The Remaking of a Therapist

The therapist’s active listening is not meandering: what underpins it is an attempt to understand – for our sake – how the subterranean operations of the past are affecting the present. We arrive in therapy with questions. We have a presenting problem which hints at, but does not fully capture, the origins of our suffering. Why, for instance, do we

I first encountered re-parenting exercises in a seminar handout written by Dr. Richard Landis, a neo-Ericksonian therapist from Southern California. Dr. Landis recommends imagining a meadow in a vivid, multi-sensory way, focusing on unresolved issues and feelings from the past and then looking over to the side of the meadow to see a child with the

Ayant réussi à faire avancer le groupe vers l’analyse du moment présent, Julius passa à l’étape suivante. À ses yeux, le travail thérapeutique se divisait en deux phases : d’abord l’interaction, souvent émotionnelle. Ensuite, la compréhension de cette interaction. Telle était sa conception de la psychothérapie : une alternance d’évocation des émoti

Therapists are essentially story editors. People come to therapy because their stories are not working, often because they get causation wrong. They blame themselves for things that are not their fault, or they blame others for things that are.

But generally ideas are not enough: it is the synergy of "ideas-plus-relationship" that creates real therapeutic power.

(As an aside, I often wonder how long this will continue to be true for our profession. In my practice, I've worked with several psychotherapists who, having just finished a graduate program consisting almost entirely of cognitive-behavioral therapy, feel despair at the prospect of working mechanically with patients in a behavioral prescriptive mod