or serious illness can bring overwhelming and unbearable distress.  We can believe that we should be able to manage and cope with such events with a ‘stiff upper lip’ approach, and if we can’t we can somehow feel we aren’t managing well enough.

In these places our human anxiety can be felt as terrifying and paralysing.  We can experience awareness of the fragile nature of our lives and the world around us, our ultimate alone-ness, as emotional shock and overwhelming dread.  This might result in a blocking off state in which we risk becoming numb, denying the difficult feelings, in an understandable attempt to defend and protect ourselves.  As therapists, how can we offer meaningful comfort to ourselves and those we work with when our human condition can feel so frail?

The study day explores how CAT can offer a scaffolding with which to explore the issues relating to our mortality.

  • Can we develop our capacity to explore issues relating to loss, ageing, decline and mortality, and our feelings about them, in the curious, open and collaborative manner that CAT embodies?
  • What might help us to move from a position of avoiding, or warding off, these aspects of our human condition, to one which allows us to think together about them?
  • How do we and our patients work towards managing and accepting the ‘unknowable’ quality of the future and the real anxieties of the finite life we have, with its inescapable endings and ultimately death?
  • What are the things that sustain us and help us to retain passion, joy, meaning, purpose and hope in life, despite our knowing that all we see and know will come to an end?

Psychotherapy can offer an opportunity to consider the meaning and significance of our individual lives and relationships, or to provide some respite from a depressed and hopeless view of the world. These powerful issues relating to our experience of being human, and the strong feelings bound up with them, are present in the time that we spend with patients, as well as in other arenas.

The day is designed to bring compassion, respect, and, hopefully, some humour, to a subject that can induce guilt, shame, confusion and anger.  Its aim is to allow us to feel more at ease with our feelings, more confident in expressing them and more comfortable in talking with our clients and patients about their experiences, as they present in our cognitive analytic therapy work.

Mandy Wildman is an accredited CAT Practitioner and Catalyse Associate. You can read more about her here. You can also follow her on Twitter – @misswyoming2

Mandy’s event took place in July 2017.  For more details about the day, click here.

Getting Meta: Reflecting on the Projects Forum as a Project

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We hope that CAT practitioners and psychotherapists in the north will join us at the  the next Projects Forum meeting on 19th May at GMCVO in Manchester.  The meeting will start at 10 am and will provide a space to consider any projects and CPD events you’d like support with.  It will also be an opportunity to reflect on the Projects Forum meetings to date as a project in their own right, as this will be the final meeting in its current form.

We hope to continue to provide an open door for CAT practitioners and psychotherapists in the north to be involved with Catalyse, consider CPD issues together and keep up contact with colleagues.  We’re looking into other ways we can help facilitate this in the future and would welcome your ideas.

In the meantime this last Projects Forum will also include an hour’s Skills Lab with the theme of goodbye letters.  Cheryl Delisser and Clive Turpin will share their own research, approach and practice for composing ending letters in CAT.  They will also refer to guidelines, drawn up by Steve Kellett & Corrie Stockton, to help clients write ending letters.

Please contact us to confirm if you can come, and if you can stay to share an ending lunch at 1.00 pm to thank you for your involvement and support of the Projects Forum over the years.

Preparing for a Personal Reformulation

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To follow on from Clive Turpin’s last blog on Personal Reformulations (PRs), he shares some thoughts the Catalyse PR therapists have put together about preparation for a PR.

In this we attend to the questions:
Is there anything I can do to prepare for my Personal Reformulation?
What things might be helpful to consider before undertaking my Personal Reformulation?

These are really important questions and the details below attempt to provide some answers.  Firstly there are some practicalities that can be useful to think about.

Timing: When should I arrange to have a PR?
What feels important here is that you will have the time and space to think and reflect, not only in the session, but afterwards too.  This helps you to make full use of the richness of what is explored in the session and to give yourself as much of an opportunity to reflect and use the work to support recognition and work towards change. Therefore periods of increased stress or workload or study might not be the best time to undertake your PR.

Who do I see for a PR?: Choosing a therapist
For those doing Doctorate of Clinical Psychology courses, or CAT Skills courses, which have an agreement with Catalyse to provide PRs, there is information on our PR therapists on the Catalyse website to help you decide who to see and where this will be.  Sometimes locality and convenience can feel important as well as distance from your local area.  The gender or other characteristics of the therapist may be important to you.  Their current or past areas of work may also be something that feels relevant to your choice.

If you don’t have access to the Catalyse PR therapists through your course but would like to work with one of us, you can contact us to explore options.  Alternatively you can check ACAT’s listing of accredited members providing private therapy in your area.  You can ask those you approach whether they have experience of providing PRs. The link for this listing is here.

Aims: What do I want to get out of a PR?
Prior to the PR it can be very helpful to reflect on what you would like to get from the sessions in a general sense and also consider any specific goals. Taking some time to reflect on your relational patterns, with yourself and with others, can also be very helpful.  You might think about things that regularly occur that you would like to explore, understand better, and work towards changing. This could focus on a particular pattern or feeling that you struggle with or that gets stuck.

What tools are available to help me get the most out of a PR?
It might be helpful to look through the Psychotherapy File prior to the meeting.  This is a standard CAT tool developed by Tony Ryle and is available from your PR therapist on request.  This can be a useful aid to recognising repeated patterns of relating and how you manage currently. Your reflections can then inform the initial conversation of the PR and help to establish an agreed focus.

There are other tools which are used to aid self reflection in the CAT model, including the Psychosocial Checklist and the Helper’s Dance (Potter 2013).  Again you may want to look at these before the meeting.  However the main focus of the PR is more likely to be the narrative that develops between you and the PR therapist through your conversation, so don’t worry if you haven’t been able to look at these other tools.

Let us know if this information has been useful in preparing for your PR.

If you’ve had a Personal Reformulation and want to share what helped you feel ready and make the most of it, let us know, or feel free to leave a comment below.

Clive Turpin, representing the Catalyse PR therapists.

You can follow Clive on Twitter: @Clive_Turpin