Whilst meeting with foster carers and their long term foster child a while ago, we came face to face with a distressing possibility about the care system. These foster carers spoke about having made a decision to end their foster child’s placement. They explained that the child had complex psychological needs and they had never […]
Read 'Who’s paying for foster care?' >
I was reflecting with a colleague the other day. Let’s call him Billy. Billy told me about how he was struggling in a relationship with someone in his team. Upset and annoyed at something, this person had charged Billy with causing them distress and then with being too thoughtless or inept to put it right. […]
Read 'Facing feelings' >
In a recent reflective practice session we began, as is our custom, by asking the team member leading this particular session what he wanted to use the time for. ‘Well’ our colleague began ‘the child is doing this and that, and the foster carers are doing this and that, and the parents are doing this […]
Read 'The broad church of psychological practice' >
My partner is a jammy bugger. He’s forever finding money in the street. And not small change, no, this guy found £10 in a park at midnight as we cycled home together from the pub in the dark. He found £20 in the gutter on a trip into town. Then he found £80 in a […]
Read 'A stroke of luck' >Central to our MyST teams are our Young People’s Practitioners (YPPs). These practitioners are the ones who bend and stretch to meet the children at the heart of our service. Once a relationship has eventually formed, our YPPs stick like glue to children through the thick and thin of our therapeutic work, and indeed the […]
Read 'Powerful stuff' >
Recently, in the course of our work, we were talking with some other service leaders. They were concerned that their team weren’t following all of the service standards that the leaders knew were central to bring about good outcomes for the service users. ‘The staff know what they need to do. They know the policies. […]
Read 'Be the change' >
Last week, I was offering clinical supervision to a colleague, when she began telling me about how she had noticed a shift occurring in herself. Where once she was quite self-critical, she now found that she was being more generous towards herself. And this inner shift had led to a corresponding outer shift in how […]
Read 'Charity begins at home' >
The other day, I had cause to read an assessment letter that I had penned nearly 20 years ago as a young clinical psychologist. Although it was clinically competent in a basic sense, I was concerned about what I read. I had authored the report as if I were ‘the expert’. There was language of […]
Read 'A plate of gravy' >A few years ago, a colleague of ours mentioned a book she had read about re-wilding. It had struck her that the principles of re-wilding biological ecosystems had a parallel in our human systems. We talked it over and it turned out that there are some really interesting principles of re-wilding natural eco-systems that are […]
Read 'Re-wilding the ecology of children and families' >
After almost 16 years housed at the back of an old industrial site, MyST has a beautiful new base in which to work. For a century before our arrival, our new home was a primary school, and therefore the job of renovating this old, well used building has been a big one. Nearing the final […]
Read 'The beauty of grey' >
