Thank you for attending the third session of New Perspectives on Practice, “Ethical Standards for the 21st Century.” Today’s session with Clifton Mitchell--“The Therapist’s Duty to Warn, Report Abuse and Rape, and Handle Self-Injurious Behavior” will cover the latest legal developments concerning therapists’ obligation to prevent clients from harming themselves or others. We’ll explore the responsibilities and the limitations of confidentiality and other ethical situations, such as how to handle clients’ self-injurious behaviors.

We hope you come away from this session with a better understanding of what’s required of therapists ethically and how to better deal with situations like clients who self-harm. What do you think was most relevant from today’s session? What was most applicable to you in your everyday practice? Do you have any related experiences that would be helpful to other participants?

Please take a minute to consider these questions and everything you’ve learned so far throughout this webinar, and comment below about what’s most striking to you.

As always, we invite you to please include your name and hometown with your comment. Thank you all for your participation and thought-provoking comments.

Thank you for attending the second session of New Perspectives: Ethical Standards for the 21st Century Practitioner. Today’s course, “Ethics in the Digital Age” with Ofer Zur covers some of the ethical challenges caused by technologies such as e-mail, search engines, and social media.

How has the Internet Revolution raised professional boundary issues? How do you handle clients who research you on the web, and should you ever research them? We hope you come away from this session with the answers to some of these questions and more.

Please take a minute to consider and everything you’ve learned so far throughout this New Perspectives webinar, and comment below about what’s been most interesting to you. What new strategies from today’s session do you think will be most applicable to your practice? Do you have any related experiences from your own professional or personal life that would be relevant here?

We invite you, as always, to please include your name and hometown with your comment. Thank you all for your participation and reflections.

It turns out that we’re not the only ones talking about MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle, our Symposium keynote speaker. Her new book, Alone Together, an insightful look at our shifting relationship with technology, has gotten a lot of press recently, earning glowing reviews from both Newsweek and Time.

Have you ever text messaged someone who’s in the same room or e-mailed people in your office rather talking face-to-face? While our beloved new gadgets make our lives more efficient—and entertaining—are they actually separating us, instead of connecting us? Turkle says they are. This week, she appeared on the Colbert Report to discuss it.

Thank you for attending the third session of Michael Yapko’s Master Class webinar. This session covers the role of relationships in depression and how depression really can be contagious. We hope you come away from the session with a better understanding of how to consider depression strategically, socially, and hypnotically.

What was most striking to you about this session? What new strategies do you think might be most applicable or relevant in your everyday practice? Do you have any related or significant experiences that might be helpful to your colleagues?

Please take a minute to consider these questions and everything you’ve learned so far throughout this webinar, and comment below about what’s been most interesting to you.

We invite you, as always, to please include your name and hometown with your comment. Thank you all for your participation and reflections.

Thank you to everyone who attended the first session of “New Perspectives: Ethical Standards for the 21st-Century Practitioner.” We hope that this 5-part webinar series, featuring leading experts on ethical therapeutic practice, will provide you with practical and enlightening discoveries of modern ethical strategies and boundaries.

Today’s session with Mary Jo Barrett, “Ethical Dilemmas for the 21st-Century Practitioner” focuses on ambiguous situations: how to keep to our ethical boundaries while utilizing our clinical wisdom.

Using the Comment Boards provided after each session will help all of us process what we’ve learned so far and what questions we may have. It’s most helpful when all of us take a few moments to share relevant experiences, questions, or reflections. What stood out for you during today’s session? What do you think will be most applicable to you—professionally or personally?

In order to create a better sense of community, we invite you to please include your name and hometown along with your comment. Thank you all so much for your participation and thought-provoking reflections.

Over the years, one important source of this sense of discovery has been the remarkable roster of speakers who have addressed the meeting, a group that over the years has included important figures like Maya Angelou, Elie Wiesel, Mario Cuomo, and Gloria Steinem. The group of featured speakers who will be presenting at the 2011 Symposium will hardly disappoint.

Opening this year’s Symposium will be MIT professor Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and anthropologist who’s spent the past 30 years studying the pervasive psychological impact of digital communications technologies on our lives. For a taste of her illuminating insights, click here to read an interview with her from the January issue of the Networker. You can also watch a video featuring Turkle on the process by which “we make our objects and our objects make us,” as she’s said.

On Saturday morning, poet David Whyte, a mesmerizing speaker and story-teller, will bring his unique powers of expression and vision to the task of describing the courage and creativity needed for “Crossing the Unknown Sea” into the uncertain future this year’s Symposium will explore. If you’re not familiar with David, just click here for a Networker profile of him and his work. You can also watch a brief excerpt from his unforgettable 2009 Symposium presentation to see him in action.

