Rather than proclaiming that you understand a client’s experience, you’re far better off assuming that you don’t have a clue what they’re going through.

By Douglas Flemons - Got flow? As a psychotherapist specializing in hypnosis, I work at times with elite performers—people who've spent long years learning and honing a skill that they can carry out with precision and grace. Except when they can't. Except when, with their mind and body out of sync, they lose concentration, coordination, and confidence.

By Douglas Flemons - Suicide assessment is a high-stakes process infused with uncertainty. However, even the best scales can be unreliable when they’re completed in the midst of an emotional crisis. Rather than outsourcing your decision-making to an instrument, it's important that therapists learn how to conduct a conversational evaluation that builds on their therapeutic skills.

By Douglas Flemons - Incorporating some basic Taoist and Zen assumptions and practices in our work can dramatically alter how we engage with clients and what we do to make a difference. We can't deliver Enlightenment, but we can help clients experience greater freedom in how they experience and relate to their problem.

I feel unprepared to make a proper suicide assessment with my clients. I’m nervous that I’ll neglect to ask, or the client won’t tell me, something vital to making the right clinical decision. Can you recommend an objective measure for reliably determining suicidality?

Most clinicians already know the basic questions to ask about a client’s suicidality, but it’s important to go beyond a rote assessment to get a fuller picture of suicide risk.

Learning to enhance performance by embracing doubt and fear.

Dualistic thinking separates us from our own experience and offers the illusion that we can achieve peace and pleasure by somehow casting out our problems.

Despite getting paid to guide them out of their sand pit, we at times succeed only at leading them right back into it. When this happens, it's possible to decide that they somehow "need" their problem, that they're "not ready" to change, or that we lack the skill to help them effectively. Alternatively, we can turn to A. A. Milne for inspiration on how to get unstuck, on how to change the way we're trying to help.