Have you ever wondered what might be the overarching competency that helps therapists choose whether or not to follow certain rules in therapy? A couple of months ago I delivered a workshop to a group of CBT learners, during which I did a role play as a “therapist”. After the event one of the participants […]
Therapists on a bus – therapeutic alliance in Emotional Safeness Therapy
Therapeutic alliance is one of the most frequently discussed topics in psychotherapy literature and its importance is broadly acknowledged. But what about the consequences of this acknowledgment? How does the robust evidence of the critical importance of alliance affect what we call evidence based treatment? Therapeutic allegiance In one of my previous posts I mentioned […]
Introducing Emotional Safeness Therapy for depression and personality problems
Emotional Safeness Therapy (EST) is a new integrative treatment for recurrent depression and co-occurring personality problems. The EST has been successfully implemented and run as group therapy over a period of three years (2015-2018) at an outpatient unit of the Akershus University Hospital in Norway. You can read more about the work on the development […]
The Multidimensional Model of Change – a new way of structuring psychotherapy
Multidimensional Model of Change (the MMC) is a meta-theoretical framework for structuring psychotherapy. The Model has been used as a basis for the development of an integrative group treatment for depression, called Emotional Safeness Therapy (EST). The EST has been implemented and successfully run by our team at the Akershus University Hospital, the major Norwegian […]
How not to learn psychotherapy – a tale from a near-life experience
As some of you probably noticed from my posts on Facebook, I spent the first half of August in the hospital, where I went through two life-saving surgeries. Unfortunately, the second one was caused by a serious medical error committed during the first one. In this way, I was given an opportunity to personally and […]
Rat race and the twilight of psychotherapy
This is the second in the series of introductory articles on the Multidimensional Model of Change and Emotional Safeness Therapy (a modular group treatment for recurrent depression, successfully implemented and run at the Akershus University Hospital in 2015-2018). In order to understand a broader context of the development of Multidimensional Model of Change, it’s useful […]
EST Project – Development of Multidimensional Model of Change and Emotional Safeness Therapy
The article discusses the organizational background of the EST Project, which led to the development of Multidimensional Model of Change (MMC) and Emotional Safeness Therapy (EST). Multidimensional Model of Change was initially thought as a metatheoretical framework for the integration of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT). The model has been […]
On becoming a therapist: choosing your ground
As I wrote in my previous article, the therapeutic process starts long before the client knocks on our door – it starts when we adopt our professional and therapeutic stance. Therapeutic stance begins to crystalize at early stages of the professional training, but some of its underpinnings might be traced even deeper in our personal […]
Did your supervisor tell you that? On re-learning psychotherapy
While delivering ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) and EST (Emotional Safeness Therapy) workshops I’m often asked to teach exercises and demonstrate protocols. Even participants who have no previous knowledge of the presented approach want to learn some techniques. This interest seems to be quite natural when the audience consists of practitioners. After all, our overarching goal is […]
How to learn ACT (or any psychotherapy)?
How to learn ACT is a really good question. Paradoxically, despite the title, I do not intend to answer the question in this article, because before being able to tell “how to learn?”, we must ask a more fundamental question “what to learn?”. So, let’s do first things first! CURRICULUM Almost every therapeutic approach has […]