Positive – positive – positive ..

Difficult to find any positivity with all that’s going on but I am feeling positive about next week. Teaching new students, providing supervision to eager supervisees, and then holidays.

I am also feeling positive on the back of some of my reading. In a couple of weeks I will be teaching case formulation and in preparation looking at books on this. Ann Garland who wrote an excellent book on persistent depression has a chapter in a book on case formulation and she makes difficult material easy to understand.

People with depression find it hard to remember positives, through no fault of theirs. Ann Garland describes the research on the depressive process that leads to difficulties in accessing pleasurable memories.

Ed Watkins has more recently made a case for helping people describe in detail their past difficulties and how this can help people to achieve a more balanced memory of the past. This made me consider how person centred counselling may also facilitate this process.

Interestingly, Ann Garland points to difficulties in goal setting for people with low mood and makes me wonder whether this reinforces the importance of enabling people to specify in detail future goals to be achieved.