Working Through on David Godot

How to Succeed or Fail as a Psychotherapist

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mentalizing is a key foundational concept in attachment-based therapy, and even most therapists struggle to understand what it really means in practice. Put simply, it is an attitude where we assume that the subjective experience has gone through some unconscious interpretation before it reached awareness. In slightly more technical language, it is a stance toward experience (a reflective stance) in which we treat all experience as a product of the mind, rather than a raw input of objective reality.

Mentalizing As Functional Inquiry

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Every therapist knows the feeling of a well-placed, reflective question falling flat. I might ask “What do you think that feeling is about?” as a way of trying to guide a patient toward the deep and unknown connections driving their emotional life — and instead receive a lengthy story about the events leading up to the feeling. Or an intellectual explanation of how the feeling connects with their interpretation of events. If the patient is fairly concrete or disconnected from emotion, they may shut down the inquiry with a simple “I don’t know.” Or, worst of all, the question may come off as a criticism, as though I were asking “Why do you feel that way?”

Why Recording Sessions Makes You A Better Therapist

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There are few things more likely to make a therapist squirm than the suggestion of recording their sessions. People see it as a dreadful assignment that supervisors force them to do a few times, and then they mercifully get to forget the grating sound of their own voice. I really want to help reframe that, because reviewing session recordings is actually one of the surest ways to improve as a psychotherapist.

The Problems With Evidence-Based Psychotherapy

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

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 findings to make sure the types of treatment we’re using in psychotherapy actually work. My own clinical training included a wide array of these empirically based treatments, and I happily use many of their key techniques. I also continue to pay close attention to new clinical research, and frequently review the literature in the course of formulating treatments for my patients.

Early Recollections And The Lifestyle

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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 evolving nature of the lifestyle.

At this time I had barely begun taking doctoral classes at the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago, and had not yet had any formal education in Adlerian psychology. Some of the powerful ideas that I learned at this workshop greatly influenced the way that I would later learn and incorporate the use of early recollections and lifestyle assessment in my own clinical practice.

The Medical Model of Psychology

Sun, 07 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The “medical model” that currently guides the majority of psychological research, assessment, and treatment is a deeply entrenched historical, social, and political phenomenon (Maddux, Snyder, & Lopez, 2004; Laungani, 2002) which has no empirical support whatsoever (Wampold, 2001). This article will outline some of the problems that the widespread acceptance of the medical model poses for the field of psychology.

Wampold, Ahn, & Coleman (2001) list five components of the medical model of psychotherapy: to begin with, the patient presents with symptoms of a classifiable disorder or disease; from the existing research and accepted materials, a psychological explanation for the disorder is available; the knowledge of this specific disorder and the theoretical conceptualization of such are sufficient that a potential mechanism for psychological change can be identified; having identified these properties, the therapist logically derives a set of specific psychotherapeutic ingredients and administers them to the patient; these specific ingredients are responsible for the benefits of the psychotherapy thus administered. “The last component,” Wampold, et al. (2001) explain, “which is often referred to as specificity, is critical to the medical model of psychotherapy and gives primacy to the specific ingredients rather than common or contextual factors.” This is particularly significant in that no research has yet to provide any empirical backing for this principle of specificity in psychotherapeutic interventions, whereas a growing body of research is being accumulated in support of alternative, contextual models of psychotherapy (Wampold, 2001).