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.”

My Parent has an Autism Spectrum Disorder: Barbara Lester talks about her new book for children and teens

“I always knew that my father seemed different from other fathers, but back then I didn’t know there was a name that described this difference or that there might be other people who had similar issues in their families. Once I realized that my father had an ASD, it helped me better understand and get along with him. I have found that over the past ten years there has been an exponential increase in the amount of information available to parents to help them understand their ASD children, but almost no information for children or teens to help them understand their ASD parents. I wrote this book to begin to fill that gap.”

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.”

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.”