Published Works 

Power, A. (2020). My questions about emotionally focused couple therapy (EFT) and a few answers. Attachment: New directions in psychotherapy and relational psychoanalysis., 14(1), 23-41.

Power, A. 2022. Working with the pursuer-withdrawer dynamic. Therapy Today, 33 (5), 28-31.

What is the secret of a long and contented attachment?

Does it matter whether two partners met by accident, were set up, met online or if their marriage was arranged by family?

Anne Power sits down with eighteen contented couples in the US and the UK to discuss how they found each other and what made it work. We hear from a fifty-year married couple who met when their commuter train got stuck and a young ultra-orthodox Jewish couple whose arranged marriage blossomed into an intense romance. We meet two women who found each other again ten years after their first relationship ended and the pair who married six weeks after meeting.

As well as couples brought together by family arrangement or random romance we meet those introduced deliberately by friends, by agencies, by Telepersonals and finally by the internet. Almost all the couples interviewed had faced major challenges along the way - but their attachment grew and relationships survived. In this book they tell us why.

The author uses some of the questions she puts to new couples in therapy: What does a row look like? How has sex been across the years? Who has grown up the most over their time together? What stopped them from becoming a divorce statistic? Woven through the book are expert, jargon-free explanations of how couples attach, how they fight and how they repair. Each chapter ends with questions which invite us to reflect on our own relationships and to benefit personally from this chance to eavesdrop on contented couples.

Forced endings in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis: Attachment and loss in retirement

Written by Anne Power

Published by Routledge 2016

This book was written to support counsellors or therapists who need to impose an ending on their clients. I hope it will also be useful to supervisors working with a supervisee who needs to stop practising. It is based on my interviews with therapists who closed their practice to retire, to move house or for maternity or sabbatical leave. 

The book uses the lens of attachment theory to explore how clients respond to being left and how the practitioner manages this disruption to the frame. Interviewees speak of their ambivalence about retirement and about the clinical challenges of imposing an ending. Finally they reflect on leaving a profession which has been not just a career but a developmental pathway.

I wrote this book when I realised that very little had been published about the therapist’s retirement or other circumstances which might cause a therapist to impose an unwelcome ending on a client. I interviewed around twenty therapists who had either retired or moved home, taken a maternity leave or time off for a sabbatical.

The book is based on the stories of these experienced therapists and explores the ambivalence they felt about letting go of a professional role which had sustained them. I explore the process of closing a private practice, from the initial ethical dilemma, through to the last day when the door of the therapy room closes.

A forced ending is an intrusion of the clinician’s own needs into the therapeutic space. I consider how this might compromise the work but could also be an opportunity for deeper engagement. I explore the role of supervision in supporting good practice and also reflect on the supervisor’s own retirement. The book closes with a checklist of questions that a practitioner might want to consider if they are deliberating a possible closure of their practice.

I hope the book will help to open up an area which has been considered taboo in the profession so that future cohorts can benefit from the reflections and insights of this earlier generation. If it can support clinicians making this transition then it may result in fewer clients having to face a sudden ending of treatment.

Power, A. 2019 ‘Avoidant people in relationships – Why would they bother?’ in L.Cundy, (Ed) Attachment and the Defence Against Intimacy: Understanding and Working With Avoidant Attachment, Self-Hatred, and Shame. (37-68). Karnac Books.

Power, A. 2017 ‘Don’t ever threaten to leave me’ pp 69-91 in L. Cundy, (Ed) Anxiously Attached: Understanding and Working with Preoccupied Attachment. Karnac Books.

Power, A. 2022. Working with the pursuer-withdrawer dynamic. Therapy Today, 33 (5), 28-31.

Power, A. 2018 ‘What kind of courtship sets a couple up for long-term attachment: romance, arranged marriage, or online matching-making?’. Attachment, 12(1), 25-34. this article draws a distinction between arranged marriage and forced marriage, and focuses on the former

Power, A. 2016 ‘Finding the right relationship’ Private Practice, Winter pp 8-11.

Power, A. and Cundy, L. (2014) ‘Net gains and losses: Digital technology and the couple’ chapter 3 (pp 53-80) in Love in the age of the internet: Attachment in the digital era. London: Karnac.

Power, A. 2012 ‘When a supervisee retires’ in Psychodynamic Practice Vol 18 (4) pp 441-455.The paper looks at the role of the supervisor in supporting the therapist through the decision and process of retirement. It reflects on the possible dynamics which arise when an ending is imposed and how these may be tackled in the supervisory dyad.

Power, A. 2009: “Supervision – a space where diversity can be thought about?” Attachment Vol 3, No 2, July 157-175

My intention in this paper is to consider the potential of supervision as a space to think about differences in culture. By culture I mean the medium in which we grow up, which from birth has silently organised our experience and left its mark in our unconscious. These inescapable parts of our psychic landscape naturally find their way into the therapeutic and supervisory space and if not thought about can subvert the relationship.

Power, A. 2013 ‘When Passion Cools: Counselling couples’. Therapy Today, 24(1): 14-18.

