By Bruce Jay Friedman - Stranded in Manhattan on a holiday weekend, Nat Solomon, a visiting academic from Detroit, decided to treat himself to an off-Broadway play. Solomon couldn't take his eyes off the actor who played the psychiatrist. Never before had he seen such compassion in a therapist's face. "On a night that you're not performing," he told the actor after the show, "I'd ask you to simply sit for me, much as you do in the play, and listen."

How many times have you surprised yourself by jumping at the scary part of a movie? You know the villain in the movie isn’t real, but your emotional brain ignores this logic and leaps into action. In essence, the emotional brain is our unconscious mind, and scientists estimate that it controls about 95 percent of what we do, think, and feel at any given moment. As therapists, we have to be a provocative guide, creating experiences that go beyond the intellect to reach a deeply human place, prompting clients to believe they can relate to themselves and the world in a new way.

Standing in my bedroom one evening more than a dozen years ago, I made an announcement to my wife: "I've got to go to the wilderness. Alone. It's been something I've been carrying in the back of my mind most of my life, and if I don't do it now, while I'm still able, I'll never do it." So a dozen years ago, I began making an annual two- to three-week pilgrimage into the wilderness to reacquaint myself with the rivers, mountains, and lands that we share with fellow creatures, and---in this vast expanse of silence---to do something I don't normally do in my busy life: just stop and listen.

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.