Early learning – or should I say mislearning – can create a habit of self-sabotage to the point where things actually ‘going right’ may seem like a scary foreign land. So what are some basic strategies we can use to help the self-sabotaging client and avoid this self-fulfilling prophecy?
Articles on: Psychotherapy Techniques
How to Use Mirror Therapy With Your Clients
To gain some objectivity on ourselves – without the distorting effects of chronic hubris, pride, conceit, and narcissism and without disabling low self-esteem or undue sensations of inferiority – allows us to live more fully, more authentically. So how can we help our clients to do this?
How Can We Help Those with Acute Guilt and Remorse?
This discussion from one of our monthly Q&As is about the chronic contrition, regret, remorse, and guilt of a 12-year-old boy with an almost monastic sense of needing to confess his ‘sins’.
How to Help Clients Stop Taking Things Personally
To take things personally when we’d be better off not to is to make things much harder for ourselves. So how can we help clients modify sensitivity and feel less threatened by perceived criticisms or slights?
How to Use What Your Depressed Client Brings
Clients bring into therapy their miseries and limitations. But they also bring their potential, past triumphs, interests, and incipient and past happinesses. We can utilize much of this, and we should – because this is the very material from which we can help our clients build happier lives.
Three Perceptive Ways to Spot Client Incongruence
Incongruence – seeming to be one thing while really being or feeling another – can blight relationships or even whole lives. People can sometimes be honest with you as far as they know, yet if you dig a little deeper there may be other things going on. So what signs can we look out for?
Three Transcendental Tips to Help Your Sports Performance Client
I’ve found that supreme sporting performance requires an optimal state of mind. And this is about not just what the participant has in their mind but, equally importantly, what they exclude from their consciousness. Here are some approaches I’ve found useful when working with sporting clients.
How to Help the Hating Client
Like obsessive love, hatred can make us feel alive. Its galvanising intensity can lend us energy – its single focus can make life feel meaningful. It can make us feel intoxicatingly certain. But it can ruin us.
How to Help Your Client Lose Weight
Aside from the larger patterns of therapy, we can share some evidence-based tips with our weight loss clients to help support them towards their goal. I encourage my clients to factor these tips into their daily life in order to get slimmer without it seeming like some medieval exercise in martyrdom! Here are a few […]
How to Do Naturalistic Therapy
From endless form filling and clunky information taking to one-size-fits-all hypnosis scripts and laborious explanations of what techniques we are going to ‘do’ to someone, the lexicon of bad practice posited as ‘best practice’ is scary. Therapeutic technique should flow from conversation and feel, as often as possible, like a natural part of the conversation. […]