Power, A. 2014 ‘Impasse in supervision – looking back and thinking again’. Attachment: New directions in psychotherapy and relational psychoanalysis, 8:2, 154-171.

Power, A. 2013 'Supervision of supervision: How many mirrors do we need?' British Journal of Psychotherapy, 29:3, 380-404.

Power, A. 2016 'Can supervision foster the personal cultural awareness that trainings often miss out?'  

My aspirations as a psychotherapy supervisor', Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling Psychology REflections. 1:1, 35-40

Power, A. 2012 ‘When a supervisee retires’ in Psychodynamic Practice Vol 18 (4) pp 441-455.The paper looks at the role of the supervisor in supporting the therapist through the decision and process of retirement. It reflects on the possible dynamics which arise when an ending is imposed and how these may be tackled in the supervisory dyad.

Power, A. 2009: “Supervision – a space where diversity can be thought about?” Attachment Vol 3, No 2, July 157-175

My intention in this paper is to consider the potential of supervision as a space to think about differences in culture. By culture I mean the medium in which we grow up, which from birth has silently organised our experience and left its mark in our unconscious. These inescapable parts of our psychic landscape naturally find their way into the therapeutic and supervisory space and if not thought about can subvert the relationship.

Power, A. 2009 “The value of supervision training” Supervision Review Summer 9-15

The paper reviews the data collected from forty respondents to a questionnaire on supervision training which was sent to two hundred subscribers to Supervision Review. Respondents evaluated aspects of their training and demonstrated their preferences through a rating scale. Provisional ideas are offered about the meaning of these preferences and the particular role of anxiety in learning is considered.

Power, A. 2008 “Clinical Notes – a Neglected Channel?” Supervision Review Summer. 2-6

The matter of how we as therapists write clinical notes and we, as supervisors, encourage our supervisees to use them as preparation for supervision, can sometimes appear to be a rather dry and peripheral issue. There are important practical and legal aspects to note-keeping but in this paper I want to explore the ways that notes may enhance the therapeutic relationship both through the reflection and self supervision which they spawn and through their use in the supervision session.

 Power, A. 2013 ‘Early Boarding: Rich children in care, their adaptation to loss and attachment’. Attachment: New directions in psychotherapy and relational psychoanalysis, Vol 7, July 2013, 186-201.

Power, A. 2007 “Discussion of Trauma at the Threshold: The Impact of Boarding School on Attachment in Young Children”. Attachment Vol 1 (3) 313-320 I will reflect on the experience of early boarding from an attachment theory perspective, thinking particularly about how the impact of early separation may depend on a child’s attachment style. My thesis is that where a secure attachment normally provides resilience, in this unusual situation, it may provide little protection.

Power, A. 2003 "Using Attachment Theory to Understand Patients' Responses to a Therapist's Medical Break" in Journal of Attachment and Human Development 5 (1) 79-93

The impact of a therapist's planned medical break is described and discussed, using attachment theory. The break is compared to Ainsworth's strange situation test and the responses of patients with avoidant, ambivalent and disorganised patterns of attachment are explored. The paper examines patients' responses at the point where news of the break is given and on reunion. An overview is given of the understanding of separation and loss in broader analytic theory and the ways in which these complement Bowlby's theory. The clinical cases are reviewed in the light of several authors.

Power, A. 2000 "As Psychotherapists, Do We Need to Deal in the Spiritual?" in The Psychotherapy Review Vol 2, No 11, December, pp550-554

Part of the richness of human consciousness is in our capacity to reframe experiences and to understand the same thing with a new set of concepts. Psychoanalysis has a major role in enabling that kind of many layered view of life. But when such re-descriptions or interpretations have been made, we need always to ask whether something of the experience may have been missed.

Power, A. 2017 ‘When is it time to retire?’ in BACP Private Practice Journal Spring 2017:26-31.

Power, A. 2015 Forced endings in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy: Attachment and loss in retirement. London: Routledge. I wrote this book when I realised that very little had been published about the therapist’s retirement or other circumstances which might cause a therapist to impose an unwelcome ending on a client. I interviewed around twenty therapists who had either retired or moved home, taken a maternity leave or time off for a sabbatical.

The book is based on the stories of these experienced therapists and explores the ambivalence they felt about letting go of a professional role which had sustained them. I explore the process of closing a private practice, from the initial ethical dilemma, through to the last day when the door of the therapy room closes.

A forced ending is an intrusion of the clinician’s own needs into the therapeutic space. I consider how this might compromise the work but could also be an opportunity for deeper engagement. I explore the role of supervision in supporting good practice and also reflect on the supervisor’s own retirement. The book closes with a checklist of questions that a practitioner might want to consider if they are deliberating a possible closure of their practice.

I hope the book will help to open up an area which has been considered taboo in the profession so that future cohorts can benefit from the reflections and insights of this earlier generation. If it can support clinicians making this transition then it may result in fewer clients having to face a sudden ending of treatment.

Power, A. 2015 ‘Retirement – a tale of attachment and loss’. Therapy Today, November pp26-30