Therapists must offer abused children a different felt experience of who they are.

More and more therapists have begun wondering how far all our impressive-sounding talk about the brain has gone in improving therapy’s effectiveness. After all, dropping stray neuroscience factoids into therapy sessions doesn’t equal “brain-based” therapy. So we’ve decided to ask some challenging questions about our profession’s infatuation with the brain: when all is said and done, has brain science actually lived up to its promise for psychotherapy? What specific clinical advances, if any, have been guided or encouraged by knowing more about neuroscience?

A Bruce Springsteen song helps crack the unspoken code of father–son communication.

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.

Most of us put much too much faith in the power of our conscious minds to bring about lasting change. Instead of looking up the higher branches of consciousness, we should be looking down into the nervous system settings that generate impulses and inclinations.

Labeling behavior in fancy neurophysiological terms can make what we do sound more scientifically rigorous than the notoriously fuzzy language of psychotherapy, but how clinically useful is this brain language anyway?

More than any other positive emotion, love resides within connections. It extends beyond personal boundaries to characterize the vibe that pulsates between and among people. It can even energize whole social networks or inspire a crowd to get up and dance.

Changes in the habitual attitudes and behaviors that shape our lives rarely happen as the result of psychological epiphanies or emotional catharsis. Most therapeutic progress comes from the painstaking process of continual practice that reinforces some behaviors while actively discouraging others.

Pilgrim's Wilderness

A new book examines how one man, under the guise of religious faith, kept his family isolated in a world of abuse and brutality, and how another family broke boundaries to help them escape.

Raising the issue of race in therapy can help African American clients connect their personal struggles to an enduring cultural legacy that many insist isn’t supposed to matter anymore.

Garry Cooper and Kathleen Smith

When routines and habits become as lifeless as the manner in which one brushes one’s teeth, when the choreography of one’s existence resembles a blindfolded slog through quicksand—rather than the Jets and Sharks leaping across the streets of the Upper West Side—something must be done.

A woman discovers that giving someone permission to sleep can be a deep expression of love.

Some people can drink to excess for years without experiencing the negative consequences that can destroy their lives. So when does someone cross the tenuous line from habit into addiction? And what’s the difference between the two anyway?

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.

David Kessler has spent his career helping people all over the world deal with death. In the process, he’s learned that—as much as we may resist experiencing it—grief is a gift that helps us heal.

How do you help 200 teenagers who’ve had to flee their country find a path to peace in a new place? A psychiatrist who’s traveled across the world to help traumatized refugees from Tibet guides them to a source of wisdom and hope within themselves.

Most clients have automatic habits of thinking, feeling, and verbalizing experiences that imprison them in a world of gray sameness. How do we help them escape? The most immediate way is to ditch your logical analysis and help them experience a felt sense.

Making yourself profoundly unhappy takes tenacity and creativity. But the real art of it is to behave in ways that allow you to claim yourself to be an innocent victim, ideally of the very people from whom you’re forcibly extracting compassion and pity.

Romantically infatuated with the idea of psychological revelation—aka the therapeutic “breakthrough”—therapists too often ignore the fact that a life’s worth of habitual behavior often trumps, for good or ill, all the insights and emotional fireworks that we like to see as the key to therapeutic “progress.”

To work as a school social worker in the Bronx’s high-crime, low-income Hunt’s Point neighborhood is to become an expert at expecting the unexpected.