Informative . Inquisitive . Independent

Editorial

It is with some level of difficulty that we come to write the editorial for the Spring 2021 edition of Contemporary Psychotherapy. It feels like there’s so much that could be said right now, yet at the same time so little, and we don’t want to make more noise just for the sake of it. Maybe the sense of reticence and lethargy is reflective of the current wider context; Beth (ed.) has been using the term ‘national burnout’ to validate client feelings of apathy, lack of motivation and general malaise over the late winter months. A burnout that more recently seems to have progressed in a number of individuals to tipping over into the minor illnesses category recently, ourselves both included.

For many of us, after months of feeling overwhelmed, run down, and over or under worked – both professionally and in our private lives – while lacking access to the usual every day resources that restore and replenish, the batteries are running on empty. Or perhaps, after a year (we note now that we are writing this editorial on 23rd March, a year to the day when the UK first went into lockdown), these resources to which we refer are no longer ‘usual’ or ‘every day’. We are all waiting to see what such terms will come to mean as we continue on this trajectory through the pandemic, trusting that one day we will come out the other side, even as the ebbs and flows of the process may make that seem an impossibility....