Brain science has revealed how deep breathing can calm our overactive nervous system, clear our distressed mind, and restore us to a balanced emotional state, says Amy Weintraub, a recognized leader in the practice of yoga and a presenter at this year’s Psychotherapy Networker Symposium. 

By Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener - There’s a clear and nearly universal assumption that happiness is desirable and, being so metaphorically shiny, we should all be trying to stockpile it. As experts in the field, we know the surprising truth. The tendency is to overlook the fact that happiness itself is sometimes harmful. Here are several often overlooked research results about a happy mindset that sound a warning.

Depression has been a tough nut to crack, but we haven’t focused much on what’s at the center of that nut: mood. Understanding the forces that are seeding low mood in the depression epidemic can help us better understand how to achieve better therapeutic outcomes.

Depressed clients repeat the same thoughts, activities, feelings, and experiences again and again, as if entranced. Good depression treatment is largely about awakening them from this bad trance.

Even though young adults seem to be craving some safety to balance their adventure, hookup culture continues to thrive, as much as many therapists would love to see young adults create something more fulfilling than ambiguous, drunken, unsatisfying sex. Whatever changes lie ahead in our cultural rituals for coming-of-age relationally, we’ll be seeing in our therapy practices the emotional legacy of hookup culture, in all its rawness and frantic incoherence, for many years to come.

New investigations are beginning to shed new light on a question that's hounded psychotherapy for more than a century: what's the relationship between nature and nurture, and what does it mean for the human project of change? As we come to understand more about the complex process of temperament development, therapists may be able to better help clients master one of life's trickiest balancing acts---making peace with one's inborn nature while knocking against its boundaries, in search of a larger self.

Most resentful people drag a long chain of bitterness through life. Since resentment can greatly distort thinking through oversimplification, confirmation bias, inability to grasp other perspectives, and impaired reality-testing, it often becomes a worldview. The initial challenge of treating those afflicted with chronic resentment is to strike a balance between validation and empowerment. While memories of past maltreatment may never go away, clients can learn to experience them as white noise, like the background hum of an air conditioner, as they build more value and meaning in their daily lives.

For nearly 50 years, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has claimed higher scientific authority among the vast legion of psychotherapy approaches as a result of having more research demonstrate its effectiveness than any other therapeutic method. But recent developments have raised questions about whether the effectiveness and scientific bona fides of CBT have been overstated.

By Clifton Mitchell - With all the recent developments in research, theory, and practice, we have more treatment options to choose from than ever before. Why then do so many practitioners still find client “resistance” a regular companion in their consulting rooms? After many years, I’ve learned that rather than seeing our clients’ frustrating reactions as obstacles that we need to overcome, we can use them as valuable information with which to steer the therapeutic conversation more skillfully.

For 17 years, managing responses to death has become part of my work, whether originally my intention or not. I’ve aspired to helping families hang tough through medical crisis, but now spend some of my time hanging crepe. I’ve now accepted the variety of ways people react to their dying. All of these ways of facing death are utterly ordinary and human. Throughout it all, I've learned that as difficult and awkward as confronting death can be, this work also gives me a richer sense of my client, the cast of characters in their world, and the drama of their life.