In this issue
Features
Making the world more child-MindEd
Catherine Jackson reports on a new child and youth counselling e-learning project.
Floods, climate change and denial (free article)
Hilary Prentice argues that counsellors should be doing more to challenge denialism about climate change.
Working with Native American traditions
Dr Catherine Iviksik Swan Reimer describes how Native American culture and beliefs influence her counselling practice.
Are we disabling our clients?
Attitudes and assumptions can be as disabling as physical barriers, writes Michèle Taylor.
Remembering in order to forget
Paul Sibson and Robin Ticic explain how memory reconsolidation works.
Counselling and epilepsy
Is it any wonder people with epilepsy are at higher risk of depression, asks Anna Carver?
Regulars
In practice
Keren Smedley: Getting on with life
In the client's chair
Lauren Clayton: It helps to feel I'm in control
In the supervisor's chair
Rosie Dansey: Time for a change?
The researcher
Barry McInnes: One in two is pretty poor odds
Talking point
Barbara Rayment: Picking up the pieces
How I became a therapist
Cirecie A West-Olatunji
Dilemmas
Should you answer a client’s emails?
The interview
Tim Bond: The quest for a moral purpose
BACP
From the chair
Amanda Hawkins reflects on endings and beginnings
Additional online content
In conversation
Hilary Prentice talks further with Colin Feltham about the role that therapists could play by enabling people to articulate their feelings about climate change.
Members and subscribers can download a pdf of this issue from the Therapy Today archive.
Editorial
Only this morning I turned on the radio to hear Evan Davis on the Today programme interviewing the Head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christina Figueres, about how she was going to convince British business leaders to further reduce carbon emissions. Instead of accepting climate change as a given, Davis asked: ‘Do you think the weather is telling us something?’ and then, in a slightly mocking tone: ‘We were told in 2009 that it was the last chance to save the planet... the planet hasn’t died yet...’
This cynicism that is typical in the media subsided somewhat during the recent floods but now seems to be returning as it has finally stopped raining and the weather is no longer the big story. At the same time as denying that climate change is real and with us now, the default position from most of the media and politicians seems to have become that it’s too late to do anything about it anyway and we now just have to adapt our housing and systems to reduce disaster risk.
I recently watched David Roberts on Ted Talks describing how if we go on with business as usual we are on track for a four to six degree rise in temperature this century. Indeed by 2100 there will be severe drought over 40 per cent of inhabited land and hundreds of millions of refugees. ‘Do something or we’re screwed,’ Roberts says.
So I welcome Hilary Prentice’s article in this issue on climate change and denial. Hilary has been involved in ecopsychology for over 20 years, exploring how counselling and psychotherapy can help address our collective denial of what is happening to our planet. She asks what does it do to our psyche to see the effects of our destructive behaviour all around us but to pretend that we do not? If there is silence around our fears of climate change in our own counselling or with our clients, where does this perhaps unconscious fear manifest itself? And she calls for our profession to step up and meet the challenge rather than avoid it.
Sarah Browne
Editor