Words are amazingly precise A patient in her 30s was defending her mother as she heavily blamed herself for her ongoing failure to function. She described how her mother was sometimes very...
Dr. Smith's Latest Articles
#14 Breaching the Silos of Psychotherapy
Time for Consensus My personal and professional mission, is to work towards overcoming the splintering of psychotherapy that has degraded our profession and shortchanged our patients. This was...
#13 The Role of Learning in...
In recent posts, I have talked a lot about general application of two change mechanisms, Extinction and Memory Reconsolidation, both implicated in research on how learned fear can be “unlearned”...
#12 On Resistance
The phenomenon of resistance turns out to be more central and more profoundly embedded in the work of psychotherapy than is sometimes recognized. Freud saw this when he said that psychoanalysis is...
#11 What Therapists Need From Research
Universality and Explanation The psychotherapy research community has produced many good things, but complaints are common about a mismatch between what research produces and what clinical...
Addiction
Do We Have Free Will?
I read something recently suggesting that most of our decisions are made outside of consciousness...
Trust: How Avoiding Risk Damages Us
How We Avoid Risk Let’s consider the damaging things we humans do for “safety” and to...
Mindfulness
Working With the Inner Child
Many of the questions that have come up recently around attachment to your therapist boil down to...
A Guide to Personal Change
Dear Readers, my new book, How We Heal and Grow: The Power of Facing Your Feelings is available...