By Rich Simon As therapists, many of us practice in two different worlds. In the first, we see polite, well-behaved, articulate clients with solid values. They engage fully in therapy, talk cogently about their problems, listen attentively to our responses, make reasonably good-faith efforts to follow our suggestions, and sooner or later get better. No wonder we genuinely like these people!
By Rich Simon A thousand years ago, during the palmy days of generous insurance reimbursement, therapists could maintain the illusion that, since therapy was paid for by an unseen hidden hand, clinical practice was somehow untouched by the tacky subject of money. Even the style of therapy reflected this disjunction:
At its best, therapy is a deeply creative art, rooted in the healing quality of imagination, hope, risk, and wonder...
CE Credits: 3 • Price: $39
Positive psychology is an attempt to give us a science of happiness grounded in a growing body of systematic research that reveals how to live a happier, more meaningful life...
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A decade ago, if therapists were familiar with mindfulness at all, it was as a spiritual practice with little connection to clinical work...
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Psychopharmacological medications have reshaped the way we do therapy...
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Aging triggers identity issues as powerful as those of adolescence, at a time when we're also coping with critical life-cycle changes, such as our children leaving home, our parents getting ill or dying, physical and financial worries, and retirement...
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The most critical life decision most therapists deal with in their everyday practice is helping couples decide whether to dissolve a marriage or try to save it...
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As therapists, we often see middle-aged clients who feel a restless sense of regret that they’ve never really followed their dreams or fully lived their lives and our job is to help them explore unlived possibilities within themselves...
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Doing therapy with teens has always been a challenge--compounding the difficulty is the fact that today’s kids are bombarded by an all-pervasive pop culture...
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If most individuals and their problems are complex and difficult, what general conclusions can possibly be drawn about treating the average marriage in trouble?...
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For decades, the rationale for therapy has been to help clients change--their relationships, their careers, their feelings about the past, their personalities...
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Probably all of us can think of at least one clinical role model or leading figure in the field who shaped our vision of the kind of therapist we wanted to be when we “grew up”...
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The devastating world of war-related trauma afflicts whole populations of people...
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For much of our profession’s history, we’ve imagined--in spite of the increased use of medications for psychiatric problems--that we still take care of people’s minds, while others take care of their bodies...
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There aren’t many issues that strain the fabric of marriage or family life as much as the chronic or terminal illness of an elderly parent or spouse...
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According to the standard wisdom, the greatest therapists—the “supershrinks”—are born not made...
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From its very beginnings, therapy has almost always consisted primarily of talk, evolving from slow, ruminative talk during the heyday of psychodynamic practice to the faster-paced, therapist-directed, make-it-happen talk required in the 6 to 10 sessions that are now the norm...
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Probably most of your clients have had at least some difficulty with insomnia as, most likely, have you...
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While the recent election was a victory for multiculturalism, ongoing bitter debates about immigration reveal that, even in our “enlightened” society, ethnic and national divisions can still evoke the raw and malign power of nativism...
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