are you sure about that?

This is a letter that I had published in the BACP Journal, Therapy Today, December 2013.  It was in response to an article. 'Spirit-based healing in the Black diaspora by Roy Moodley. (I had to look up 'diaspora', apparently it is a scattered population.) The article and subsequent letters, support the possible acceptance of traditional healing practices such as voodoo and shango into the counselling and psychotherapy communities.   I have no objection to  these practices in themselves and of course individuals and communities have every right to continue their ancient traditions but so do counsellors and psychotherapists, and I do not wish to have any association with them and so I wrote this letter.   It made me laugh when I read it in the journal.    ,  Dear BACP                      I have to have a rant. I nearl...

What is the answer to the question of the meaning of life? Douglas Adams in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy suggested that the answer to the ultimate question of the meaning of life and everything was 42. So what is the answer to the question of the meaning of life?  When you don't need to answer the question anymore? or even when you don't have to ask it.

Big Data is Here

Imagine?

These are some of the key parts of the psychological games that can be acted out in relationships, based on the Game Theory of Eric Berne made popular in ‘Games People Play.’   What is a relationship game? A game is a series of communications between two people that seems to be going in one direction when there is a sudden switch and it heads off in a completely different direction. So you might be talking about going to the cinema and suddenly you are defending something you said yesterday and wondering where that came from.   There is a moment of confusion when the switch occurs followed by a familiar feelings and thoughts which tend to be negative and accompanied by the thought, oh here we go again. There is also the feeling that whatever you do it won’t stop the charge. There is a negative benefit for both people and it is usually something that reinforces our beliefs about ourselves such as: I’m not loveable; I’m too difficult to live with; I never get w...

Over the time I spent with Christopher I always found him to be welcoming and interested, compassionate, accepting and encouraging. He developed a space where I was able to discover my own desires and a voice to articulate them. Slowly all the goals I had set for myself at the beginning of therapy began to be accomplished. My relationships with colleagues, friends and family benefited, becoming more equal and rewarding. The challenges life throw at me are now faced with a new confidence. Although therapy has ended I can still feel the encouragement, internalised, cheering me on. (October 2013)   I think of my time with Christopher as profoundly important, nothing less than a watershed. I am still living the transformation. I entered counselling with fear and trepidation, with little faith, and I emerged from it with a secure sense of its efficacy. It is truly possible to "arrive where we started and know the place for the for the first time". (June 2013)   The s...

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, NYU-Poly; Author, Antifragile What We Learn From Firefighters How Fat Are the Fat Tails ? Eight years ago, I showed, using twenty million pieces of data from socioeconomic variables (about all the data that was available at the time), that current tools in economics and econometrics don't work, whenever there is an exposure to a large deviations, or "Black Swans". There was a gigantic mammoth in the middle of the classroom. Simply, one observation in 10,000, that is, on day in 40 years, can explain the bulk of the "kurtosis", a measure of what we call "fat tails", that is, how much the distribution under consideration departs from the standard Gaussian, or the role of remote events in determining the total properties. For the U.S. stock market, a single day, the crash of 1987, determined 80% of the kurtosis. The same problem is found with interest and exchange rate...

Question in Irish Times: 22.10.13   I feel brilliant most of the time, but I can’t find a serious relationship, so what’s standing in my way? I am highly creative and don’t conform to the physically strong working-male reality for the majority of men. Some girls love me because I am more in touch with my feelings, expressive, creative and passionate about life. According to the Myers-Briggs test I am an “ENFP” (extrovert, intuitive, sensing, perceptive) and am good at expressing myself. The kind of girls I like usually love that. But there are some masculine attributes that most men have that I don’t have, so I don’t think I will ever have a serious relationship with a woman, just like I am not attracted to women who don’t have some feminine attributes.   A I thought the John Wayne/ Roy Keane version of masculinity had bitten the dust last century and the self-confident, humorous and artistic type was in vogue. Cross-dressing Eddie Izzard is very masculine; so is se...

If we could reduce the world's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this: The village would have 61 Asians, 13 Africans, 12 Europeans, 9 Latin Americans, and 5 from the USA and Canada 50 would be male, 50 would be female 75 would be non-white; 25 white 67 would be non-Christian;  33 would be Christian 80 would live in substandard housing 16 would be unable to read or write 50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation 33 would be without access to a safe water supply 39 would lack access to improved sanitation 24 would not have any electricity (And of the 76 that do  have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.) 8 people would have access to the Internet 1 would have a college education 1 would have HIV 2 would be near birth; 1 near death 5 would control 32% of the entire world's wealth; all 5 would be US citizens ...

http://www.helpguide.org/mental/anxiety_self_help.htm

Relaxation Techniques for Stress Relief

LESS IS MORE. A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared and he sat and watched for several hours as it struggled to force its’ body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and it could go no further.   The man decided to help the butterfly, so he took a pair of scissors and sniped off the remaining bit of cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shrivelled wings.   The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able t support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shrivelled wings. It was never able to fly.   What he man in his kindness and haste did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle req...

As a humanistic psychotherapist I have spent years trying to imagine what it is like to be someone else. It is an exercise in empathy that is common to all of us in our relationships that in my view can help to create a balance between the selfish self and the altruistic self.   This is a short piece about standing in other’s shoes and standing in my shoes. It makes sense to me and I hope that it makes sense to you. It left me wondering that if I am standing in someone else’s shoes, where do they stand?   Walking along Whiterock beach on the north Antrim coast at 9am on a random sunday in August. The beach runs from the seaside town of Portrush eastwards for about four miles to limestone cliffs, arches and caves. A mini white cliffs of Dover, on the edge on the north Atlantic rollers. A few people had been walking on the beach already leaving wet footprints on the sand where the ebbing tide had been. Separate fresh identifiable tracks of early Sunday morning wal...

PERSON-CENTRED THERAPY AND TRAUMA   A PERSONAL VIEW   By Christopher Murray I am a person centred, humanistic, psychodynamic, counsellor, psychotherapist, supervisor and trainer, 35 + years in practice. I call on a range of approaches in my practice. I can talk Psychodynamic, I can talk Transactional Analysis, I can talk Existentialism, I can talk Gestalt, I can talk Jungian Creative Therapy, I can talk the Person Centred Approach, I can talk Solution Focused Brief Therapy, (a bit). I can talk trauma, depression, sexual abuse, suicide, relationships, psychiatric illness, neurosis, psychosis, narcissism, projection, introjection, attachment, dissociation, free association. Boy can I talk the talk. But my experience of working with trauma in Northern Ireland has often silenced me. This is not a piece aimed at contradicting existing research, nor is it claiming the efficacy of any approach. It is not research in the traditional sense. It is research from a phenomenolo...