According to trauma specialist Peter Levine, the body is the therapist's greatest tool in helping clients understand and heal from a traumatic event. So rather than focus on the event itself, Levine asks clients to focus on how their body manifests the trauma. In this brief video clip, he shares his method.

Increasingly, therapists are looking for alternatives to the office-bound rigidity of traditional private practice. In the following interview, The Center for Mind-Body Medicine's Sabrina N'Diaye shares the takeaways from her work, and what it means to be a therapeutic "peacebuilder."

By Ryan Howes - Should we praise children, students, clients, and ourselves for being smart people who earn top marks? According to motivation expert and bestselling author Carol Dweck, praising intelligence often creates people devoid of resilience and motivation. It’s far more important, she says, to enhance people’s ability to tackle adversity and persevere.

By Howard Schubiner - Few people in the medical profession look at the disconnect between pain and structural abnormalities in the body. Could it be that we're attributing some of our physical pain to body disorders when the pain has an emotional source instead?

In his Symposium address, Dan Siegel challenged some common myths about adolescence and suggested that the aspects of adolescence that can drive us crazy—novelty seeking, social engagement, emotional intensity, and creative exploration—are exactly what we need to cultivate to maintain vitality in our own adult lives.

By Rhegina Sinozich - If you really want to help people open a doorway to a different way in life, therapy needs to give them powerful experiences—positive ones. I've learned that the most powerful and effective way to get therapy off on the right note is to help clients access the power of the hope and openheartedness that’s embedded in childhood.

By Ann Weiser Cornell - Clients need to tell their stories, of course. But when the stories manifest habitual categories—ways of labeling and explaining experiences—the process can get stuck. The formation of a felt sense is a breakthrough moment, in which we slow down and form a new bodily awareness of some life situation.

By Rubin Naiman - Traditionally, sleep and darkness have had positive connotations. Yet many of us don't go gently into the night: we knock ourselves out with alcohol, sleeping pills, or sheer exhaustion. Our widespread fear of and disregard for darkness may be the most critical, overlooked factor in the contemporary epidemic of sleep disorders.

Often we hear things from clients like “My relationship ending was so traumatic for me,” or “When my uncle passed away, I was totally traumatized.” With the word trauma being used so loosely and for such a wide range of problems, how do we know what it actually means anymore?

Most therapists recognize that physiological processes hugely influence emotion and behavior. But according to psychiatrist Robert Hedaya, too many tend to practice as if treatment should focus entirely on the mind. A comprehensive physiological evaluation is needed, he says, before determining that a medication trial is appropriate.