How can you more effectively work with a client whose emotions have become all-consuming?
According to Joan Klagsbrun, author of Focusing-Oriented Art Therapy, Focusing techniques are especially effective for helping distressed clients navigate their inner repository of memories, feelings, emotions, and bodily sensations.

Clients who struggle with PTSD, depression, and other stress-related conditions may have a tough time staying engaged in the consulting room. No matter how lively your approach may be, their minds are likely to wander.

Want to instill hope in your depressed clients? According to Jim Gordon, author of Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven Stage Journey out of Depression, you can start by reinforcing the idea that antidepressants aren’t always necessary for recovery.

If you’ve got a client who frequently oversleeps, binges on junk food and alcohol, and passes up fresh air for hours in front of the television, there’s a good chance these bad habits will hinder any progress you make in therapy sessions.

Perhaps you’re seeing a kid in therapy who’s overcome with anxiety or depression. You may have tried to engage him with games and casual conversation about the latest X-men movie. But what about talking to him about the latest neuroscience and the way his brain works? Would that do any good? According to interpersonal neurobiologist Dan Siegel, author of Brainstorm: The Power and the Purpose of the Teenage Brain, kids can actually find this information pretty cool when it’s articulated the right way.

In the increasingly influential world of positive psychology, researchers have begun to wonder whether all the fascination with drama and intensity is obscuring a mundane truth about what really matters in human relationships: the importance of the little things in daily life.

Therapeutic skeptics still cite the possibility of stirring up intense transference and countertransference responses as a compelling reason not to use more body-oriented approaches. But therapists who work somatically maintain that transference and countertransference are no more a problem for highly trained and skilled body psychotherapists than for well-trained talk therapists.

When a client comes in for their first session, the natural way to start is by asking them what they want to accomplish in therapy. But the way they answer isn't always helpful in moving the treatment forward.

It’s the very fact that both emotion and reasoning ability are held hostage by their body’s continuing physical reaction to trauma that makes healing so hard for trauma survivors, no matter how much cognitive “insight” they have into their suffering.

First and foremost, love is an emotion, a momentary state that arises to infuse your mind and body alike. Love, like all emotions, surfaces like a distinct and fast-moving weather pattern, a subtle and ever-shifting force.