Learning even a little about nutrition and diet can greatly enhance therapists’ ability to help clients with mood problems.

In Emotional First Aid, Manhattan psychologist Guy Winch provides an instructional manual for handling the bumps and bruises of life.

The increasingly blurry distinction between normal and abnormal not only makes us easy targets for Big Pharma’s advertising, but also distracts us from the larger social and economic forces that shape our lives.

Although the idea that the mind and body are inextricably linked is widely accepted in our field, many clinicians remain too focused on words to hear the truths that their clients’ bodies have to offer.

There’s something about healing from the deep emotional suffering that feels like death and rebirth—not the quick kind that some claim to receive in religious conversion. It’s the kind that asks us to be open to changing our contract with life in the most fundamental way.

Recently, therapists have begun to use simple, no-mat yoga practices to help clients whose minds are racing or fogged.

Through our lives, most of us develop what can only be called a deeply personal relationship with our anxiety. There’s a good reason for this. A predilection for anxiety was built into our neurophysiological wiring as a kind of evolutionary early-warning system for us hominids in an unpredictable, often hostile environment. Anxiety, in this sense, is like a loyal, somewhat skittish guard dog—maybe too easily aroused, but handy to have growling around the cave when intruders threaten.

Therapists are supposed to make clients feel safe and secure, creating a cozy haven from a cruel world, right? Well, when it comes to treating anxiety, more clinicians are instructing clients to ramp their fears, while telling themselves how much they welcome the experience.

As therapists, we typically assume that a person suffering from severe anxiety is eager and motivated to receive the help we offer. But we should never naively underestimate clients’ hidden antipathy to change, despite their discomfort.

In this age of helicopter parents and protective child professionals, we can often recreate a potent anxiety- reinforcing system around children that not only rewards anxiety, but encourages it to grow and take over even more of the child’s life.