Creative Leaps

Team development, and what it can and cannot fix

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Team development borrows from psychotherapy, and the borrowing is not unreasonable. Therapy is largely about how people relate, what goes unsaid, how responsibility is taken or avoided, and how conflict is handled — all of which are also what makes a staff team work or fail.

What it borrows badly is the assumption that the problem is always in the room.

What team work of this kind involves

Typical content: surfacing what is not being said, examining how the team handles disagreement, clarifying roles and expectations, and looking at the difference between the team’s account of itself and how it actually behaves. Facilitators sometimes use creative or experiential methods — visualisation, drawing, movement, structured exercises — on the reasoning that a group will show in activity what it will not say in a discussion.

How therapy is regulated in the UK

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the single most useful thing to understand before you look for therapy in the UK, and it surprises most people.

The words are not protected

“Psychotherapist”, “counsellor” and “therapist” are not protected titles in UK law. There is no legal requirement to hold a qualification, to be registered anywhere, or to be insured before using any of them. A person with a three-year master’s degree and a person who finished a weekend course may both, lawfully, advertise as a counsellor.

Psychotherapy and counselling: what talking therapy is

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Talking therapy” is the umbrella term the NHS uses for a family of treatments in which a trained person and a client work through difficulties in conversation. Counselling, psychotherapy, CBT, guided self-help and several other things all sit underneath it.

What it consists of

Stripped to essentials, most talking therapy involves:

A regular, bounded meeting. Usually weekly, usually around fifty minutes, in a private room or by video or telephone. The boundedness is not administrative fussiness — the reliability of the frame is part of what makes it possible to say difficult things.
A working agreement. What the work is for, how long it might run, confidentiality and its limits, and what happens if either party wants to stop.
A method. What the practitioner does with what you bring: examine thought patterns, trace a difficulty back to earlier relationships, attend to what is happening between the two of you in the room, or something else again. See schools of therapy.
Supervision, behind the scenes. Registered practitioners take their work to a supervisor. This is a professional requirement, not a sign of inexperience.

Counselling or psychotherapy?

In UK usage the words overlap heavily and are frequently interchangeable. The rough convention is that counselling tends to be shorter and focused on a present difficulty, and psychotherapy longer and concerned with patterns that recur across a life. But there is no legal definition of either, and plenty of practitioners do both.

Personal development training and workshops

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A large, informal sector sits between education and therapy: short courses and workshops on confidence, assertiveness, communication and listening, stress management, self-care, relationship awareness, body awareness, creativity and career skills. They run in adult education, in colleges, in charities, in government departments and in private organisations.

Much of the material is drawn from psychotherapy. Assertiveness training took its models from behavioural therapy and from transactional analysis; awareness exercises come largely from gestalt; stress management borrows from CBT and, more recently, from mindfulness.

Accredited registers and the Professional Standards Authority

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Because the titles are not protected, the accredited registers scheme is the main public-protection mechanism for UK therapy. It is worth understanding precisely, because it is often described in ways that overstate it.

What the scheme is

The Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care is an independent body accountable to Parliament. It has two jobs. It oversees the statutory regulators — the HCPC, the GMC, the NMC and the rest. And, since 2012, it runs a separate programme that accredits voluntary registers in occupations that are not regulated by law.

The main schools of therapy, and how they differ

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Schools of therapy differ less in what happens in the room than the names suggest, and more in what each thinks the problem is. That is the useful axis, so it is the one used here.

Cognitive behavioural therapy

The problem, as CBT sees it: unhelpful patterns of thinking and behaviour that keep a difficulty going, whatever originally started it.

In the room: structured and collaborative. An agenda, a shared model of what maintains the problem, and tasks between sessions — testing a prediction, keeping a record, gradually approaching what is avoided. Usually time-limited, often twelve to twenty sessions.

Group work and facilitation

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Group therapy is not individual therapy done more cheaply with an audience. It works on a different mechanism: the group itself is the instrument, and what happens between members is the material.

Group analysis

The main British tradition is group analysis, originated by S. H. Foulkes in the 1940s and formalised when he and colleagues founded the Institute of Group Analysis in 1971. It combines psychoanalytic thinking with an account of social and interpersonal functioning: the individual is understood as formed within a network of relationships, not as a self-contained unit that occasionally bumps into others.

How to check a practitioner

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Checking a therapist is free and takes a few minutes. The difficulty is not access — it is knowing which register applies and what an entry actually proves.

The procedure

1. Ask for the register and the registered name. Not “are you qualified”. Ask: which register are you on, and under what name? People appear on registers under their legal name, which may differ from the name on a website.

Dance movement psychotherapy: what it is

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dance movement psychotherapy (DMP) is a form of psychotherapy that uses movement as its primary material. The premise is that movement is expressive as well as functional — that how a person holds themselves, initiates, stops, takes up space or avoids it, carries information that words either miss or defend against.

