Tuesday is for Therapists: Biweekly Essays

TIFT #114: Giving, Taking, and Fairness tift Nov 19, 2024

 

For many, knowledge of what is fair is taken for granted and not even thought about, but in therapy it can be a source of real questions. Clients wonder what life owes them and what they should give back. With dysfunctional families and trauma, children grow up with skewed ideas of what is...

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TIFT #113: Guilt and Responsibility inner child tift Nov 05, 2024

 

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...

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TIFT #112: Freedom Envy tift Oct 22, 2024

 

This post is about intense emotions around our natural abhorrence of constraint. We have all seen how far down the chain of evolution the desire for freedom is manifested. Animals, even insects, almost universally struggle to remain free when constrained. Constraint can be forced or...

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TIFT #111: Arrested Development tift Oct 08, 2024

 

I’ve been writing a lot about memory reconsolidation, but perhaps half of the work in my practice is helping people restart psychological development where it was left off. Development doesn’t necessarily involve my favorite change mechanism, memory reconsolidation, because...

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TIFT #110: Borderline vs. "Growth Tantrum" tift Sep 24, 2024

 

Recently I have been involved in situations where someone who could clearly be called “borderline,” was rather suddenly “cured.” In both cases, I had been working with parents and felt the problem was better understood as a developmental issue rather than a deep...

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TIFT #109: Back to School inner child tift Sep 10, 2024

 

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...

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TIFT #108: Penelope and the Five Key Questions tift Jul 30, 2024

 

Linda revealed that the source of her shame was “Penelope,” the name she gave to an inner critic who cut her to shreds for any attempt to live a brighter, more interesting life. In this post, I’ll show how our quest to deepen our understanding and support change...

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TIFT #107: The Gift of the Inner Child tift Jul 16, 2024

 

Most of us light up when we see a small child. That’s how we want to respond to the our own and our clients’ inner selves. I’m afraid I haven’t made that as clear as I would want, especially because that inner child is so often the main character in the drama of...

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TIFT #105: Empathizing with Depression tift Jun 18, 2024

 

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...

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TIFT# 104: Unconscious Emotion: A Deep Dive tift Jun 04, 2024

 

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...

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TIFT #102: Affectā€“Therapy's North Star tift May 07, 2024

 

“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...

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TIFT #100: Clinical Memory Reconsolidation: The Earliest Description tift Apr 09, 2024

 

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...

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*** Residents and Fellows in Psychiatry Course enrollment ending Sunday***