Psychotherapy Blog

Some people collect stamps, others baseball memorabilia. I prefer psychotherapy and treatment related books. It would be an understatement to say some select works have had a profound influence on my career. As I type this blog, I have a vintage 1925 hard back copy of John B. Watson's Behaviorism sitting to the side of my monitor. In its day the work commanded a hefty price tag of $3.00 and tied for the most expensive tome in W.W. Norton & Company,...

Online psychotherapists ponders the reasons that people choose online therapy over face-to-face therapy.

One of the joys of running Psychotherapy.net is my interactions with customers. But of all the correspondence I’ve had over the years, this a recent exchange I’ve had has been perhaps the most intriguing. It began with this email describing our videos: Good evening Victor, I have enjoyed the almost freakishness of Albert Ellis telling it like it is, he was a man to be respected by the way he wanted the patient to come clean, and at the same time to...

I was just on the phone with Peter Levine discussing a new video we are making  using his Somatic Experiencing approach to working with pain. I started to tell him that want to release the video next year….and I caught myself as I realized that next year is now this year. Hello 2017! I still remember my kindergarten teacher writing 1964 on the board after our Christmas vacation, and I was so surprised. How could it be a new year? What...

Have you ever struggled to share your dream with somebody in the morning? What seemed most vivid and realistic just a moment ago, when verbalized, turns into senseless gibberish, doesn’t it? What about adding another difficulty to recounting a dream, namely telling it in a foreign language? Which of their languages to use is a dilemma faced by many of my multilingual clients in therapy. It may also open doors that neither they nor I would have dreamt of. Francesca was Italian, living...

When I penned an article and a book chapter on the classic Gloria Films some years ago I never dreamed these pieces would continue to bring me a seemingly endless string of correspondence. Indeed, this classic video influenced the psychotherapy training and subsequent practice strategies for thousands and thousands of helpers. To this day the battle rages on about whether this work of art was the savior of psychotherapy, or psychotherapy’s worst nightmare. Recently a graduate student contacted me with a string...

As I tap away on the first installment of a my little blog about mental health in music I sit only a hundred yards or so from a Chinese restaurant in my little East Texas town where, legend has it, Mick Jagger was at one time known to dine on occasion with his former paramour, model Jerri Hall. Hall is or was the owner of a ranch in the general vicinity, according to local lore. In any case, while wondering...

Janice is sitting on the loveseat in my office. The sun slants through the Venetian blinds behind her, casting a warm glow that looks like an aura around her. She is a beautiful woman. This is just a fact. “I was talking at a meeting at work. I really think the policy they’re considering is dangerous. I was ticking off point after point for some of the unintended consequences I see in the distance, and it’s like . . . like...

We only had one therapy session with Inna. It ended with the bubbly feeling for me of a “perfect fit” that I get when I intuit that good work can be done with a prospective client. We had the same cultural background and four fluent languages in common. It was the first time I saw such a fit in my therapy room, in fact. Maybe too perfect a fit, as I was to find out later. Inna shared her experience of displacement,...

*Janelle sits on the edge of the loveseat in my office. Her knees form perfect ninety degree angles. She pulls her head up, her shoulders back and down, and looks me square in the eye with a set jaw. The word “formidable” pops in my mind. But immediately her shoulders curl forward, her head sags. “I want him to tell me how proud he is of me.” The formidable woman suddenly sounds like a child. “I raised over ten thousand dollars for pediatric cancer...