Thinking Outside the Box
Giving Stuck Clients a Therapy Experience Like They've Never Had Before
By Cloe Madanes - There are times when clients are so deeply stuck, not just in the unhappy circumstances of their pain, but in the unshakable sense that nothing they do will make any difference, that they need a little benign shaking up.
Daily Blog
The Silver Lining in Failure
Not Every Teachable Moment Has to Be a Successful One
By Cloe Madanes - The problem with a failure is that one doesn't really understand why one failed. If one did, it wouldn't have been a failure. But I'm not giving up on my toughest client, Bob. There's one strategy I still haven't used.
Daily Blog
Creative Therapy with the Humor Antidote
Using Playfulness to Move Stuck Clients Into Recovery
When clients are deeply stuck, they have lost all sense of perspective, all capacity to see any possible humor or lightness in their problem or in their lives. Emotionally and cognitively, they’re trapped in their own sad story. In these cases, the approach that I’ve found most useful is a kind of soft shock therapy in the form of a humorous paradoxical directive. Playful, humorous strategies can be like therapeutic life preservers, which keep both therapist and client afloat until both can get back to shore. Humor reboots the emotions and enables us to look at our situation with fresh eyes.
Daily Blog
Recovering the Lost Roots of Child and Family Therapy
Using Family Therapy's Origins to Fix a Broken Mental Health System
During the height of the family therapy movement, the healing power of the family was respected, and medication and out-of-home placements were considered a last resort. For a variety of reasons, that era has passed, and countertherapeutic economic forces have come to dominate treatment decisions. We need to reexamine our values as a profession and rediscover the activism of the days when the DSM didn’t so thoroughly limit our perspective and clinicians were encouraged to think beyond narrow diagnostic categories and embrace the fuller complexities of human systems.
Daily Blog
Cloe Madanes on Advocating for the Most Vulnerable
Let’s unite to stand up to vested interests that have taken over the mental health system.
Magazine Article
Soft Shock Therapy
The Art of Speaking the Unspeakable
Using humor to help clients reconstruct their problems, even to the point of making parodies of their own dilemmas, can help some them get distance from their woes, learn to take themselves less seriously, and perhaps even gain a bit of wisdom.
Magazine Article
The 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People
How to Succeed at Self-Sabotage
Making yourself profoundly unhappy takes tenacity and creativity. But the real art of it is to behave in ways that allow you to claim yourself to be an innocent victim, ideally of the very people from whom you’re forcibly extracting compassion and pity.
Magazine Article
Copyright:
3/15/2013
Authors:
MARTHA STRAUS, PH.D.
CLOE MADANES, HDL, LIC
DAVID TREADWAY, PH.D.
FRANK PITTMAN, MD
LASCELLES BLACK, MSW, LMFT
MARY PIPHER, PH.D.
Product:
NRC095559
Copyright:
3/15/2013
Authors:
MARTHA STRAUS, PH.D.
CLOE MADANES, HDL, LIC
DAVID TREADWAY, PH.D.
FRANK PITTMAN, MD
LASCELLES BLACK, MSW, LMFT
MARY PIPHER, PH.D.
Product:
NRC095559
New Ways to Work Effectively with Your Most Challenging Clients
Copyright:
1/1/2012
Authors:
TERRENCE REAL, LICSW
WILLIAM DOHERTY, PH.D.
RICHARD C. SCHWARTZ, PHD
WENDY T. BEHARY, MSW, LCSW
CLIFTON MITCHELL, PH.D.
CLOE MADANES, HDL, LIC
JOYANNA SILBERG, PHD
Product:
NRC095865
Copyright:
1/1/2012
Authors:
TERRENCE REAL, LICSW
WILLIAM DOHERTY, PH.D.
RICHARD C. SCHWARTZ, PHD
WENDY T. BEHARY, MSW, LCSW
CLIFTON MITCHELL, PH.D.
CLOE MADANES, HDL, LIC
JOYANNA SILBERG, PHD
Product:
NRC095865
Copyright:
3/15/2013
Authors:
MARTHA STRAUS, PH.D.
CLOE MADANES, HDL, LIC
DAVID TREADWAY, PH.D.
FRANK PITTMAN, MD
LASCELLES BLACK, MSW, LMFT
MARY PIPHER, PH.D.
Product:
NRC095559
Copyright:
3/15/2013
Authors:
MARTHA STRAUS, PH.D.
CLOE MADANES, HDL, LIC
DAVID TREADWAY, PH.D.
