This post is a look at the incredible variety of ways the inner non-conscious mind seeks to ensure our survival. For some time, I have wanted to try laying out the range of possibilities. This is not the first time anyone has made a list of such strategies, but prominent efforts have been limited...

Writing a book is not just putting down what one knows, it’s a journey of discovery. Chapter 2 of the upcoming How Psychotherapy Works: Navigating the Therapeutic Space with Confidence is about coming to appreciate and even love the inner selves we encounter in our work. The clarity I want to sha...

In earlier posts, I haven’t made much of the distinction between guilt and shame, but guilt has unique features that have recently come into sharper relief. I see how often adult clients still feel guilty for things that happened when they were children and how old guilt, appropriate or not, can ...

Returning from vacation I’m finding young people and parents rightly concerned about intense and frightening symptoms connected with the demands and stresses of returning to school.They are understandably distressed about severe anxiety, suicidal thoughts, intense compulsions, and other serious s...

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 path from the problem to...

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 next. L...

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...

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 ...