We all know that when clients show emotion in their sessions we are on the right track. We also know that purely intellectual interpretation or reframing is not effective. But the pipeline between client and therapist and between consciousness and the limbic system bears a harder look. It is comp...

The key to undoing psychotherapy’s divisiveness and silos is understanding the healing moment at the core of every therapy. You could call it a “moment of meeting” or an “ah-hah” moment, or a successful exposure session. What our field doesn’t know yet is how they are all the same. I’ve talked be...

This post is about difficulty clinicians have with researchers and vice versa.

• An important but little recognized cause of divisiveness arises from contrasting standards of evidence and proof.
• The conscience, including its standards, does not stop forming at age 5. Internalized values are cen...

Summer is a time when toddlers warm one’s heart as they scale steps, run away from parents, and insist on what they want, period! Will and motivation are the same, and they start very young. Like lambs who get to their feet within minutes of brith, if we didn’t have strong will, we would not exis...

A reader asked if I could help “de-confuse” Internal Family Systems therapy. Doing so is very much part of the mission of these posts. IFS therapy, like most "branded" therapies, has developed its own set of constructs, and its explanations are, as is usual, self referential. That biases towards ...

Psychiatry residents are required to learn three therapies, CBT, Psychodynamic therapy, and Supportive therapy. While the goal is to gain a broad knowledge, incompatibility among these therapies leads to a lot of confusion. It doesn’t have to be that way because they do the same things in different ...

Today’s writing comes after attending a blockbuster online conference* organized by Tian Dayton, a psychodramatist, who spent 90 minutes with each of five leading thinkers on trauma: Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Stephen Porges, Ed Tronick, and Richard Schwartz. What made this conference so ...

*Notice:  I would like to discuss therapist's most troublesome cases. Email or use the communication form.

The New YorkTimes recently published an article on the adolescent mental health crisis. They cited many factors but missed the center of the problem. Yes, puberty comes earlier than ever, whi...