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. […]
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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 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.
Working With the Avoidant Client
I’m not one for labelling people. Therapy should, I feel, help clients transcend their labels. But I think looking at some people through the frame of personality disorders can be useful, as long as we don’t fall into the trap of not seeing the unique individual behind the label. In this piece I’ll focus on […]
Treating the Client Who is Codependent in Their Relationship
Clients in codependent relationships often don’t seek help for the codependency itself. And, after all, if both are happy to continue as they are, then who are we to disturb their pathology? But if one partner is effectively being pushed into an early grave by the other through drink, drugs, or unhealthy food, then it […]
How to Help 10 Types of Difficult Psychotherapy Clients
Here I want to address 10 types of clients that I’ve found to be the most ‘difficult’. I offer, too, pointers for helping you deal with such clients.
Research Roundup 16
Reality flows and merges, and yet we fragment it into separate bits. This is useful sometimes, but we lose a sense of wholeness when we only approach knowledge that way. In this occasional series I take five recent psychological studies and attempt to see how they might fit into the bigger pattern of what it […]
A 12-Point Client Relationship Checklist
We tend to be happier if we have someone who we love and who, in turn, we feel loves us deeply. So when relationships go wrong, it can sometimes feel overwhelmingly threatening. As the song has it, “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.” Here I want to offer a list of 12 questions that I […]
When Happy Fantasy Meets Hard Reality
Many of us have sometimes dreamed of fame, riches, perhaps even the words we might use during an award acceptance speech to display how simultaneously amazing yet humble we are. These kinds of fantasies may not be that uncommon and may not cause too much harm in and of themselves. But overwhelmingly seeking fame purely […]
How to Handle Hindsight Bias
Many of our decisions are based on past experiences. So how we view the past, what we amplify and what we minimize, will impact at least some of our decisions and perceptions. And depressed people have been found to view the past in particular ways. Ways that hurt them in the present.
How Do You Help a Client When Their Mother Denies They Were Sexually Abused?
What do you do when a client feels betrayed by a parent who denies knowledge of, disbelieves, or even has no interest in, their adult child’s account of having been sexually abused? This was a question on a recent Uncommon Practitioners Q&A call. And you can listen to the segment and my reply here.
