Blogs
Writing
Ongoing inquiries into consciousness, inner life, and psychotherapy.
2026
2 essays
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What Does It Actually Mean to "Use" Countertransference?
Therapists talk a lot about “using countertransference”, and that phrase is rarely accompanied by specifics. Too often, the therapist’s feelings toward the client (the countertransference) …
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Just One More Session: On asking clients to meet again before dropping us
You’ve been seeing a client for therapy, perhaps thinking everything was going well enough, and suddenly receive a voicemail, email, or text message shutting it down: “Please cancel our …
2025
5 essays
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How to Succeed or Fail as a Psychotherapist
A clear, practical guide to mentalizing and its failure modes in psychotherapy.
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Mentalizing As Functional Inquiry
How to move away from “interpreting” or “challenging” patients, and toward relating to them as full mental partners
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Why Recording Sessions Makes You A Better Therapist
The dirty secret of clinical training, and one practice that reliably improves client outcomes.
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Holding the Pen Lightly: On Getting Things Done When You Don’t Really Exist
A personal inquiry into creativity, motivation, and the nature of self.
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On Thinking in Public
The allure and danger of thinking in public in a lonely world.
2015
1 essay
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A Symbolic Therapeutic Gardening Group for Adolescents
This morning I led a gardening therapy group for my 25 residential teenagers. I introduced the group by teaching them how to work with the plants, by way of some Ericksonian metaphors: The …
2013
1 essay
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Positive and Negative Aspects of Shame
Shame is one of those emotions that a lot of people label “negative,” and talk about simply wanting to banish or let go of. I will argue that all emotions are useful, and only take on a …
2012
1 essay
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The Problems With Evidence-Based Psychotherapy
There has been a tremendous movement toward evidence-based treatment in clinical psychology over the past decade. On its face, this is a good thing — the idea that we should use scientific …
2010
1 essay
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An Egodynamic Model of Hypnosis
Hypnosis is a spooky phenomenon. Through mechanisms that are not fully understood, this technique allows seemingly impenetrable barriers to be bypassed: repressed material can be recovered …
2009
2 essays
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Early Recollections And The Lifestyle
A few years ago, when I was only just beginning to learn about Adlerian theory and therapy, I attended a workshop given by Al Milliren for the Chicago Adlerian Society. The topic was the …
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Re-Branding Psychotherapy: Why Therapists Have Got It All Wrong & What We Can Do About It
The field of psychology is suffering a crisis of identity which is devaluing its services and damaging its practitioners. The problem, in my opinion, is the paradigm of mental health versus …
2008
4 essays
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Hermann Rorschach & The Amazing Technicolor Inkblot
On a psychodiagnostic residency, where your job is just to understand people, one of the tools you use is the famous Rorschach Inkblot Test. In this test, the patient is shown a standard …
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We Live in Memories and Dreams
In my recent article on hypnosis, I mentioned that we don’t live in the present moment. We live in memories and dreams. This is an idea that will not be unfamiliar to those with a mystic …
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8 Facts About Hypnosis
Hypnosis is a sort of spooky and misunderstood phenomenon. Most of what people generally know about hypnosis comes from movies and stage performers, not real clinical hypnotists. You may …
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Knowing Your Tells: Body Language and Unconscious Communication
People communicate with each other constantly, and in ways we hardly ever even realize. You heard that right: even a truly prolific writer is unlikely to ever match in written words the …
2007
1 essay
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Hypno-Oncology: Hypnosis in the Treatment of Cancer
Abstract Clinical hypnotherapy has been soundly established as an effective treatment for the symptoms associated with cancer and its related therapies, including chronic and acute pain, …
2005
3 essays
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The Medical Model of Psychology
The “medical model” that currently guides the majority of psychological research, assessment, and treatment is a deeply entrenched historical, social, and political phenomenon (Maddux, …
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Repressed Memory Phenomena
The issue of repressed memory is surprisingly heated, and comes loaded with the weight of several fundamentally different conceptions of the human mind. The real issue, hidden away in the …
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Jonestown and The Social Psychology of Accepted Truth
Everybody “knows” what happened in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. At the behest of their charismatic leader, all the members of the Peoples Temple religious cult—the residents of …