This discussion from one of our monthly Q&As is about the chronic contrition, regret, remorse, and guilt of a 12-year-old boy with an almost monastic sense of needing to confess his ‘sins’.
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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.
How to Help Clients Stop Taking Things Personally
To take things personally when we’d be better off not to is to make things much harder for ourselves. So how can we help clients modify sensitivity and feel less threatened by perceived criticisms or slights?
How to Deal With Crazy Hypnosis Requests
Couple ignorance about hypnosis with a desire for magical control over others and we have a recipe for crazy demands. So how can we deal with these kinds of demands?
Research Roundup 18
Wisdom isn’t a mere compilation of facts, acquired then put aside, only to be brought out occasionally to impress others like some family heirloom. I think we become wiser when we are able to make sense of what we know, contextualize it, and see where it fits in the bigger picture.
How to Use What Your Depressed Client Brings
Clients bring into therapy their miseries and limitations. But they also bring their potential, past triumphs, interests, and incipient and past happinesses. We can utilize much of this, and we should – because this is the very material from which we can help our clients build happier lives.
7 Steps to Help Your Client Resist Guilt Manipulators
If our guilt-manipulated clients can start to respond differently to those who manipulate them, they will effectively change the relationship dynamic, feel more of a sense of healthy control, and move the relationship further towards a healthy, genuinely reciprocal balance for both parties.
6 Key Social Skills to Teach Your Shy Clients
Relationships are what bring meaning to most people’s lives. Social connection matters to both health and happiness. Whatever our natural tendencies, we can all learn to be better socially. So what social skills might we want to help our socially unskilled clients develop?
How to Help Your Client Stop Over Criticizing the Ones They Love
Good relationships are the biggest predictor of a happy life,[1] yet excessive expressions of contempt destroy relationships like nothing else.[2] Contempt, commonly expressed in the form of criticism, fundamentally communicates the idea that “you are worthless”, even if this is not the intention.
The Pandemic and Us
The world has changed. We have become divided, even splintered. What did this series of coronaviruses do to society? To collective and individual psychology? Certainly, anxiety conditions, depression, and addictions, as well as sleep disorders may well have increased hugely during the pandemic.3 And the treatment of other illnesses and diseases has been, in some […]
How to Tell if Your Client is Hypnotically Capable Without Using a ‘Susceptibility Test’
Therapeutic technique needn’t always be laid bare in a procedural or even bureaucratic form of doing therapy. Rather, I feel it’s best to have it flow and feel natural as part of a very human interaction. In a recent Q&A session I was asked about why I don’t teach standard hypnotizability tests in my courses […]
