The Seeds of Change: How Therapists Cultivate Personal Growth, published by Routledge

My Book Is Six Months Old!

James Hillman suggested that, just as an acorn already contains the pattern of the oak, each of us comes into life carrying the seeds of who we might become. Therapy cannot decide what those seeds should grow into, but it can help create the conditions in which they have a chance to flourish.

Six months ago, my first book, The Seeds of Change: How Therapists Cultivate Personal Growth, was published by Routledge.

I still find that rather extraordinary.

I wrote it because, after more than thirty years as a psychotherapist, I kept coming back to the same question: what actually happens in therapy that helps people change?

From the outside, therapy can look deceptively simple. Two people sit in a room and talk. But underneath that conversation, all sorts of things are going on. We begin to notice patterns, defences, old loyalties, beliefs we absorbed years ago and never thought to question, the roles we learnt to play, the parts of ourselves we would rather not look at, and the ways in which the past has a habit of turning up in the present wearing a different hat.

Once we begin to see those things, we have choices.

That, really, is what The Seeds of Change is about.

I wanted to write a book about psychotherapy that did not require the reader to keep a large dictionary nearby. It draws on many of the approaches I use in my own work — Jung, Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, CBT, the transpersonal, dreams, symbols, complexes, the shadow, and much more — but always with one practical question in mind: how does any of this actually help the person sitting in front of us?

That question is just as important for therapists as it is for clients.

For fellow practitioners, students, and trainees, the book brings together ideas that are often taught in separate boxes and examines how they can sit alongside one another in real therapeutic work. Most of us do not meet a client and think, Excellent, this is clearly a Transactional Analysis problem, and I shall now remain firmly in that lane. Human beings are rather less obliging than that. We draw on different ways of understanding what is happening, depending on the person, the relationship, and what is unfolding in the room.

The book contains stories from practice: examples of how people become caught in patterns and how, sometimes slowly and sometimes quite unexpectedly, those patterns begin to loosen.

Because therapy is not about turning someone into a completely different person. Nor, thankfully, is it about “fixing” them, as though they were a faulty toaster.

It is much more about becoming aware of who we are, what has shaped us, what we continue to carry long after it has ceased to be useful, and what might become possible if we stop living quite so automatically.

You do not need to be in therapy to read the book. You may be curious about yourself. Perhaps you have wondered why you keep ending up in the same kind of relationship, why certain people can press your buttons within thirty seconds of meeting you, why you know perfectly well what you should do and then do something entirely different, or why an old wound can suddenly feel as fresh as if it happened yesterday.

Or perhaps you are thinking about therapy and would quite like to know what on earth you may be letting yourself in for.

And if you are a therapist, supervisor, counsellor, or trainee, I hope the book gives you ideas you can actually use — not only theories to understand, but also different ways of thinking about the person sitting across from you.

We all develop ways of surviving. Some of them serve us brilliantly for years. The difficulty arises when the strategy that once protected us becomes the very thing that keeps us stuck.

Therapy can help us notice that.

Noticing is often where change begins.

So, if you are interested in how therapy works, why we become who we are, or how we might help ourselves — and others — loosen the patterns that no longer serve us, do grab a copy of The Seeds of Change: How Therapists Cultivate Personal Growth.

It may even help you understand why you keep doing that thing you swore you would never do again.

The Seeds of Change: How Therapists Cultivate Personal Growth is published by Routledge and is available from Routledge, Amazon, Waterstones, Blackwell’s, Bookshop.org, and other booksellers, in print and eBook editions.