Culture of Empathy Interview

Edwin Rutsch, the MC of the website Culture of Empathy and the various activities connected with it, has just published an interview with me about empathy and empathy training.  The video (from the ancient iMac in my office at work) is a bit fuzzy, but I'm pleased to see the interview up on Edwin's website and available at:http://cultureofempathy.com/References/Experts/Robert-Elliott.htm

Saturday Adventures Resume: Alloa Tower and the Pineapple

Entry for 30 April 2016:

Diane and I finally got a free Saturday today: We're both in town; we've sent our tax stuff to our American accountant; and there's no EFT training this weekend. 

So: After studying the possibilities, we decided to take in a couple of National Trust for Scotland properties in Clackmannanshire today. (That's the bit of Scotland that's squeezed in between Stirling and the Ancient Kingdom of Fife.) Alloa Tower is a well-restored castle keep on the old road between Edinburgh and Stirling, two of the main centres of power in Scotland for the Stewart royalty between 1500 and 1700. So we enjoyed a pleasant ramble around the 4 floors of the this structure, talking to the guides, looking at the large collection of interesting paintings. During the 10 minutes we were outside admiring the panorama views up at the top of the tower we even got to experience the latest of a series of late April Scottish hail storms. 

After that, we needed a bit more, so we hunted down an architectural folly a few miles away, called The Pineapple, because in fact it's topped by a tower in the shape of, well, a giant pineapple. Apparently, pineapples became of fad among the nobility in the 17th and 18th century Britain, leading to the creation of special greenhouses for growing them. It was a bit status symbol to be able to given others' a pineapple as an act of hospitality. Nothing says "Welcome", or "Thank you" like a fresh pineapple!

Emotion-Focused Psychotherapy 2016 Level 1 Training, University of Strathclyde 30 Aug - 2 September 2016

 

Emotion-Focused Psychotherapy

2016 Level 1 Training

Tuesday 30 August – Friday 2 September 2016, 

09.30 – 17.00

Venue:  University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

Facilitated by Robert Elliott and Lorna Carrick

Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) is a humanistic, evidence-based form of psychotherapy/counselling that integrates person-centred and gestalt therapies, with particular relevance to working with depression, trauma, and anxiety difficulties. It has gained international recognition through the work of Les Greenberg, Laura Rice, Robert Elliott, Jeanne Watson, Rhonda Goldman, Sandra Paivio, Antonio Pascual-Leone and others.  The Counselling Unit at the University of Strathclyde is again pleased to offer Level One professional training in this approach to qualified counsellors and psychotherapists (Postgraduate Diploma/MSc Level or above).

Now in its eleventh year at the University of Strathclyde, this successful, four-day Level One EFT training programme will provide participants with a grounding in the theory and skills required to work more effectively with emotion in psychotherapy. Participants will receive in-depth skills training through a combination of brief lectures, video demonstrations, live modelling, case discussions, and supervised role-playing practice. We begin with an overview of EFT Emotion Theory, including basic principles and the role of emotion and emotional awareness in function and dysfunction; this will be illustrated by Focusing-oriented exercises. Differential intervention based on specific process markers will be demonstrated. Videos of evidence based methods for evoking and exploring emotion schemes, and for dealing with overwhelming emotions, puzzling emotional reactions, painful self-criticism, and emotional injuries from past relationships will be presented.

Participants will be trained in moment-by-moment attunement to emotion, and the use of methods for dialoguing with aspects or configurations of self and imagined significant others in an empty chair. This training will provide therapists from person-centred, psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioural and related backgrounds an opportunity to develop their therapeutic skills and interests, and provides the first step toward certification as an EFT therapist.

• This is the only official Emotion-Focused Therapy level 1 training offered in the UK. 
• This course could be taken for continuing professional education credit.

Cost: On or before 15 July 2016: £445; after 15 July 2015: £495

In order to keep costs to a minimum, catering is not included.

Register soon via our online shop at: http://onlineshop.strath.ac.uk/

Contact: jan.bissett@strath.ac.uk or 0141-444 8415 for further information on this training, the facilitators, ways of applying for this course or other APT events

                                                                                                       

 

Les Greenberg to present 2-day EFT workshop in London 31 May - 1 June

Les Greenberg is going to be presenting a 2 day EFT workshop in London 31 May - 1 June:

Emotion-focused therapy: The transforming power of affect.