FRANK PITTMAN, MD
LASCELLES BLACK, MSW, LMFT
MARY PIPHER, PH.D.
Product:
NRC095559
New Ways to Work Effectively with Your Most Challenging Clients
Copyright:
1/1/2012
Authors:
TERRENCE REAL, LICSW
WILLIAM DOHERTY, PH.D.
RICHARD C. SCHWARTZ, PHD
WENDY T. BEHARY, MSW, LCSW
CLIFTON MITCHELL, PH.D.
CLOE MADANES, HDL, LIC
JOYANNA SILBERG, PHD
Product:
NRC095865
Copyright:
1/1/2012
Authors:
TERRENCE REAL, LICSW
WILLIAM DOHERTY, PH.D.
RICHARD C. SCHWARTZ, PHD
WENDY T. BEHARY, MSW, LCSW
CLIFTON MITCHELL, PH.D.
CLOE MADANES, HDL, LIC
JOYANNA SILBERG, PHD
Product:
NRC095865
Page 1 of 1 (2 Items)
Thinking Outside the Box
Giving Stuck Clients a Therapy Experience Like They've Never Had Before
By Cloe Madanes - There are times when clients are so deeply stuck, not just in the unhappy circumstances of their pain, but in the unshakable sense that nothing they do will make any difference, that they need a little benign shaking up.
Daily Blog
The Silver Lining in Failure
Not Every Teachable Moment Has to Be a Successful One
By Cloe Madanes - The problem with a failure is that one doesn't really understand why one failed. If one did, it wouldn't have been a failure. But I'm not giving up on my toughest client, Bob. There's one strategy I still haven't used.
Daily Blog
Creative Therapy with the Humor Antidote
Using Playfulness to Move Stuck Clients Into Recovery
When clients are deeply stuck, they have lost all sense of perspective, all capacity to see any possible humor or lightness in their problem or in their lives. Emotionally and cognitively, they’re trapped in their own sad story. In these cases, the approach that I’ve found most useful is a kind of soft shock therapy in the form of a humorous paradoxical directive. Playful, humorous strategies can be like therapeutic life preservers, which keep both therapist and client afloat until both can get back to shore. Humor reboots the emotions and enables us to look at our situation with fresh eyes.
Daily Blog
Recovering the Lost Roots of Child and Family Therapy
Using Family Therapy's Origins to Fix a Broken Mental Health System
During the height of the family therapy movement, the healing power of the family was respected, and medication and out-of-home placements were considered a last resort. For a variety of reasons, that era has passed, and countertherapeutic economic forces have come to dominate treatment decisions. We need to reexamine our values as a profession and rediscover the activism of the days when the DSM didn’t so thoroughly limit our perspective and clinicians were encouraged to think beyond narrow diagnostic categories and embrace the fuller complexities of human systems.
Daily Blog
Page 1 of 1 (5 Items)
Cloe Madanes on Advocating for the Most Vulnerable
Let’s unite to stand up to vested interests that have taken over the mental health system.
Magazine Article
Soft Shock Therapy
The Art of Speaking the Unspeakable
Using humor to help clients reconstruct their problems, even to the point of making parodies of their own dilemmas, can help some them get distance from their woes, learn to take themselves less seriously, and perhaps even gain a bit of wisdom.
Magazine Article
The 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People
How to Succeed at Self-Sabotage
Making yourself profoundly unhappy takes tenacity and creativity. But the real art of it is to behave in ways that allow you to claim yourself to be an innocent victim, ideally of the very people from whom you’re forcibly extracting compassion and pity.
Magazine Article
The Godfather Strategy
Finding the Offer a Client Can't Refuse
After 20 years of teaching therapy, but not doing it myself, I decided I needed a lesson in humility. What better way to experience humility than to be a therapist? So I started a small practice that basically consisted of taking on the cases that, for a variety of reasons, other therapists couldn't handle: sexual violence, heartbreaking drama, money problems, celebrities. And I was quite successful, to the point that the lesson in humility was escaping me. Until I met Bob.
Magazine Article
Page 1 of 1 (4 Items)
Cloe Madanes is a world-renowned innovator and teacher of family and brief therapy and one of the originators of the strategic approach to family therapy. She has authored seven books that are classics in the field: Strategic Family Therapy; Behind the One-Way Mirror; Sex, Love, and Violence; The Secret Meaning of Money; The Violence of Men; The Therapist as Humanist, Social Activist, and Systemic Thinker; and Relationship Breakthrough.
