Tuesday is for Therapists: Biweekly Essays
This post reproduces a lecture given at a conference of the World Association for Dynamic Psychiatry and the World Federation for Psychotherapy in Marrakech on 4/16/2024.
To fulfill the promise of that title, I’ll cover highlights in five areas where today’s science...
My first experience of memory reconsolidation (MR) was dramatic, so much so that it triggered a career-long drive to understand therapeutic action. But I was not alone, nor the first. The same remarkable phenomenon was the beginning of psychotherapy as we know it.
When. Breuer told Freud...
Every therapist has their own repertoire of metaphors, rules of thumb, and tricks that come back over and over. I don’t usually share these because I don’t want to bore you, but today I thought our readers, might appreciate a few of the best ones. Here are three....
Being right teaches us little, but finding out we got it wrong is exciting and enlightening. Holding an idea one thinks is true, a working hypothesis, then discovering clear evidence that points the other way, can open up new vistas. For many years I have believed (with niggling...
What makes humans so prone to irrational and maladaptive patterns? Entrenched Maladaptive Patterns (EMPs), are products of the human mind. Other mammals have minds, too, that is, a brain that takes in information, identifies threats and opportunities, and generates responses calculated to...
In the Howtherapyworks Coaching Community, we have been working on pinpointing the ultimate target for change in therapy. Looking at it from an information standpoint, the specific target of our work is a bit of implicit (unconscious) memory that needs to be rewritten. That critical bit of...
It’s the source of our creativity, intuition, hunches, and all the fuzzy stuff that enriches our lives. Neurologists just call it the DMN, default mode network. From a brain standpoint that makes sense. It is the huge network of interconnected neurons that operate when the brain is...
I’m writing today on how therapists can gain clarity about client problems and how to help clients trade maladaptive patterns for better ones. Toward that end, I am sharing five critical questions developed in our Psychotherapy Coaching Community to trace, step by step, a...
A lucid therapist is one who strives continually to gain greater clarity about underlying principles and processes and how they manifest in day to day psychotherapy. This past year I came to appreciate the role of visualization in seeing, moment to moment, what is happening and what to do...
This last TIFT of the year seems like a fitting time to talk about hope, one of the most amazing capacities of the human mind. It’s uniquely human that some of our most vaunted achievements are driven by hope, even when the chances of success are far from certain. The winter holiday...
Most therapists wish they had an expert colleague with whom to discuss problem cases and puzzling situations, but few actually access such a resource. Mostly, we muddle through or talk to peers but wish we had a more definitive source of knowledge and stronger support. This post describes an...