Finally, Sunday begins with an address by renowned therapist John Gottman on “The New Science of Trust.” At a time when the fabric of society seems to be irreversibly fraying, he’ll describe the crucial therapeutic significance of his latest research on enhancing human trust and connection. For an overview of John’s crucial contribution to the couples therapy field, check out this Networker article featuring him and his work or take a sneak peek at John in action here.

This blog will continue to give you a close-up view of the people and events coming up at this year’s Symposium that we think deserve your special attention, whether or not you decide to attend. Stay tuned on Fridays for more of our Symposium Countdown.

Rich Simon,
Editor, Psychotherapy Networker

We hope you enjoyed the second session of Michael Yapko’s Master Class Webinar, “Beyond Pills: Effective Psychotherapy with Depressive Clients.” Today’s session included a brief background on what hypnosis really is—and isn’t—and why it can be a beneficial method to help depressive clients.

We were given the opportunity to watch a clinical video presentation of Yapko with a real client who was in a major depression. “The Case of Mike” illustrates Yapko’s techniques with a client he’d never seen or spoken to before that meeting, and demonstrates the kind of experience such a client can have in a focused or hypnotic state.

Have you ever used hypnosis as part of your psychotherapy before? If so, what do you think works, or doesn’t work, well about it? What stood out for you today?

Please take a moment to share with us below what was new or most interesting, particularly about getting to experience this kind of session.

In order to create a better sense of community, we invite you to please include your name and hometown with your comment. Thank you all for your participation and inspiring thoughts and comments.

“It’s that time of the year again,” writes Judith Matz in her cover piece on our national obsession with dieting in the January/February Networker. “Every January, the weight-loss frenzy begins anew as the overeating of the holiday season subsides and millions of us resolve that this will be the year that we will lose weight and keep it off.”

Our national cornucopia spilleth over our waistlines in rolls of fat even more than it did 13 years ago: obesity rates were 15 to 20 percent in 1995, and about 34 percent in 2008. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us we’ve become an “obesogenic” society, “characterized by environments that promote increased food intake, nonhealthful foods, and physical inactivity.” For more information, click here. Read more

More than 1,200 attendees have already signed up--our largest registration ever! So this is a good time to see which Symposium topics are inspiring therapists the most.

Here are the five most popular sessions so far, in reverse order:

5. Paper Tiger Paranoia:  Transforming the Fearful Brain: Rick Hanson will demonstrate that, while evolution may have hard-wired us to overestimate threat--favoring chronic anxiety--we can use our own neuroplasticity to override this evolutionary heritage. Read more.

4. Treating PTSD and Complex PTSD: 101 Ways to Bolster Resilience: Amidst all the competing claims of different approaches, Donald Meichenbaum, one of the founders of psychotherapy’s “cognitive revolution,” will separate myth from reality in  the treatment of trauma. Read more.

3. The Therapist Under the Microscope: “In Treatment” and the Ethical Challenge of Practice: William Doherty will use clips from the popular HBO series to illustrate the ethical complexities of modern therapeutic practice. Read more.

2. The Attuned Couple: John Gottman, famous for his groundbreaking research on everyday couples interactions, will provide a practical roadmap through even the most densely overgrown marital jungle. Read more.

1. Creating a Beautiful Mind: Symposium keynoter and poet David Whyte will lead a journey through the uncharted challenges of 21st-century life. Read more.

Another workshop in particular that’s worth noting is the new The Hero’s Journey: A Special Two-Day Transformation Retreat. Come to the Symposium a day early for this newly created, two-day session. This popular workshop is filling up fast, as it'll be an unforgettable enrichment to your personal growth. Read more.

Of course, as more registrations come in, these Fabulous Five could find their stars eclipsed by yet newer wonders--after all, the Symposium season is young and we have 175 different events and workshops to choose from. Just click here to explore what workshops are likeliest to float your boat.

Let us know what inspires you the most about the upcoming Symposium.

Sincerely,

Rich Simon
Editor, Psychotherapy Networker

Last September, the Networker published an issue called “Life After 2.0,” devoted to exploring whether we’ve crossed a threshold in our relationship to technology--even therapists like me, a committed technophobe. As we explored the social and clinical impact of the ever-more-advanced communication technologies, I got more and more curious about what I was missing out on. Finally, I took the plunge and bought an iPod, and my life hasn’t been the same since. Read more

Remember when setting appropriate boundaries in psychotherapy was a no-brainer? “No” was the operative word--no gifts, no sex, no self-disclosure, no financial or social connection whatsoever outside the hermetically-sealed cloister of the consulting room. The rules were simple, direct, and unambiguous. But in today’s more informal therapy marketplace, the rules often don’t seem as clear anymore.

