Challenging the Myths Surrounding Sexual Abuse and Sexual Offenders
There are few crimes which evoke more horror and loathing than sexual abuse, especially when the victim is a child. Yet in the late 1960s, when I first began a residency in psychiatry, there were also no established evaluation and treatment programs for the sexual offender.
The shocking events, misinformation, betrayals, and back-stabbings of the last month suggest what a thoroughly divided nation we are. We are split along class and education lines in a way Continental Europeans can’t really appreciate. Those I have spoken to recently about Brexit – Dutch, Danish, French and Germans – are both shocked that we sacrificed our position in Europe and outraged by the resignations of the three main players and the ‘business-as-normal’ attitude in our public life.
How Intercultural Understanding Enriches the Coaching Relationship
My book, The Cross-Cultural Kaleidoscope, was written over a period of four years, in a pre-Brexit world. This called for an increase in cultural understanding, thanks to the forces of globalisation, increased mobility and the impact of technology, bringing about multi-cultural societies and new ways of working.
How the ongoing dialogue between the left and right hemispheres constitutes our mental reality
My book The Wisdom of Lived Experience explores various aspects of the nature of reality and more specifically that of lived experience. In recent years I have become aware that my efforts to learn from theory and from noted colleagues have often meant closing down my experiencing mind and focussing upon the intellectual and the theoretical, rather that upon the more three-dimensional lived experience with my patients and within myself.
My search for healing began many years ago, when I was experiencing unhappiness and extreme anxiety with panic attacks. I entered into a therapeutic relationship which at the time was supportive and useful and helped me through some difficult times. Some years later I trained in psychotherapy, partly to understand myself, and entered into therapy again. This time the work was at greater depth and began to address the source of my pain, my early infancy and the relationships in my family. During my training I came to understand my object relations and the failed dependency I had experienced in infancy and so continued to search for. Fortunately for me, my therapist was open to wherever I wanted to go and was not afraid of my developing dependency. This relationship and my response to it has healed me. My personal interest and my need to develop my practice to aid clients with similar difficulties led to my research into this area, and to my book – Better Late Than Never.
When introducing people to the breathing school method, I have often started by describing my professional background and the history of psychophysical breathing therapy, because I believe these explain why I use breathing as an important tool and pathway in my psychotherapeutic work.
The Objectified Body as a Transitional Object in Anorexia and Body Dysmorphic Disorders
False Bodies, True Selves: Moving Beyond Appearance-Focused Identity Struggles and Returning the the True Self is a book embedded in Donald Winnicott’s idea of the false self and true Self. Winnicott, an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst writing in the 1950s and 60s, described the development of a false self within the mother-infant relationship when the infant’s spontaneous impulses are met with non-acceptance.
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