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 […]
The Painted Bird: Culture and Stigma
“The Painted Bird” is the tittle of a novel by a Polish-American writer, Jerzy Kosinski, and describes World War II as seen by a Jewish (or Gipsy?) boy wandering through small towns in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. At some point the boy is in the company of a professional bird catcher. He watches how the man […]
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?… […]