Reminiscence and Life Story Work – The Importance of Remembering Our Life’s Journey

“From infancy to old age, the recall of personal memories serves to establish identity, safeguard self esteem, assist communication, enhance relationships, and preserve and transmit personal, family and community history. By valuing memories people are helped to value themselves when developmental challenges, current circumstances, transitions, failing health and increasing age assail us.”

Dr Mary Harris on the FIT Model: An Integrative Approach to Therapy and Supervision

“Therapists are increasingly required to learn and work using an approach which is unfamiliar to them; this is the case for many therapists seeking employment within the NHS, where CBT is often the treatment of choice. The FIT approach meets the current need to incorporate additional or new approaches within their work, and to utilise an integrative approach which is flexible yet clear and consistent, rather than confusing to the client.”

Salvation through Shakespeare: An Interview with Laura Bates, contributor to ‘Performing New Lives: Prison Theatre’

“When I was invited to contribute a chapter to this important anthology, I knew that I wanted to focus on one prisoner [Larry]…[T]he second half of the chapter…relates his transformational journey through the works of Shakespeare, using his analysis of the characters to provide a self-analysis that was truly life-altering. As one example, we focus on the character of Macbeth, examining some parallels between that character and Larry’s early criminal experiences. While some of those parallels are disturbing, the chapter concludes with the celebration of Larry’s ‘salvation through Shakespeare.'”

Counselling Older People with Alcohol Problems – An Interview with JKP authors Mike Fox and Lesley Wilson

” I find that older people are often patronised, and their ability to recover and make changes in their lives is often not acknowledged. Dr Martin Blanchard speaks in the Foreword of a ‘therapeutic nihilism’ that exists in attitudes towards the client group described in the book. One effect of this is that older people are often expected to fit into generic treatment systems, when they clearly have needs that will not be met by those systems. Thus the need for a specialist approach such as the book describes.”

Video: JKP author Nick Luxmoore on ‘Young People and the Curse of Ordinariness’

“My goal in counselling young people around issues of ordinariness, I suppose, is to help them begin to feel that the way they are is fine. They’re not going to be as good as they always longed to be, but nor are they going to be as dreadful as they always feared they might be… That’s not to say that they won’t achieve massively, but that they don’t have to be striving for it to such an extent that they then start behaving strangely or self-destructively or being destructive at other people’s expense in order to get recognised, and in order to be different.”