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I was just interviewed by Jeffrey Magnavita and Jennifer Kelly on modernizing psychotherapy and how to teach it. This is part of a series on "Eminent Psychotherapists" on YouTube. It's my best to date!

Jeffery Smith MD

Writing a book is not just putting down what one knows, it’s a journey of discovery. Chapter 2 of the upcoming How Psychotherapy Works: Navigating the Therapeutic Space with Confidence is about coming to appreciate and even love the inner selves we encounter in our work....

As chair of the organizing committee I want personally to invite followers of Tuesday Is For Therapists to come to Istanbul, October 10-12, 2025 for an exciting conference focused on foundational principles and processes that cut across multiple therapies. And today, the submission portal is open...

This post is built on what I often say to adult clients with ADHD. 

ADHD has advantages as well as challenges

We start by countering the negatives about ADHD. This form of neurodiversity comes with definite advantages along with the challenges. The main positives are...

One of my major goals is to promote familiarity with and appreciation of the inner self that has a huge role in ours and our clients' daily lives. It is the source of our truest motivations and most authentic feelings. Today I’ll talk, mostly from experience, about how the inner...

For many, knowledge of what is fair is taken for granted and not even thought about, but in therapy it can be a source of real questions. Clients wonder what life owes them and what they should give back. With dysfunctional families and trauma, children grow up with skewed ideas of what is...

In earlier posts, I haven’t made much of the distinction between guilt and shame, but guilt has unique features that have recently come into sharper relief. I see how often adult clients still feel guilty for things that happened when they were children and how old guilt, appropriate...

This post is about intense emotions around our natural abhorrence of constraint. We have all seen how far down the chain of evolution the desire for freedom is manifested. Animals, even insects, almost universally struggle to remain free when constrained. Constraint can be forced or...

I’ve been writing a lot about memory reconsolidation, but perhaps half of the work in my practice is helping people restart psychological development where it was left off. Development doesn’t necessarily involve my favorite change mechanism, memory reconsolidation, because...

Recently I have been involved in situations where someone who could clearly be called “borderline,” was rather suddenly “cured.” In both cases, I had been working with parents and felt the problem was better understood as a developmental issue rather than a deep...

Returning from vacation I’m finding young people and parents rightly concerned about intense and frightening symptoms connected with the demands and stresses of returning to school.They are understandably distressed about severe anxiety, suicidal thoughts, intense compulsions, and...

Linda revealed that the source of her shame was “Penelope,” the name she gave to an inner critic who cut her to shreds for any attempt to live a brighter, more interesting life. In this post, I’ll show how our quest to deepen our understanding and support change...