Most of us light up when we see a small child. That’s how we want to respond to the our own and our clients’ inner selves. I’m afraid I haven’t made that as clear as I would want, especially because that inner child is so often the main character in the drama of psychotherapy. Let’s put aside pat...

Seeking accurate empathy is a good way to create the conditions for change. That is the theme of the Five Key Questions approach to teaching core psychotherapy skills. What it means in practice is putting oneself (and the client’s observing self) in the shoes of the limbic problem solver or inner...

Unconscious emotion is of central importance for us. It stands at an epicenter between the mind’s appraisal of circumstances and the responses we want to help our clients change. Not only is unconscious emotion a necessary trigger for action, but it embodies the specifics of both the threat and t...

“Where are we and what to do next?” These questions come frequently as we practice psychotherapy, sometimes in the background, but just as often arising as conscious questions. This post is about three very different situations and how each has a different tempo and requires a different approach....

My first experience of memory reconsolidation (MR) was dramatic, so much so that it triggered a career-long drive to understand therapeutic action. But I was not alone, nor the first. The same remarkable phenomenon was the beginning of psychotherapy as we know it.

When. Breuer told Freud about h...

Every therapist has their own repertoire of metaphors, rules of thumb, and tricks that come back over and over. I don’t usually share these because I don’t want to bore you, but today I thought our readers, might appreciate a few of the best ones. Here are three.

A blank book with two sides 

Th...

Being right teaches us little, but finding out we got it wrong is exciting and enlightening. Holding an idea one thinks is true, a working hypothesis, then discovering clear evidence that points the other way, can open up new vistas. For many years I have believed (with niggling doubts), that the...

What makes humans so prone to irrational and maladaptive patterns? Entrenched Maladaptive Patterns (EMPs), are products of the human mind. Other mammals have minds, too, that is, a brain that takes in information, identifies threats and opportunities, and generates responses calculated to improve...

In the Howtherapyworks Coaching Community, we have been working on pinpointing the ultimate target for change in therapy. Looking at it from an information standpoint, the specific target of our work is a bit of implicit (unconscious) memory that needs to be rewritten. That critical bit of memory...

It’s the source of our creativity, intuition, hunches, and all the fuzzy stuff that enriches our lives. Neurologists just call it the DMN, default mode network. From a brain standpoint that makes sense. It is the huge network of interconnected neurons that operate when the brain is idle, not focu...

I’m writing today on how therapists can gain clarity about client problems and how to help clients trade maladaptive patterns for better ones. Toward that end, I am sharing five critical questions developed in our Psychotherapy Coaching Community to trace, step by step, a path from the problem to...

A lucid therapist is one who strives continually to gain greater clarity about underlying principles and processes and how they manifest in day to day psychotherapy. This past year I came to appreciate the role of visualization in seeing, moment to moment, what is happening and what to do next. L...