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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Twelve rules for managing conflicts in groups
In the past three years I’ve been increasingly engaged in working with groups, both as a therapist and as a supervisor. Conflicts in groups are inevitable and as a group leader you must be prepared to face them. In this post I suggest twelve basic rules that will help you navigate through a group conflict, […]
Pursuing therapeutic excellence in ACT through deliberate practice
Besides my usual clinical work, I deliver introductory ACT workshops to many hundred participants each year. I always wonder what happens with these people afterwards. How many of them include ACT in their clinical work on a regular basis? How many of them become real ACT therapists? Some of participants say that they have already […]
How to do a (great) experiential workshop?
Are you planning to deliver your very first experiential workshop and trying to put it together? Or, perhaps, are you a seasoned presenter and wonder whether and how you could enhance the experiential side of your events? This is exactly what this text is about: how to plan and deliver an experiential workshop. And I […]
The therapist’s ten commandments: “First – Do not shame”
Although shame is a very common psychological phenomenon, it is not given very much attention in our culture, at least as I perceive it. We like to talk about love, anxiety, jealousy, hate, vengeance or grief. But the topic of shame is often like “an elephant in the room”. Perhaps it’s shameful to discuss shame?… […]