Being Alone Versus Being Lonely in the Mobile age

A moving and thought-provoking article, which, claiming my right to total hypocrisy, I am posting on a social networking site. I guess this phenomenon is one of the reasons that counselling and psychotherapy are becoming increasingly important these days...An uninterrupted hour of intimate embodied dialogue, etc. The Flight from Conversation- New York Times David Harford www.harfordtherapy.com

The age of materialism and the need for enlightenment

Further to my last post about the work of Glasgow's Centre for Confidence and Wellbeing, there's a whole host of interesting material on their website relating to our conception of self, others and wider society as a whole. Well worth a browse.... Centre for Confidence and Wellbeing - on Materialism David Harford www.harfordtherapy.com

Thought-provoking article on consumerism makes for uneasy reading

The consistently on-the-button Centre for Confidence and Well-Being point out some painful home truths. I agree with much of this, except the slight inference that middle class people know how to prioritise their spending, whereas the working classes do not. The middle classes are the definers of 'taste' as a concept, so they simply dress up their materialism as something morally superior, but the underlying consumerist impulses are the same.

David Harford www.harfordtherapy.com

Fatherer's Question Time

How does a TA practitioner welcome and subsequently process the news that- all being well- he is soon to acquire his first experience of fatherhood? The answer, at least for this one, is with a curious blend of unreality, excitement and trepidation.

A vague quickening of inner warmth and existential triumph over death intertwines with the half-remembered cynicism of Philip Larkin's 'This Be The Verse'; all this observed by a menacing menagerie of twittering child development theorists. “Beware abandonment!” squawks one; 'Beware engulfment!” chirps another, like some sinister object relational fusion of the 'The Birds' with 'Eraserhead'. Somewhere on the periphery, a Council spokesman and Holyrood bureaucrat point and whisper something about 'Getting It Right For Every Child', while in the background a pair of insecurely attached adults are engaged in a tug of war; one tugging the left arm of a hapless child and screaming hysterically, “Look out! Look out, there be paedophiles about!”, while the other tugs at the right arm of the same, pleading, “Let him be, let him be free- just like me!”....

Such are just a few of the cacophonous Parent voices of cultural and transgenerational scripting around Daddy's responsibilities reverberating around my unconscious as the trimesters unfold.

Of course, by way of compensation, TA provides me with quite a few reasons to be cheerful- not least the fact that, as Erskine and Summers & Tudor assert, children are not the passive recipients of script programming we once postulated them to be. Nor are they prisoners of Mahler's autistic selflessness. My child will be fine-tuned for contact-in-relationship (Erskine & Trautmann, 1996) from the start- and will shape me as much as I shape them. I wonder what they will teach me about self, others and the world? Perhaps I will be born, too; the redefining and stroke-filtering scales falling from my eyes?

So, enough of these gloomy prognostications of hanging up my dancing shoes and handing on- and possibly fumbling- the baton. All I need to do is be “good enough”, as my new best pal Winnicott would say, and not lurch into acerbic guilt and self-criticism when I inevitably experience envy and resentment for the little critter from time to time.

David Harford www.harfordtherapy.com

EMDR and PTSD

Please click on the title link above to view an interesting article on the use of EMDR techniques to treat PTSD and other related symptoms arising from exposure to severe trauma. Fascinating stuff!

David Harford www.harfordtherapy.com

Anger management tips

Having had some "interesting" responses to poor quality workmanship carried out by tradesmen in my flat recently, the attached article features key points relating to the management of angry impulses. http://www.harfordtherapy.com

David Harford

Codes of ethics and best practice guidelines

The codes of ethics and best practice guidelines I adhere to in my counselling and psychotherapy work are now available for download from: http://www.harfordtherapy.com/apps/documents/

David Harford www.harfordtherapy.com