It is a small profession, and it is frequently confused with things it is not.

What it is not

It is not a dance class. There is no choreography, no technique to acquire, no standard to meet. Ability to dance is irrelevant, and much of what happens in a session is small — a gesture, a shift of weight, stillness.

NHS talking therapies in England

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In England there is a national programme, NHS Talking Therapies for anxiety and depression, which provides free psychological treatment for common mental health problems. It is the route most people use, and it does not require anyone’s permission to start.

You can refer yourself

You do not need a GP referral. You can contact the service directly, or your GP can refer you. The requirements are that you are registered with a GP and aged 18 or over — in some areas 16 or over. The NHS publishes a search that finds the service covering your postcode.

Dance movement therapy: what the evidence does and does not show

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This page exists because the honest answer is more useful than an enthusiastic one, and because enthusiasm is easy to find elsewhere.

The short version

The controlled evidence for dance movement therapy is thin. It is not absent, and it is not negative — it is thin: a small number of small trials, of variable and often low quality, in a field that has not yet been studied at the scale that would settle anything.

Therapy across the four nations

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Health is devolved. The English self-referral route described on the NHS talking therapies page is an English arrangement, and assuming it applies everywhere is one of the commonest sources of wasted time.

The registers are UK-wide — BACP, UKCP, HCPC and the rest cover all four nations, so checking a practitioner works the same way everywhere. Access to NHS treatment does not.

England

Self-referral direct to the local NHS Talking Therapies service, or referral by your GP. Search by postcode on the NHS website.

Arts therapies in the UK, and the protected titles

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The arts therapies are psychological therapies in which an art form is the main medium of the work. They matter for a reason beyond their own practice: they are the clearest illustration in UK mental health of what statutory title protection actually does.

The four protected titles

Art therapist, art psychotherapist, dramatherapist and music therapist are protected in law. Using one without being on the Health and Care Professions Council register is a criminal offence under the Health Professions Order 2001, along with falsely implying that you are entitled to use one.

Who pays for therapy in the UK

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This page is about routes and who pays for them, not about anyone’s prices. This site sells nothing and lists no practitioner.

The NHS route

NHS talking therapies are free at the point of use, in all four nations. Nobody pays a fee, and there is no means test. What you trade for that is choice and waiting time: the service decides which treatment fits, from the set it offers, and there is usually a wait — see NHS talking therapies and therapy across the UK.

Mindfulness: origins and what the word now means

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The archived version of this page used the spelling “mindfullness”. The address is preserved; the spelling is not.

The practice

Mindfulness, in the sense used by the clinical programmes, is deliberately paying attention to present experience, without adding judgement to it. In practice that means noticing what is happening — breath, body sensation, sound, thought, feeling — observing that attention has wandered, and returning it, repeatedly and without self-criticism, which turns out to be the difficult part.

What a first appointment involves

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first meeting is usually not therapy. It is an assessment: a structured conversation whose purpose is to work out what is going on and whether this service, and this person, is the right fit. Knowing that in advance takes some of the strangeness out of it.

What normally happens

Practicalities first. How long sessions are, how often, how many, what happens if you cancel, how to contact them between sessions and whether that is expected at all. In private practice this is set out in a working agreement, sometimes called a therapeutic contract.

MBSR and MBCT: the two clinical programmes

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two programmes account for nearly all the clinical research on mindfulness. They are related, they are frequently confused, and they were built for different jobs.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR)

Built for: people living with chronic illness, pain and stress, at a hospital that had run out of other things to offer them. Developed from 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.

Shape: eight weekly group sessions of roughly two and a half hours, a full-day silent session around week six, and daily home practice of around forty-five minutes. The core components are the body scan, sitting meditation, mindful movement drawn from hatha yoga, and enquiry — group discussion of what practice actually threw up, rather than instruction.

Getting help now

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If there is an immediate risk to life, call 999 or go to A&E. That is the answer, and it is not an overreaction.

This page is not a crisis service and neither is the rest of this site. It is a short list of the official routes, so that you do not have to search for them while you are struggling.

England

NHS 111, then press option 2. Since 2024, NHS 111 has offered urgent mental health support, 24 hours a day, every day, staffed by trained mental health professionals. It is free, and you can call for yourself or for someone else.

Mindfulness: what the trials support, and where claims outrun the evidence

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mindfulness is one of the areas where the gap between what is claimed and what has been shown is widest. Both halves of that sentence matter: there is real evidence, and there is a great deal of overclaiming built on top of it.

What is reasonably well supported

Relapse prevention in recurrent depression. This is the strongest and most specific finding. NICE’s 2022 guideline on depression in adults concluded there was good evidence that group CBT and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy were effective, and on average cost-effective, for people at high risk of relapse, with data covering up to two years. It is recommended as one option among several.