Enjoyment needs to be taken more seriously – especially when it comes to supporting adult therapy clients with ADHD. To mark Neurodiversity Celebration Week 2024, ACT trainer and Senior Psychologist for ADHD Ireland Aisling Leonard-Curtin describes a common vicious cycle with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and suggests some exploratory questions that avoid problematising an individual’s need for stimulation and instead encourage a new and nourishing relationship with enjoyment.

It was trauma that first led Counselling Psychologist Cleandra Waldron to yoga. During the pandemic, avoidance and burnout were her signals that she needed to throw down the yoga mat and re-embrace it. In the final part of her series, she describes the place of yoga in her life as a therapist today – from strengthening core therapeutic skills and tolerating discomfort to honouring her clients’ courage.

There are mental health risks as well as benefits associated with yoga. How might ‘talk therapists’ support clients to explore new psychological corners of a long-established yoga practice – as well as helping novice clients to avoid inadvertent triggering or ‘dissociation in disguise’? In the penultimate part of her series, Counselling Psychologist and former yoga teacher Cleandra Waldron shares some useful general questions, and specific cautions for practising yoga when there is a history of childhood abuse.

From working with resistance to understanding the role of integration, therapy and yoga have much to say to each other. In the third part of her series on yoga for ‘talk therapists’, Counselling Psychologist and former yoga teacher Cleandra Waldron shares how yoga has helped her reflect on the function and goals of therapy, the common threads of human distress, the ‘extraordinary powers’ of trauma survivors – and the ‘permission’ from which all therapy clients can benefit.

When we think of yoga, many of us may imagine physical poses conducted in group exercise classes. In fact, yoga less than a century ago was more like a private therapy session. In the second part of her series on the interconnections between therapy and yoga, Counselling Psychologist and former yoga teacher Cleandra Waldron draws our attention to the evolution of yoga and explains why a little therapist curiosity about a client’s yoga practice can go a long way.

Yoga can enter ‘talk therapy’ in many ways – from one client’s committed practice to another’s curiosity to ‘try it out’, and from transformative experiences to triggering ones. Counselling Psychologist and former yoga teacher Cleandra Waldron embarks on a five-part series about the interconnections between therapy and yoga, including the therapist’s own experience or assumptions – beginning with how she found her professional ‘yoga lens’ through personal trauma

What do practitioners need to know about Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder? Maggie Learoyd is a therapist specialising in working with both neurodivergent clients and ARFID. To mark Eating Disorder Awareness Week 2024, she shares her personal experience of struggling with this little known and often misunderstood condition – and offers some pointers to help therapists meet severe selective eating with empathy and understanding.

What can Internal Family Systems bring to our understanding of the supervision phenomenon of parallel process? How might an IFS supervisor and her supervisee work with this in service of the client? Psychotherapist, IFS Supervisor and author Emma Redfern explains why detecting parts primes IFS clinicians to identify and work with activated parts in multiple systems – and shares some common parts dynamics that can show up via unconscious processes in supervision.