Sibling rivalry can be complex. Love and envy, affection and resentment can and often do coexist within one relationship – but they make uncomfortable and messy bedfellows. Here I offer five strategies that may help you help any clients who exhibit sibling rivalry.
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If you are a therapist or coach of any persuasion; counsellor, psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, life coach, bodyworker, in fact anyone who works in the helping professions, you will glean valuable, actionable ideas, tips and techniques from Clear Thinking, my free therapy techniques newsletter.
In it you'll find a wide range of topics including solution focused therapy approaches, cognitive-behavioural therapy techniques, ideas from DBT, hypnotherapy, counselling and even the occasional philosophical piece. I've been treating people with psychotherapy for more than 30 years and I've drawn what I find useful from many fields. I hope you find it helps you in your practice too, whatever flavour of helper you are.
Why is Your Client Depressed?
Understanding the origins of depression is often a necessary starting point in treatment, because once we know what they are or have been missing in their life, we can help them fill the gap of that missing need. So what might we do well to discover about the origins of our clients’ depression?
How to Help Your Client Overcome Fear of Rejection
The fear of rejection can stalk our minds like some mythical monster, terrorizing our dreams and casting a shadow across our every thought. Here are seven tips to help you help your clients overcome a morbid fear of rejection to live a fuller and happier life.
Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder
Diagnosed cases of borderline personality disorder (BPD) seem to be on the rise. While working with a client with BPD may feel difficult, ultimately anything we can do to help such clients gain some emotional stability and regulate their emotions will help. So, what might that involve?
Doing Visualization Right
Positive visualization, when done correctly, can help make us feel better about past traumas, make us more focused on achieving our goals, and help us relax more during social interactions. So, what’s the best way to help your clients visualize their best possible self?
How to Stop Your Client’s Negative Spiral
There is a kind of unhelpful self-confidence in the mind of a negative client, at least as far as their sense of being right about how bad things are or will be is concerned. We need to help such clients develop the capacity for calmer, more hopeful and reasonable thoughts with greater perspective. So what […]
How to Externalize an Addictive Pattern From Your Client’s Core Identity
When we externalize a pattern, whether through story or simply the way we talk to our clients about their problems, we encourage mastery over the problem by separating it from who they essentially are. Here I present my reply to a question from a Q&A call, where I discuss the art of removing the problem […]
How to Use Psychoeducation With Your Clients
Psychoeducation can be a powerful tool for therapists to help their clients better understand their mental health condition, learn effective strategies for managing their symptoms, and take control of their mental health. So what pointers can be useful when we think about providing our clients with psychoeducation?
How to Help Your Therapy Clients with Their Spiritual Questions
Where did we come from, where are we going, and what is behind it all? Many of us have at some time wrestled with or just wondered about the bigger questions of life. And research suggests that addressing such spiritual concerns may help mental health. So how might we as practitioners aid our clients in […]
Philosophy Piece: Why Are Our Children So Depressed?
It’s so poignant when we hear of children who feel life isn’t worth living, who feel doomed to lives of misery or even feel like killing themselves. And if childhood suicide rates and admissions to hospital for self-harm are anything to go by, childhood depression is trending upwards. So why might childhood depression be on […]