So what’s a therapist to do when a client anxiously offers a diamond-studded token of appreciation for all of the positive change you’ve helped him achieve? Do you accept a not-so-valuable gift--a tin of holiday cookies--from a vulnerable client to express thanks? What’s your decision when your therapeutic instincts conflict with the rulebook?

I highly recommend one article in particular--Ofer Zur’s “The Ethical Eye” is a refreshingly sane and practical discussion of how to reconcile risk management with humanistic values. You can read this article free or you can read it as part of our 3-CE Ethics Reading Course.

How does today’s culture make ethics more (or less) complicated in your practice? What resources do you consult in order to make the best possible therapeutic decisions?

Does communications technology--Skype, e-mailing, text messaging, Facebook, or even the telephone--pose any ethical issues to our therapeutic practice? Which modern ethical dilemmas would you like to hear more about--or are there any of your own that you’d be willing to share?

Rich Simon
Editor, Psychotherapy Networker

An article in the December Archives of General Psychiatry just reported that only 43 percent of people who sought treatment for depression went to a psychotherapist. This is part of a larger trend over the past couple of decades that has seen the number of people referred for therapy by physicians drop nearly 50 percent.  Read more

As the final session of our New Practices on Trauma Treatment, hear from Donald Meichenbaum, the founder of cognitive-behavioral therapy, on his perspectives about trauma treatment in psychotherapy today.

Legendary for his impressive career—and his straightforward, sharp ways of thinking and speaking—this isn’t a presentation you’ll want to miss. He’ll explain which trauma treatments are effective, or ineffective, and why he believes so.

If you’d like some background information on him, be sure to check out a Networker interview with Meichenbaum that appeared in our November/December 2010 issue here.

After listening, please take a moment to comment here and share your thoughts and experiences, both on this session and on the entire series. What did you think of Meichenbaum’s take on trauma treatments? What presentation resonated with you the most? Which ideas do you connect with least?

Tune in to hear David Feinstein present the evidence for Energy Psychology (EP), following the article on the topic that he wrote in the November/December issue of the Networker. Energy Psychology is one of psychotherapy’s most controversial methods—is it truly effective? Feinstein will describe why and how EP has come to be regarded as controversial in context, and how to understand the practice of tapping as an effective method.

In his article, Feinstein asks rhetorically, before embarking on his story:  “What could possibly have possessed a wizened, seen-it-all therapist like me to embrace an approach that much of the world of orthodox psychology considers the latest incarnation of snake oil?”

Find out the answer in his article, posted online here, and then listen to him speak in a one-on-one conversation about his experiences with EP and how to integrate it into clinical practice.

After listening to Feinstein’s presentation, please take a moment to comment here and share your thoughts. What did you think about EP before this presentation? What do you think now? Have you ever had any personal experiences with EP? Did you learn anything new today?

All of us listening to this session of New Perspectives on Trauma Treatment, featuring Laurie Leitch, come from a wide variety of backgrounds, but few of us seize the opportunity to practice our models of therapy in places outside of our offices.

Laurie Leitch, along with her business partner Elaine Miller-Karas, founded the Trauma Resource Institute in order to provide short-term trainings to groups of people surrounding traumatic events—in places like Haiti after the recent earthquake or New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina—so that their set of biologically based skills can help stabilize local people after disasters.

Get ready to be wowed by Leitch’s descriptions of the incredible results that have occurred, after presenting simple skills to people who have suffered unimaginable horrors. After listening, please take just a moment to comment here. What do you think of this method? What stands out for you?

Thank you to everyone who attended today’s webinar, Bill O’Hanlon’s “The Web Made Easy.” This session--and this Comment Board!--is an integral part of the collective learning process we’re all embarking on together, in order to understand the changing world around us.

Please take a minute to tell us about what stood out for you during today’s session--a piece of useful information or a thought-provoking anecdote. Or, share with us your favorite technological tools that have benefited your professional or personal life. What are some resources you use to improve your practice or yourself?

Please share with us whatever you felt was most striking about today’s webinar and, to create a better sense of community, we invite you to include your name and hometown with your comment. Thank you all so much for your participation and inspiring thoughts.

Wow… after reflecting on yesterday’s second session of Dan Siegel’s Master Class, I realize that that feeling of amazement comes from the idea that we really are “dancing” with our brains through this particular course. It’s taken me a little while to process all that I learned in his one-hour webinar (which never really seems to be long enough for a conversation with Dan!) because I found so many aspects of his talk so intriguing.

Like Rich Simon said during today’s first Master Class webinar session with Dan Siegel, it’s absolutely amazing what opportunities technology affords us all. This kind of experience is extremely relevant to the kinds of online applications mentioned in the current issue’s articles.