In the following interview, Networker senior writer Lauren Dockett sits down with EMDR specialist and trauma expert Deany Laliotis to get her take on the core skills therapists need to treat trauma effectively, and hear about how EMDR works and has evolved as a practice.

By Chris Lyford - Back-to-school season can be one of the most stressful periods of the year for a child, no matter what age. From making new friends to handling a new workload, the challenges that come with the new school year are plentiful. Here, three veteran therapists, all of whom know quite a bit about back-to-school anxieties, share the clinical lessons they learned—and a few stories.

By Ryan Howes - Author David Barlow is widely considered the dean of anxiety researchers. In the following interview, he shares his thoughts on the nature of anxiety and what research has revealed about the most effective treatments for it.

By Fred Wistow - Every day, every moment, we must wade through the flood of incoming alerts and emails urgently demanding our time and attention, all the while knowing that there’s an infinite ocean of stuff online that waits for us at all hours to stick our toe in so that it may then slowly begin to swallow us up . . . until we drown.

Most therapists would consider themselves agents of change for their clients. But can (and should) they become voices for change in the larger community? What about when it comes to weighing in on political matters? According to therapist Bill Doherty, clinicians have the capability—and sometimes a duty—to speak up.

By Chris Lyford - Recently, a therapist has found herself losing steam. She mentally checks out when clients are talking, and constantly feels exhausted. She worries this burnout could be affecting her work, and is looking for some good, realistic forms of self-care beyond just taking a vacation or going to the spa. Here, five therapists offer their advice.

Therapists who grew up in the communities of color they serve often have the social capital and particular wisdom to better understand clients’ core needs and make therapy accessible and meaningful. Here, Black Therapists Rock member Nicole Thompson takes us on her own journey from a Philly kid steeped in adversity, to an urban school psychologist who’s gone back to the old neighborhood and found her calling.

By Alicia Muñoz - I used to view boundaries as a fancy way of dressing up rejection, incompetence, and selfishness. But after a decade of working as a couples counselor, I've learned just how much they create safety in relationships. They’re guardians of our life force, energy incubators, protectors of precious emotional resources, stokers and fuelers of self-respect.

When it comes to working with kids in therapy, it's easy to overlook how critical a role parents play in ensuring the success of treatment. But when so many parents are just as anxious as their children, and many have had negative experiences with therapy in the past, what's the best course of action? In the following interview, therapist Lynn Lyons explains the first thing you need to do when working with young clients and their parents.

By Courtney Armstrong - As therapists, we’re taught to be master detectives, methodically investigating our clients’ symptoms in search of the source of their pain. But if we spend too much time preoccupied with them, we’re likely to miss important clues to their hidden strengths. I’ve learned that turning a symptom into a client’s ally can transform the whole experience of therapy for both the therapist and client.

It can be tricky doing therapy in communities where the field’s reputation is mixed. That's why Black Therapists Rock member Daphne Fuller stresses the importance of meeting clients where they are when working to help and empower people of color. Here, she shares how she does this in her own practice.

By Dafna Lender - We’ve now moved past the point where we rely only on intuition to elicit trust and openness. Microbehaviors occur within fractions of a second, most of them not conscious to the sender or receiver, and some greatly contribute to inspiring feelings of safety, connection, and comfort. Here are four ways these emotional messages are transmitted.

By Sue Young - When it comes to bullying, students’ knowledge of their lives in school makes even young children skilled at knowing the small but significant actions they can take to help make another child happy.

What do we contribute as a profession to the "conversation about race"? As lame and ungainly as this phrase often sounds, it continues to heat up around us, and therapists can no more ignore it in their lives than they can in their offices, says therapist Ken Hardy.

By Anita Mandley - I not only have an expanded vision of trauma these days, but an increased sense of mission to help other therapists see the larger context of what we carry inside. It’s not a matter of dredging up a painful past, but of normalizing our interconnectedness and the emotions and behaviors that come out of it.

By Jay Efran - How can both joyful and tragic events elicit tears? This question puzzles many clinicians, including some who are considered experts in the field of emotional expression. The problem is that few of us have received explicit training in theories of emotion. And sometimes, clinicians can feel an urge to rush in and “fix things” that aren’t broken.

Anxious clients that voluntarily come to therapy rarely say, “I came here because I have no intention of changing right now.” And yet even clients who clearly have a desire to feel better may fight change at every turn by continually saying “yes, but” or otherwise embodying therapy’s least welcome visitor—resistance. And when both client and therapist are unclear about the source of resistance, it can bring the process of treatment to a halt.

By Ryan Howes - At times, the line between stable and stuck-in-a-rut can become a bit blurry. So we turned to New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg, author of the bestseller The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business to see if he’d share how his findings may help us therapists, both personally and professionally.

Here, Networker assistant editor Chris Lyford speaks with family therapist and trauma specialist Mary Jo Barrett about the evolution of trauma treatment and the importance of bringing families into the mix.

By Howard Honigsfeld - As a school social worker in a South Bronx elementary school, the kids I see have a vast range of personal, social, economic, and medical issues. With so much stacked against these children, what can a school counselor do? The rewards of time, dogged persistence, and ordinary kindness in a supportive school environment can work their own kind of wonders.

By Chris Lyford - Sara, 26, had been attending weekly therapy three months, and had developed concrete strategies with her therapist to help her manage her depression and anxiety. He thought they'd developed a strong bond, but Sara has missed her last two sessions. Her therapist texted her after the first missed session to ask if everything was okay, but still hasn’t heard anything. He keeps worrying he might've done something wrong. Should he reach out again? Here, five therapists weigh in.

Do you have a client who you can't seem to help, no matter what techniques you try? In this brief video, master clinician David Burns—one of the developers of CBT and an expert in treating depression and anxiety—explains why we shouldn't automatically assume that clients actually want to change the problems they initially present in treatment.

By Bessel van der Kolk - My hope for the field of trauma treatment is that we learn how to help people bring their imaginations more fully to bear on their possibilities. More recently, we’ve been exploring the capacity to rewire brains that are stuck in freeze and terror and develop a sense of self-compassion that enables people to integrate their dissociated self from the past into in a calm state of mind in the present.

By Terry Real - My own experience as a couples therapist has taught me that we aren't doing clients a favor by soft-pedaling difficult issues. More than adopting any particular methodology of change, we can be far more direct and challenging to clients who come to us than we've previously acknowledged. By and large, people are neither fragile nor stupid. If you show them how they're getting in their own way and what behaving more skillfully looks like, they'll be grateful.

By Jeff Levy - Gay men married to women frequently describe their experiences in therapy as confusing and polarizing, facing a strong bias toward full disclosure and divorce. My work with gay and bisexual men over the past 10 years has taught me to see psychotherapy as a place to hold dynamic tensions without easy, premature resolutions.