The piquing of curiosity may be an underrated yet powerful strategy in therapy. Curiosity, a kind of open-minded expectancy, can align clients to therapeutic improvement and actually drive them toward that improvement. So how can we recruit the power of curiosity to facilitate change?
Get Free Therapy Techniques in Your Email Inbox Every Week
If you are a therapist or coach of any persuasion; counsellor, psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, life coach, bodyworker, in fact anyone who works in the helping professions, you will glean valuable, actionable ideas, tips and techniques from Clear Thinking, my free therapy techniques newsletter.
In it you'll find a wide range of topics including solution focused therapy approaches, cognitive-behavioural therapy techniques, ideas from DBT, hypnotherapy, counselling and even the occasional philosophical piece. I've been treating people with psychotherapy for more than 30 years and I've drawn what I find useful from many fields. I hope you find it helps you in your practice too, whatever flavour of helper you are.
Avoiding Emotional Burnout for Practitioners
When we can be sympathetic, that is, appreciate how hard it is for someone without being swamped by maladaptive empathy, then we’re freed to be more effective in actually helping. Here are a few thoughts on how we can care less to help (ourselves and our clients) more.
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?
Help Ease Your Client’s Adult Sibling Rivalry
Sibling rivalry can be complex. Love and envy, affection and resentment can and often do coexist within one relationship – but they make uncomfortable and messy bedfellows. Here I offer five strategies that may help you help any clients who exhibit sibling rivalry.
Why is Your Client Depressed?
Understanding the origins of depression is often a necessary starting point in treatment, because once we know what they are or have been missing in their life, we can help them fill the gap of that missing need. So what might we do well to discover about the origins of our clients’ depression?
How to Help Your Client Overcome Fear of Rejection
The fear of rejection can stalk our minds like some mythical monster, terrorizing our dreams and casting a shadow across our every thought. Here are seven tips to help you help your clients overcome a morbid fear of rejection to live a fuller and happier life.
Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder
Diagnosed cases of borderline personality disorder (BPD) seem to be on the rise. While working with a client with BPD may feel difficult, ultimately anything we can do to help such clients gain some emotional stability and regulate their emotions will help. So, what might that involve?
Doing Visualization Right
Positive visualization, when done correctly, can help make us feel better about past traumas, make us more focused on achieving our goals, and help us relax more during social interactions. So, what’s the best way to help your clients visualize their best possible self?
How to Stop Your Client’s Negative Spiral
There is a kind of unhelpful self-confidence in the mind of a negative client, at least as far as their sense of being right about how bad things are or will be is concerned. We need to help such clients develop the capacity for calmer, more hopeful and reasonable thoughts with greater perspective. So what […]
How to Externalize an Addictive Pattern From Your Client’s Core Identity
When we externalize a pattern, whether through story or simply the way we talk to our clients about their problems, we encourage mastery over the problem by separating it from who they essentially are. Here I present my reply to a question from a Q&A call, where I discuss the art of removing the problem […]
