Saturday, March 29, 2014

Sanders & Hill’s Counselling for Depression (2014)

Entry for 28 March 2014:

Today I received my copy of Counselling for Depression: A Person-Centred and Experiential Approach to Practice (Sage, 2014).  As far as I know, this is the first book-length person-centred-experiential therapy treatment manual for a specific client population.  It is an outgrowth of the humanistic therapy competences that I worked on in 2008-2009, integrating person-centred and EFT, and provides important reading material to go along with the CfD training now being carried out in England and Wales. 

I co-wrote chapter 2, with Andy Hill; I also put together one of the Appendices from my meta-analysis data and helped construct the competence rating scale (PCEPS) reproduced in the last chapter.  For background for doing the book, Pete Sanders came up to Glasgow to do EFT Level 1 18 months ago. 

The book is a handy reference for PCE therapists and counselors working with depressed clients, and I think also helps legitimize the use of a humanistic therapy for depression.  There is a lot of EFT in it, but without, as Pete Sanders says, “furniture”. 

This book, and the big PRACTICED trial currently running in Sheffield, have inspired me to return the EFT’s roots in the work we carried out from 1985 to 1992 on developing it as an approach for working with depressed clients.  In the process I’ve developed my own take on CfD and EFT for depression.  Some of my thinking on this can be found under the CfD and EFT Masterclass sections on the following page: https://sites.google.com/site/eftnetworkuk/files-and-resources

This material includes ideas about depression as “stuckness”, how to help therapists and clients get unstuck, and alternative ways of working with Self-Criticism and Unresolved Relationships that don’t involve chairwork.  There are also useful formulations, such as “Depression is a message that I send myself that something is broken in my life”.

Regardless, Sanders & Hill’s new book is an excellent to start looking at how PCE therapy can be carried out with depressed clients in a more focused and responsive manner.  Hopefully, it will also generate additional interest in EFT as well.

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