Just over a week ago, Alison Crosthwait (from ‘The Good Therapists‘) and I, had a fantastic twitter chat on the subject of ‘Therapy breaks’. For more information on Alison, and on why we chose that subject, please see this post, which I wrote prior to the chat.

Using the wonders of Storify (and a few minutes spent trying to figure out how it worked), I put together a ‘transcript’ of our chat, which you can find here:

https://storify.com/lifeinabind/therapy-breaks-what-do-they-mean-to-you

Please accept my apologies if any sections are hard to follow or if questions appear to come out of the blue! Due to the natural pauses while one of us was replying to a question, we sometimes found ourselves with more than one question on the go at once, and so reconstructing a particular thread was not always easy! However, I have done my best to keep portions of the same conversation together, as far as possible, and this is why the tweet ‘time stamps’ don’t always follow strict chronological order.

We were hoping to use the subject of therapy breaks to explore a number of areas, including change and attachment. We covered how both clients and therapists can feel during a break, and the different strategies they may employ to manage the break, including transitional objects, email contact, or, occasionally, back-up therapists (a concept I had not come across before!).

I think Alison will forgive me for speaking on her behalf to say that we both enjoyed it enormously and hope that you will enjoy reading through our conversation. We are keen to try this again sometime, and it would be good to hear your thoughts on subjects you would like us to explore (and that YOU would like to explore – please join us!) next time. Speaking personally, though we spoke about ‘attachment’ during therapy breaks, I felt that we didn’t really get a chance to talk in depth about the subject of change, and that is something Alison has written about, and that I would love to discuss with her. It is also something which is particularly pertinent for me at the moment, as my therapy went through significant (positive) changes just before, during, and after the Easter therapy break.

But all suggestions are welcome, and we both love creative ideas, so do feel free to put forward anything therapy-related that you have an interest in! I’m already getting excited at the thought of creating a list 🙂