Professional Development

VIDEO: How to Make Clients Feel Safe

Today's Video: Bringing Polyvagal Theory into Your Practice

How can therapists acquire neuroscientific knowledge without becoming brain scientists themselves? Even more pressing, what real-life practical therapeutic... Read more

Why DSM-5 Is a Step Forward for Psychotherapy

Find Out About the Benefits of Dimensional Diagnosis

In this video clip, Regier talks about how the new definition of a major depressive disorder in DSM-5 better enables clinicians to diagnose clients who exhibit... Read more

Do Brain Games Build Cognitive Muscle?

Grim Job Prospects for Mental Health Grad

Brain games and grad prospects Read more

Outside the Box

Bringing Families into Trauma Treatment

If we don’t open up the one-on-one therapeutic cloister, trauma sufferers may never learn how to engage in the give and take of real-life relationships. By... Read more

When Victims Victimize Others

Some Clients Challenge our Capacity for Compassion

Most therapists find it relatively easy to feel empathy for the usual hyperaroused, vulnerable trauma client. But it can be a lot tougher to remain... Read more

VIDEO: What to Do When Therapy Stalls

Bill Doherty on Handling the Issue of Progress Before it's a Crisis

Bill talks about a proactive approach that can lead to positive developments when therapy starts to stall. Read more

What Really Motivates Resistant Clients

Finding Emotionally Compelling Reasons to Change

Push up against a resistant client, you get more resistance. Try a comforting, helpful approach, and you can undermine a client's motivation to act. So what's... Read more

Move Beyond the Fee-for-Service Therapy Model by Offering Other Types of Psychotherapy Products Read more

Defiance vs. Compliance—Two Faces Of The Reactant Client

John Norcross on Different Approaches that Work with Each Extreme

John Norcross gives us a clear and compassionate take on reactance—what it is, how it’s different from resistance, and how to begin with each extreme. Read more

Getting to the Heart of the Stuck Couple’s Story

Peggy Papp on Using Metaphor for New Insight, Fresh Language, and Forward Movement

How can a therapist cut through a couples’ intellectualizations, defensiveness, and ritualized use of language? The key is to bypass the language and explore... Read more

Is Therapy Creative?

Erving Polster on Rethinking the Concept of Creativity

Erving Polster talks about the concept of creativity how he sees it and how it is applied to the work we do with our clients. Read more

Improving Therapeutic Effectiveness: Moving Beyond Reliable Performance

How Can We Make Progress in Our Therapeutic Effectiveness?

K. Anders Ericsson’s work on deliberate practice and client feedback explains studies showing that most of us grow continually in confidence over the course... Read more

Editor's Note - March/April 2014

DSM, Psychotherapy's World Almanac

Even though the grumbling about DSM-5 does seem to have reached some kind of tipping point, it isn’t clear at all what alternative would be any better... Read more

The Cult of DSM

Ending Our Allegiance to the Great Gazoo

Labeling clients with DSM diagnoses is a ritual most of us perform to get reimbursed and pay our mortgages, but few of us actually believe in. Has the time... Read more

The Book We Love to Hate

Why DSM-5 Makes Nobody Happy

From small insignificant beginnings in 1952, when almost nobody read it, DSM has become a kind of sacred literary monster. Today, it’s the most detested and... Read more

Shedding Light on DSM-5

The View from the Trenches

While the polemical debates over the new DSM have received widespread coverage, the reactions of ordinary clinicians have yet to receive much scrutiny. Read more

Beyond Lip Service

Confronting Our Prejudices Against Higher-Weight Clients

Therapists should not only be aware of their prejudices toward higher-weight clients, but should commit themselves to challenge those attitudes as well. Read more

Whose Therapy Is It Anyway?

When Your Client Is Uncommitted to Change

When we find ourselves haunted by a particular case, it may mean that we’re more invested in the client making changes than the client is himself. Read more

The Debate Over DSM-5: A Step in the Right Direction

A Step in the Right Direction: An Interview with Darrel Regier

The vice chair of the DSM-5 Task Force is bemused that the release of what was intended to be a more accurate and rigorously researched manual has raised such... Read more

The Debate Over DSM-5: A Step Backward

A Step Backward: An Interview with Allen Frances

As the man responsible for the previous edition, the foremost critic of DSM-5 is perhaps the last person you’d expect to trash this latest, biggest version. Read more

Psychotherapy and the Affordable Care Act

Ecstasy in the Consulting Room
Tori Rodriguez and Kathleen Smith

Throughout the fall, news about the landmark Affordable Care Act (ACA), designed to extend healthcare coverage to millions of the country’s currently... Read more

Deliberate Practice: The First Step on the Path to Professional Excellence

One Team Finds that Deliberate Practice is the First Step to Becoming a Superior Therapist

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... Read more

A Conference for People Who Hate Conferences

Networker Symposium 2014: Psychotherapy’s Most Celebrated Anti-Conference

Genuine learning is conveyed via experience; something happening that resonates emotionally as well as intellectually, something that literally alters the... Read more

VIDEO: Talk Like a Therapist—Even from the Podium

Lynn Grodzki on Attracting New Clients by Being Ourselves

Lynn Grodzki shares about speaking with audiences about your therapy practice and how to leave your audience wanting more. Read more

Our Habits, Ourselves

What Role Do Habits Play?

Psychotherapy too often fails to help clients like myself make changes in their lives because of the blind spot at its core—it undervalues the central role... Read more

Something New, Here & Now

Breaking Free of the Habitual

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... Read more

Shaking & Dancing in Dharamsala

A Group of Tibetan Refugees Find their Inner Guides

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... Read more

Psychotherapy vs. Placebos

Frontline Psychotherapy

Garry Cooper and Kathleen Smith Read more

What's The Value Of A Diagnostic Category In The DSM?

Gary Greenberg on the Role of Economic Factors in the Shaping of the DSM

Gary Greenberg deconstructs the DSM and how it affects the field and your practice. Read more

Therapist and business coach Lynn Grodzki provides an eye-opening road-map to both the shift in clients’ attitude and how we as therapists can most... Read more