Subrideo Blog

The Subrideo Network has been created for therapists from across the world who want to share their knowledge and experience to help others, as well as improve their own services by recognising the need to continue their own learning in this vast field.

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail." - Abraham Maslow

Even if you are an experienced therapist, there will be times when you scratch your head over a particular case, whilst another therapist out there has already been through something similar and has a possible solution to what might work. This site brings together that conversation and variety of approaches as used by experts in their fields, so they can be shared, analysed and where appropriate, critiqued.

So how does this site work?

Share Knowledge
Here, you can access live and completed case studies and give your idea’s as to how they could be or could have been tackled. You can also input your own cases and receive feedback from across the world from a multiple of disciplines as to other approaches you could try.

Access Resources
Here, you can access free resources to help support your sessions, whether this be through accessing our hypnotherapy scripts, downloading the EFT basic recipe, tasking idea’s, or even leaflet templates to help grow your business.

Networking
If you would like advice on a specific area or in relation to a specific therapeutic approach, you can review our list of experts and contact them directly. Why not submit your details and we can include you in our list for others to contact you?

Plus much, much more...

All you need to do to get access to all these amazing resources is to head over to http://thesubrideonetwork.com and sign up. See you there.

I recently blogged about the Solution Focused Brief Therapy and Depression courses that we ran. The students certainly did very well on the courses and took a lot away from it. So much so that Paula and Natasha, two of the students on those courses were kind enough to come back and do a little video testimonial for us to let you all know their thoughts. You can see their testimonial below:

We all had great fun videoing the testimonial and what you saw above was only half of what we actually videoed. In fact we had so much fun, we had to put an outtakes video together:

We hope you enjoy the above videos and a big thanks to Paula and Natasha for doing the testimonial for us. If you have any questions on anything you saw in the videos please contact us and we will be happy to help in any way we can.

We are really pleased to announce that the AAMET has awarded our 2 day Solution Focused Brief Therapy course with 2 CPD points. Along with supervision, CPD points are required when you are an EFT Level 3 - Advanced Practitioner to ensure that you are keeping your skill set current and advancing your knowledge or improving your delivery of EFT. Our Solution Focused Brief Therapy course really takes your delivery of EFT to the next level and integrates it with advanced rapport building skills and advanced language techniques.

Our course is now listed on the AAMET website and we thank AAMET for recognising the value of our course.

Well, it has been a while since our last post and one of the main reasons for this is that we have been busy training. We have had a really nice group of students on one of my favorite courses - our Solution Focused Therapy course where we take our students on a journey to finding solutions for our clients and not dwelling on the past. We teach them that the clients who come to see them all have the resources within them to find long lasting solutions to their problems and they are just there to facilitate this process. Above all, we teach them that the client is the expert in their problem and as a result of this, their sessions should be 'client led' to ensure that they are always on the right track.

We certainly cover a lot of information over the two days and there are lots of practical sessions, which are great to watch as the students try out these techniques for the first time. This year we have updated the course to include a whole section on Human Givens. We normally just include this information on our Understanding and Beating Depression course but this information is vitally important to any therapy session, not just depression.

Solution Focused Brief Therapy is the style of therapy that we use here in our clinic and is a powerful framework to base your therapy on.

Research into how to help people stop smoking is pretty constant, however two area's of research have interested us lately, particularly with Non Smoking Day 2008 being Wednesday, March 12th.

Reaching Retirement
The first research was regarding giving up smoking as you are reaching retirement. The Peninsula Medical School, in Devon, followed 1,712 smokers over six years to measure their success in giving up. The success rate among those who had recently retired was 42.5%, but among those still in work it was 29.3%.

So why does reaching retirement result in being more successful in stopping smoking? Retirement for many people can be one of those when you sit back and take stock of your life. This results in many changes, but interestingly is often when people de-stress their life and have much more time to do things they want to do. When you consider this from a Human Givens perspective, it actually seems obvious that someone in the process of reshaping their life, ultimately to re-balance their Human Givens, could well have a much better chance at stopping and addiction, than someone who has made no life changes.

So what should we do with this information? Well obviously, it’s important to reframe smoking for those reaching retirement age. Many people think it is too late for them to give up and that it is harder if they have been smoking for a long time. However, in our own personal experience, we generally find that the more embedded a pattern of smoking, the easier it is to break. Secondly, it is important to look at what is changing for people at retirement age and mimic those changes for those people some years away from retiring. This basically is by always reviewing a clients Human Givens and ensuring there is balance in their life. Too often therapists deal with every smoker the same, reaching for the same script and approach, when in fact each person is unique in the therapeutic program they need.

Lung Age
Another exciting study has reported that telling a smoker their "lung age" was a very effective method of motivating people to quit smoking.

One in eight of the patients told this managed to quit smoking immediately - and even those told that their lung tests were normal were more likely to quit.

"If lung age is normal, there is an incentive to stop before it is too late" the researchers wrote.

"If lung age is abnormal then this is a clear message that the lungs are undergoing accelerated deterioration that would be slowed if the smoker stopped."

Lung age is important as a quarter of smokers will develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and this is the fourth commonest cause of death worldwide. In addition, in the UK half of the estimated 1.5 million people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are currently undiagnosed. So you can imagine that if you a smoker and have never been checked, getting some idea as to whether you are one of the 1.5 million undiagnosed would be a pretty big motivator to stop, regardless of what the results were.

If you think you may have COPD, you should speak to your doctor, they will assess how well you breathe by using a machine called a spirometer. Spirometry can detect obstructive lung damage in susceptible individuals, typically at around age 35. Yet the average age of diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the UK is 55, despite widespread availability of diagnostic equipment.

Below is a link to an interesting graph adapted from the work of Fletcher and Peto (researched the natural history of chronic airflow obstruction, 1977, British Medical Journal). This illustrates how smoking effectively "ages" the lungs. The examples illustrated show how the lungs can deteriorate more rapidly with smoking, as if they are ageing faster. Smoking cessation will not allow the lungs to return to normal but reduction in function or "ageing" will then occur at a normal rate. This graph uses the terminology FEV, this is Forced Expiratory Volume, the amount of air that you can forcibly blow out (normally in one second), measured in litres.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/bmj.39503.582396.25v1/FIG2

Other Links:
British Medical Journal - article on Lung Age -
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/bmj.39503.582396.25v1

BBC News article on Retirement -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7283815.stm