Back to Top

Get my free therapy techniques in your email inbox every week - click here.

Psychotherapy Techniques Articles by Mark Tyrrell

The therapeutic relationship is vital; rapport and listening skills help our clients no end. But there are plenty more useful psychotherapeutic strategies and techniques. This collection was created to present some ideas and techniques which perhaps you won’t be so familiar with and also presents more familiar strategies in what I hope are new and interesting ways. Here you’ll find such topics as ‘mirror therapy’ and strategies to help the self sabotaging clients and many more. Grab a cup of tea or coffee, relax and find ideas for therapy you can use straight away.

  • spot-client-incongruence

    Three Perceptive Ways to Spot Client Incongruence

    Incongruence – seeming to be one thing while really being or feeling another – can blight relationships or even whole lives. People can sometimes be honest with you as far as they know, yet if you dig a little deeper there may be other things going on. So what signs can we look out for?

  • sports-performance-client

    Three Transcendental Tips to Help Your Sports Performance Client

    I’ve found that supreme sporting performance requires an optimal state of mind. And this is about not just what the participant has in their mind but, equally importantly, what they exclude from their consciousness. Here are some approaches I’ve found useful when working with sporting clients.

  • Intense flames from a massive forest fire. Flames light up the night as they rage thru pine forests and sage brush.    The Carlton Complex wild fire was Washington state's largest fire in history.

    How to Help the Hating Client

    Like obsessive love, hatred can make us feel alive. Its galvanising intensity can lend us energy – its single focus can make life feel meaningful. It can make us feel intoxicatingly certain. But it can ruin us.

  • help-client-lose-weight

    How to Help Your Client Lose Weight

    Aside from the larger patterns of therapy, we can share some evidence-based tips with our weight loss clients to help support them towards their goal. I encourage my clients to factor these tips into their daily life in order to get slimmer without it seeming like some medieval exercise in martyrdom! Here are a few […]

  • naturalistic-therapy

    How to Do Naturalistic Therapy

    From endless form filling and clunky information taking to one-size-fits-all hypnosis scripts and laborious explanations of what techniques we are going to ‘do’ to someone, the lexicon of bad practice posited as ‘best practice’ is scary. Therapeutic technique should flow from conversation and feel, as often as possible, like a natural part of the conversation. […]

  • pseudoepileptic-seizures

    How to Treat Pseudoepileptic Seizures

    The unconscious mind can behave in ways that confuse and confound the conscious mind (and other people!). Here I examine one such case and take a look at how we can unravel the hidden ‘logic’ behind such bizarre psychosomatic symptoms.

  • how-to-identify-and-remove-unconscious-blocks

    How to Identify and Remove Unconscious Blocks

    The past is never really gone in some ways, at least not all of it. It lingers on, influencing our decisions and reactions. Faulty pattern matching can produce what may seem to be baffling responses within us. With this in mind, whenever we’re confounded by a client’s emotional responses, we can do what I did […]

  • unk-self-harm

    How to Help a Client Stop Cutting

    You may never have seen a self-harming client, or perhaps self-harm is something you’ve seen clients do only occasionally. But one thing’s for sure. Self-harming behaviours are common – and getting more so.

  • unk-guiltshame

    How to Help Clients with Crippling Shame and Guilt

    The terms guilt and shame are often used interchangeably. But these feelings, though they commonly overlap, are distinct. Unlike guilt, which focuses on a sense of having done wrong to others, shame is more of a self-focused emotion.

  • helping-suicide-bereaved-client-unk

    Helping the Suicide-Bereaved Client

    Far from the common suicidal sentiment that “people will be better off without me!” the resulting trauma and grief can spread much wider and deeper than the suicidal person could ever have imagined.