Tuesday is for Therapists: Biweekly Essays
Seeking accurate empathy is a good way to create the conditions for change. That is the theme of the Five Key Questions approach to teaching core psychotherapy skills. What it means in practice is putting oneself (and the client’s observing self) in the shoes of the limbic problem...
Unconscious emotion is of central importance for us. It stands at an epicenter between the mind’s appraisal of circumstances and the responses we want to help our clients change. Not only is unconscious emotion a necessary trigger for action, but it embodies...
Why do we need to understand what unconscious emotions a Limbic Protector is “trying” to soften or eliminate? The act of joining with our client to seek this knowledge is an excellent way to create the conditions for change. The Five Key Questions referred to in...
“Where are we and what to do next?” These questions come frequently as we practice psychotherapy, sometimes in the background, but just as often arising as conscious questions. This post is about three very different situations and how each has a different tempo...
This post is adapted from a lecture given given in Marrakech, Morroco, at a conference of the World Association for Dynamic Psychiatry and the World Federation for Psychotherapy on 4/16/2024.
Introduction: Modernizing the teaching and practice of psychotherapy
A worldwide need for...
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...
