By the end of the hour, even when we begin with her raging and sobbing, Jenna usually leaves more cheerfully. She’s much less reactive than when she entered, and, best of all, we’re more in sync. When I’m able to be present in this way, my cooler, more regulated brain lowers the emotional temperature of her hot head. Over the year or so that we’ve been meeting regularly, she’s allowing me to comfort her more and more, using me more effectively for soothing. This is the wonder of what I call Time In.

On the first day of a clinical placement in my doctoral program during the early 1980s, I was assigned to a counseling center and told by the director that because of unexpected staffing problems, I'd be seeing 20 couples a week. I'd never done any couples therapy, but I did have considerable experience as a family and individual therapist with emotionally disturbed adolescents--a tough, challenging group of clients if ever there was one! So my first thought when given this new assignment was, "After what I've done, how hard can this be?" I plunged in and almost immediately was appalled by how hard it actually could be!

What keeps people stuck in destructive relationship patterns? While Attachment Theory has provided some answers as to how those patterns originate, many clients remain trapped within them. What’s missing for them isn’t the desire to change—it’s an authentic experience of what it means to be secure in a relationship. That’s why Diane Poole Heller, expert trainer in the Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning Experience model, has developed tools to create corrective experiences in therapy that nourish clients’ capacity for secure attachment.

Despite a growing acceptance of integrative mind-body techniques, energy psychology remains just outside mainstream psychotherapy. And it’s easy to understand why—it makes frequent use of touch and includes techniques for tapping acupuncture points while conducting therapy.

Psychotherapy for chronic pain? It’s not an obvious connection to many who live with persistent aches, pangs, and cramps that defy all the usual medical explanations and interventions. To be fair, it’s not a connection a lot of therapists are making either. Using talk therapy to treat chronic pain is still a developing area of our field, and Maggie Phillips is among those leading the way.

When Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy developer Daniel Hughes first started working with children who struggled with serious behavioral and emotional problems, he knew something was missing in his approach. Daniel found the answers he was looking for in Attachment Theory—or at least most of them. Attachment Theory told him plenty about the symptoms and behaviors of his clients, but there were no instructions he could immediately apply to working with kids and families. He had to experiment and think outside the box to develop his own attachment-informed way of doing therapy.

When a couple leaves the consulting room, what keeps them from falling back into the destructive, deep-seated behavioral patterns that brought them there in the first place? In other words, how do in-session breakthroughs become daily habits?

How do you decide when a problem is not rooted in early experience? While developing Coherence Therapy, Bruce Ecker, coauthor of Unlocking the Emotional Brain, spent a lot of time uncovering the differences between attachment-related problems and those that mimic them in therapy.

For those who struggle with early attachment injuries, even the presumably safe presence of the therapist can often evoke feelings of desperation, fear, and threat. Diane Poole Heller, developer of the Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning Experience model, is an expert at creating a sense of safety with even the most troubled clients.

When we trust ourselves to follow the signals of life that the patient emits in seemingly casual conversation, we increase our chances of stepping outside the confines of our theoretical models to enjoy an unexpected encounter.