In this excerpt from “Becoming a Citizen Therapist: Integrating Community Problem-Solving into Your Work as a Healer,” Bill Doherty and Tai Mendenhall lay out a roadmap for helping clinicians transition from private practitioner to community educator therapist.
How Clinical Empathy Can Restore the Impact of Invalidating Medical Experiences
Drawing upon his own personally invalidating experience during medical treatment, a therapist pays forward lessons of empathy.
Psychologists Struggle Too: How Shame Keeps Us Silent
Psychologist Shannon Swales shares her very personal journey through burnout, mental illness, and shame to recovery, hope, and helping others.
Virtual Treatment of Eating Disorders and the Importance of Human Connection
A Clinician who struggled through an eating disorder in adolescence overcomes the limitations of virtual therapy to connect with a similarly struggling teen.
Rick Miller on the Clinical Challenges of Working with Gay Sons, Mothers, and Families
Psychotherapist Rick Miller discusses the challenges and benefits of working with gay men and their mothers.
Dialogue 1: How Do We Define Collaborative Writing?
In the spirit of Irvin Yalom’s “Every Day Gets a Little Closer,” a therapist and her client share the richness of the therapeutic journey through collaborative writing.
Deploying Therapeutic Airbags to Enhance Clinical Outcome
Therapy carries inherent risk, and eventually we’ll get into accidents, but what if we abandon the “do no harm creed” and build strategies into therapy for damage-reduction?
My Romance with Narrative Letters: Counter-Storying Through Letter Writing
A creative clinician shares her romance with – and successful use of – narrative letter writing in therapy to deepen the therapeutic bond with her clients.
Psychotherapists Are the Luckiest People on Earth
Allen Frances reflects on a long clinical career with gratitude to his patients for valuable lessons they’ve taught him about life and living.
Beyond Neurosis: The Case for A Humanistic Approach to Illness Anxiety
A health-anxious client teaches his therapist about the importance of humanizing rather than pathologizing.