Clinical Skills & Experience

Can True Love Be Designed?

Transforming How We Experience and Express Love

Discover two models of love and how distinguishing between them can help therapists support clients in designing a conscious relationship. Read more

7 Benefits of Concurrent Couples Therapy

Revisiting an Underappreciated Approach

Concurrent couples therapy has advantages over conjoint therapy that get overlooked by many therapists. Discover 7 ways concurrent couples therapy can improve... Read more

Supercharging Art Therapy with AI

A Surprising New Tool to Enhance Trauma Healing

Using AI art therapeutically is still a novel idea in the field of art therapy. For clients wary of traditional forms of creative expression, it allows them to... Read more

The Client Who's Tried Everything

ACT and ISTDP Tackle One Challenging Case

How do you approach a first session with a client who's tried all kinds of different therapies and yet continues to struggle? Steven Hayes, the cofounder of... Read more

Breaking the Cycle of High-Functioning Codependency

When Helper’s High Goes Too Far

Many therapists believe their intense care and concern for clients is a form of selfless love. Maybe it’s time to rethink that. Read more

Racial Trauma Assessment Tool

The Trauma Symptoms of Discrimination Scale (TSDS)

Support your BIPOC clients in gaining clarity about the frequency and types of discrimination they’ve experienced as they heal from racial trauma. Read more

Reimagining God in Therapy

When a Parent’s Critical Voice Is Almighty

Creating a safe space for clients to slowly re-evaluate some core religious teachings they’ve absorbed can be delicate and clinically necessary work. Read more

Three Blocks to Processing Trauma

Getting to the Pain Behind Spiritual Bypass

How do you navigate toxic positivity, and other forms of spiritual bypass, when it’s a block to processing trauma? Read more

An Unlikely Companion to EFT

How Can Psychedelics Enhance the Work?

Talk therapy can help couples understand their negative patterns cognitively. Adding psychedelics to the work can help them feel it. Read more

Treating the Trauma in Religious Trauma

Body-Based Healing for Faith-Based Harm

High-control religions can disconnect people from themselves—and somatic therapies are the key to helping them heal. Read more

The Spiritual Therapist

Healing and the Secular Priesthood

Most therapists don’t shy away from discussing charged topics like sex and drugs. But religion and spirituality? That’s a different story—one that a... Read more

Discerning Three Types of Anxiety

Improving Outcomes for Anxious Clients

We can all get caught up in their “anxiety whirlwind” of dysregulation, distorted thoughts, and defensiveness. Understanding some of the most common ways... Read more

Rethinking Insecure Attachment

From a Fixed Model to a Fluid Spectrum

A new framework for visualizing attachment turns a potentially pathologizing concept into a friendly clinical tool. Read more

When Clients Ask for Session Notes

Tips for Navigating a Legal Gray Zone

Few things can spook therapists as much as emails from former clients requesting session notes for a legal proceeding, but handling these requests thoughtfully... Read more

Listening as the Ultimate Spiritual Act

From Passive Process to Active Practice

How do we change our habit of defensive listening and make emotional presence our practice? Read more

Helping Clients Find Rituals that Heal

Offerings from a Spiritual Therapist

A Sufi therapist invites all clients to find their unique spiritual path through their current struggles. Read more

God, Grief and Therapy

The Quest for Meaning after Loss

Renowned grief expert David Kessler shares what can grief work teach us about the role of religious beliefs in therapy. Read more

Taking the Blindfold off Couples Therapy

A Tool for Cultivating Emergent Love

How might a panoramic view of a relationship at the start of couples therapy change what clinicians focus on? Read more

Teaching Practical Wisdom

Helping Clients Build Up Their Own Inner Resources

What if wisdom—the elusive prize so many of us strive for—is actually a practical skill clients can gain in the course of everyday therapy sessions? Read more

How Do You Know if You're a Culturally Responsive Therapist?

Measurement-Based Care with Diverse Clients

Evidence-based tools can help us embrace our clients' feedback, greatly increase our cultural competence. and improve therapy outcomes. Read more

The Funny Therapist

Dismantling Stigma, One Joke at a Time

What do therapy and comedy have in common? Therapist and comedian David Granirer has spent over two decades helping aspiring stand-up comics—many in... Read more

4 Things Therapists Should Consider About Political Polarization

Maintaining Client Trust in a Divided Nation

Unless we want to let down our clients and lose public trust, therapists need to figure out how to navigate a politically polarized world. Read more

FREE Clinical Worksheets

Tools for Releasing Pain and Remembering Love

This month’s free practice tool is from David Kessler and offers clients a way to accept losses and express the unexpressed. Read more

Facing Post-Separation Abuse

Sometimes the Breakup Isn't the End

Post-separation abuse can easily masquerade as a simple "bad breakup." Read more

When Your Client Goes to Family Court

The Truth about Documenting Sessions

How you document sessions with clients in emotionally abusive relationships can either help or harm them in family court. Read more

When Burnout Threatens Therapy with Survivors

Cultivating Your Stamina as a Therapist

Even experienced clinicians can start to feel lost when helping people untangle the psychological effects of coercive control. Read more

Soothing Dysregulation in Couples Therapy

The One Thing We Should All Do First

Is teaching partners to join forces against their stress where all couples work should begin? Read more

Just because a relationship isn't physically violent doesn't mean emotional abuse won't turn violent. Read more

Healing the Covert Narcissist

When Early Trauma Meets Entitlement

Entitlement, the characteristic that best indicates when coercive control is narcissistically driven, makes treating perpetrators challenging—but not... Read more

When Your Client Prefers Chitchat

Finding Meaning in Unlikely Places

If a client can't stop talking about the plot twists of a banal TV show, should you try to change the clinical channel? Read more