Is Our Goal Spiritual Growth or Symptom Reduction?
Ronald Siegel • 4/16/2019
By Ronald Siegel - As mindfulness practices work their way into the psychotherapeutic mainstream, we’re starting to ask more clinically sophisticated questions: Who needs what practice when? What about the downsides of some mindfulness interventions?
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Ways to Boost Your Clinical Creativity
Ronald Siegel • 6/4/2018
By Ronald Siegel - In today’s more strictly regulated, bottom line-driven mental health marketplace, should we care about anything beyond symptom relief?
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Strengthening the Therapeutic Alliance with Concern, Reflection, and Insight
Ronald Siegel • 6/30/2015
Within the older traditions originally inspired by psychoanalysis, self-knowledge had a place of honor in both treatment and training that it no longer occupies. The question our field faces at this point is whether this older tradition that revered clinical wisdom is still relevant. Here are some of the characteristics of wisdom identified by both researchers and therapists alike.
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The Paradox of Mindfulness in Clinical Practice
Ronald Siegel • 2/13/2015
What if our therapeutic goals of improving self-esteem, developing a stable and coherent sense of self, and identifying and expressing genuine, authentic feelings all turn out to be symptoms of delusion? If we engage in meditation long enough, we discover that our sense of being a separate, coherent, enduring self is actually a delusion maintained by our constant inner chatter. Seeing ourselves in this light can pull the rug out from under us in alarming—though potentially liberating—ways.
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Can We Afford It?
Ronald Siegel • 7/2/2014
It wasn’t their research results or bestselling books that set apart Freud, Rogers, Minuchin, and Satir. They seemed to have a sense of what really mattered. Today have conceptions about clinical wisdom become obsolete?
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Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Brings Eastern Mindfulness Techniques to Western Medicine
Ronald Siegel • 3/31/2014
In the late 1970s, before mindfulness exercises caught on in psychotherapy, mindfulness meditation was making inroads into the medical community. This was largely through the efforts of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who had adapted ancient Buddhist and yogic practices to create Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).
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Why Meditation in the West Went from Being Relegated to Counterculture, to Becoming the Hallmark of Mindfulness Therapy
Ronald Siegel • 11/7/2013
Therapists of the '70s and '80s saw meditation as either a fading hippie pursuit or a nonvaluable relaxation method. On the other hand, meditation teachers typically viewed psychotherapy as a “lesser practice” that couldn’t liberate the mind like meditation.
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