Tuesday is for Therapists: Biweekly Essays
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...
Announcment: Before going into the subject of this 90th post, we are pleased to let readers know that our Psychotherapy Coaching Community is up and running and accepting new members. More information is at the end of this post.
The issue of directive vs. nondirective...
This post is about the concepts of “bottom up,” “top down,” and how they relate to the art of communicating with the inner self, where problem patterns are formed and hopefully exchanged for healthier ones. I’ll start by putting these things in some...
This post was prompted first by goings on in the world, but more specifically by two interesting encounters. I attended a talk entitled, “Darwin, and Freud's Epistemological Path to the Unconscious” by Mark Erickson, MD. Coincidently, I listened to an episode of Dr. David...
Maybe it’s like the state of healthcare in the US, where corporate interests hove so overpowered the ranks of those who do the work that we have fallen into a state of passive demoralization. The field of psychotherapy is largely unaware that it is suffering the same fate. In our...
