We've gathered Psychotherapy Networkers most popular posts and arranged them here by topic.
Therapeutic Mindfulness in an Age of Interruption
Michael Ventura on Achieving Mindfulness in a Distracted World
We speak about “the present moment” and the ability to be fully present, and we claim a sort of smudgy understanding of what that means. But what is “the present moment?” Americans have heard and used these phrases for about 40 years, as Eastern and New Age concepts influenced psychology and other ologies. But obviously, once you delve into it, now isn't as exact a word as it appears. Plus, it isn't so easy to "live now" in a multimedia, interactive era of cell phones and pagers in which we're expected to be constantly available. To buck the odds takes courage.
Adopting Healthy Habits for Happiness and Wellbeing
How Therapists Can Teach Habits for Happiness
Once in a while, we may make concerted attempts to be kinder, less impatient, or more attentive to our own self-care. But our chaotic 21st-century lives often lack the structure, discipline, and even the raw physical energy required to make the changes stick. After a few weeks of trying something as simple as swimming at lunchtime, we sag beneath the weight of too much distraction and too little sleep. We know everything except how to live. In this postmodern world of infinite choice and incoherent structure, what practical steps should we take now---a personal trainer? More therapy? Feng shui? Zen meditation?---to become the self we see shining in our best moments?
A Couples Therapy for the Modern Relationship
Esther Perel on Relationship Dynamics in the Age of Consumer Marriage
When it comes to couples, we still hold onto the romantic ideal of finding that one soulmate who’ll fulfill all our needs for companionship, emotional intimacy, and erotic adventure in a single relationship. In our interview with Esther Perel, she shares her thoughts about how broader social context shapes expectations of marriage in crucial ways that are often ignored by many models of couples therapy.
The Rise of Therapy's Positive Psychology Movement
Martin Seligman Injects Thinking Positively into the Therapy World
How did Martin Seligman come to be known as the "father" of something called positive psychology, a movement that could change the face of psychotherapy as we know it? With his scientific study of what makes people happy and good, Seligman overturned therapy's culture of victimology, obsessed with the study of what's wrong with people---with their emotional lives, their relationships, their physical brains, and why they fail and feel bad. If people could be taught to feel bad, Seligman supposed, perhaps they could also be taught to feel good.
Confronting the Culture of the Busy Child in Therapy
The Epidemic of Overscheduling Our Children
In previous decades, we came to see sexism and racism as problems we could no longer ignore in our work. I have a nomination for the problem of this decade: for many kids, childhood is becoming a rat race of hyperscheduling, overbusyness, and loss of family time. The problem is all around us, but we haven't noticed how many of our children need daily planners to manage their schedules of soccer, hockey, piano, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, baseball, football, karate, gymnastics, dance, violin, band, craft clubs, foreign-language classes, academic-enrichment courses, and religious activities. Parents have become recreation directors on the family cruise ship.
How to Keep Sex in Marriage After Childbirth
Esther Perel on Maintaining the Romantic Spark After Children
Sex makes babies. So it is ironic that the child, the embodiment of the couple's love, so often threatens the very romance that brought that child into being. Sex, which sets the entire enterprise in motion, is often abandoned once children enter the picture. But the brave and determined couple who maintains an erotic connection is, above all, the couple who values it. When they sense desire in crisis, they become industrious, and make intentional, diligent attempts to resuscitate. They know that it's not children who extinguish the flame of desire: it's adults who fail to keep the spark alive.
Avoiding Runaway Ethics in Psychotherapy
Is Risk Management Threatening the Therapeutic Alliance?
Currently, the field is so deluged with dire warnings of imminent professional ruin that many therapists practice under a cloud of fear. At our professional meetings, in the legal columns that are now a regular feature of our journals, and at workshops and seminars, legal professionals, usually without any clinical training whatsoever, are giving their opinions about how we should practice, what we're allowed to do, and what we should never do---and scaring us to death in the process. As it turns out, this extreme self-watchfulness and rigid avoidance of anything resembling a "boundary violation" by a psychoanalytic or risk-management yardstick can do clients real harm.
Sensory Integration Therapy for Defiant Children
When Faulty Sensory Processing Affects Behavior
In our culture, we don't take kindly to children who refuse to do what they are told. We label them with euphemisms, such as difficult, willful or spirited. When these kids show up in my office as early as age 3 or 4, their parents---often tearful, angry, guilt ridden---want quick advice about how to win the battles they are losing. Because we assume that these children are neurologically and physiologically capable of doing what we ask them to do, we may describe them as inattentive, hyperactive or clumsy and complain that they are stubborn, angry or oppositional. In fact, they are all of those things---but for a reason. That reason is faulty sensory processing.
Nightmare in Aisle 6
A Therapist Caught in the Act of Being Herself
I live in a small city in Upstate New York, and most people in town know somebody who knows me, my husband, or one of our four engaged and energetic sons. Despite all this, I managed, for two decades, to maintain (in my own mind, at least) a fire wall between my personal and professional lives. In the consulting room and the classroom, I worked to present an air of calm worldliness, an expert with the answers to all sorts of painful therapeutic and family dilemmas. Until one day, I was caught being myself, and everything changed.
