Helping a client navigate an identity crisis is about more than finding a label – it’s about crafting a life that feels genuine from the inside out. Not one that simply mimics what everyone else is doing. Here are three straightforward strategies to help your client discover who they truly are.
Psychotherapy Techniques Articles by Mark Tyrrell
The therapeutic relationship is vital; rapport and listening skills help our clients no end. But there are plenty more useful psychotherapeutic strategies and techniques. This collection was created to present some ideas and techniques which perhaps you won’t be so familiar with and also presents more familiar strategies in what I hope are new and interesting ways. Here you’ll find such topics as ‘mirror therapy’ and strategies to help the self sabotaging clients and many more. Grab a cup of tea or coffee, relax and find ideas for therapy you can use straight away.
How to Help the Chronically Self-Pitying Client
We should always be compassionate, kind, decent, and caring to people who are suffering. But with some clients, the kindest and most compassionate approach we can take is to help them transcend their self-pity. So what are some of the ways we can do this?
Working with the Angry Child: A Short Case Study
Chronic anger issues can lead adults to ruin their relationships, jobs prospects, and health. But many angry adults were also angry children. Regardless of why a child exhibits extreme anger, we need to help them learn to tame the anger early so it doesn’t become a lifelong, problematic pattern.
How to Help Your Stigmatized Mental Health Clients
Some people see mental illness less as a situation someone is ‘going through’ and more as some intractable difference from ‘normal’ people. When someone is seen as different, and in that difference, wrong, they are stigmatized. So how might we help the stigmatized client?
Rewriting Your Client’s Story
We all form stories. Human beings are, above all, narrative or story-making creatures. And the kinds of stories our clients tell themselves about their own lives can make all the difference to their happiness or lack thereof. A story is a frame of reality. So how might we help reframe our clients’ limiting self-stories?
How to Use Radical Acceptance Therapy with Your Clients
Radical acceptance means fully accepting reality as it is, without judgement or resistance, even if it’s not what you want it to be. It means practical alignment with truth so we can actually do something! So how can you help your clients who may need to develop radical acceptance?
How and Why to Use Defamiliarization in Therapy
Emotional problems, addictions, and compulsions of all kinds come to inhabit, then mimic and merge with, a person’s core identity. When we defamiliarize, we are moving the client towards a new way of seeing the problem – and therefore a new way of feeling about it. But how do we do this?
The Therapeutic Power of Journaling for Self-Reflection
Far beyond being a simple record-keeping practice, journaling serves as a gateway to the depths of self-reflection and insight and an aid in the development of emotional intelligence. So if you feel a bit of journaling may help your client, how can you usefully get them started?
How to Use the ‘Meaning Vacuum’ with Your Clients
The art of relaxing with not knowing is, I think, more profound than many people realize. Being able to suspend judgement, not being too quick to label something as ‘bad’ or ‘good’, can help us see what there really is to see. So how might we use this concept with our clients?
How to Positively Reframe Your Clients’ Negative Traits
We all have certain ‘negative’ personality traits. And if we view those traits as irrefutably negative, it can make us feel hopeless. So how might we reframe ‘negative’ traits?
