Everyone knows that a twisted ankle requires elevation and a bag of frozen peas. Minor cuts and scrapes get bandages and Neosporin ointment. Colds get chicken soup, cough drops, and tissues. But what’s the common remedy for rejection, rumination, or low self-esteem?

Even with all the school and professional training we undergo as therapists, it's impossible to be completely prepared for every situation we may encounter in the consulting room.

Besides obvious techniques to open the mind and simply have fun, the creative arts can teach us new ways to motivate stuck clients and better attune to the emotions that arise in the consulting room.

Once upon a time, psychotherapy was a field filled with charismatic and taboo-breaking innovators, whose live and taped sessions were a form of thrilling performance art that made traditional approaches seem slow and stuffy enough to bore both clients and therapists to death.

The shadow of a smile in the midst of tears, a momentary crinkle of the eyes in the wake of anger—hints of vitality such as these can be powerful clues to essential truths that a client may be totally unaware of.

Let’s face it—no less than the clients we serve, therapists are largely creatures of habit. And like them, we can often find that our busy, stressful lives get too jam-packed and leave us little room for the spontaneous, unexpected, and exploratory.

It's easy for us at Psychotherapy Networker headquarters to tell you about all the wonders and benefits that await you at our annual Symposium. But the best—and most unbiased—endorsement for the Symposium can only come from our attendees.

How do the supershrinks do what they do? Are they made or born? Is it a matter of temperament or training? Have they discovered a secret unknown to other practicing clinicians, or are their superior results simply a fluke, more measurement error than reality?

Genuine learning is conveyed via experience; something happening that resonates emotionally as well as intellectually, something that literally alters the wiring of our brains, changes the sense we have of ourselves, even changes us.

Even strong emotions that are difficult to work with guide the therapy in the direction of what’s important. The key is knowing how to use them in a way that moves the therapy forward and leads to relationship repair.