For more information, go to: http://www.bps.org.uk/events/emotion-focused-therapy-transforming-power-affect-2-day-workshop

Where Can You Find the Supplemental Materials for the Learning Emotion Focused Theory (2004)?

When the new isEFT.org website was set up about a year ago, the supplemental materials for Elliott et al. (2004), Learning Emotion Focused Therapy were supposed to be transferred over to it; however, it has turned out not to be possible to do this so ar, due to lack of technical expertise, at least until we get a webmaster.  In the meantime, here is link to a zip file with all the supplemental materials in it: Dropbox file containing Learning Book supplemental materials

You'll need to unzip the file, which will generate a folder with all the supplemental materials in Word documents by chapter.  Not an elegant solution but hopefully it will make this material available in the meantime until we can do better.  It would be helpful is someone would let me know they have a problem with any of this.

Good Friday at St. Mary's from the Point of View of Mary of Nazareth

Today, 25 March, is both Good Friday and also the date for the Feast of the Annunciation, being 9 months before Christmas. This hasn't happened since 1951 (when I was a 10-month-old baby) and won't happen again until 2046.

Today, for the traditional noon-to-3pm Good Friday service at our church, St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral in Glasgow, our two priests (technically provost and vice-provost) Kelvin and Cedric decided they'd look at the Crucifixion from Mary's point of view. After all, she was the person who knew Jesus best.

So what we did for 3 hours was to journey with Mary through the story of all that she had gotten herself into, when -- in the words of the lovely John Bell song that we ended with -- she said at the Annunciation to the Archangel Gabriel: "Tell God I say yes".

Somehow, this was the most moving Good Friday service I've ever been to.   I had many thoughts during and after, as I walked home down a busy Great Western Road, among them:  The different chapters of this story, all of which we peeked into during our pilgrimage to the Holy Land last year, especially Mary's little underground room that we saw at the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, the high point of our pilgrimage the Holy Land last May; also my mother's fascination with Mary and the Goddess and her own spiritual journey, and my own connection to that.  But more than anything, the meaning of the word, "Yes!": what it means to take that leap of faith, to give oneself to another person, to a principle, to God, to the Universe.

 

If you'd like to know more about this, go to: http://thecathedral.org.uk/2016/03/good-friday-preaching/

Bill and the Toledo to Santa Cruz Move

Although our main home continues for now to be Scotland, for the past 9 and a half years we have maintained a house in Toledo, Ohio, as our US base.  In the meantime, our children finished university in Cleveland and went on to other parts of the US, leaving our old house as a kind of orphan. 

About a year ago, however, we decided it was time to think about getting rid of the Toledo house and moving our US base to Santa Cruz, California. Since last April, we have made five trips to sort through the possessions that we left behind when we moved to Scotland.  We gave away at least half of our books and all of our music CDs; we decommissioned 6 old computers and confidentially shredded psychotherapy data sets; we persuaded our children to return to the family home to sort through their boxes of old toys and school papers; and so on and so on. 

Two days ago, I arrived in Toledo from Scotland, with 13 hours of accumulated jet lag, having only two days before that flown back from Singapore.  There I joined Diane, who had been here for a week doing final sorts and packing.  We spent a very long day yesterday scouring the house from top to bottom looking for things we’d missed (these were numerous and sometimes surprising) and packing these up.  We finished up about 9:30 pm.

This morning, 12 hours later, Bill Frizzell and his bearded crew showed up to take the 100+ boxes and load them onto their enormous moving van, which he parked like a supertanker on our little street in suburban Toledo. Bill, who is driving our stuff to California along with 4 other loads, turns out to also be a former music minister and an occasional country singer, full of stories and at least one very nice song, which he pointed me to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4CiknL0Sjw . (Also, a song called "Shake Your Head", which he said has been popular in Scotland, even Radio Clyde, backed by his autistic nephew on drums and guitar.) He even stopped to help my neighbor whose tire was almost flat. From a European perspective, this might sound so working-class middle America as to almost be cliche, except that it felt wonderful. Somehow, I feel like our stuff, not particularly valuable but full of memories precious to us, is in good hands.