Thinking in Thirds Closing The Session (Part III of III)
How Do You Close a Session in a Meaningful Way? In the previous 2 parts on Thinking in Thirds, I’ve detailed about the process of Stage 1 of creating an invitational beginning and Stage 2...
Category: First Sessions
Thinking in Thirds: Going Deeper (Part II of III)
In Part I of Thinking in Thirds, I talked about the rule of three in various domains like the performing arts, storytelling and music, and how segmenting the therapy hour into thirds can be structurally...
Take Note of These 4 Perennial Factors of Your Clients
I’m amazed it has taken me about 2 decades of writing case-notes to finally come up with this system for myself. I’ve been using this particular format to capture what I call “evergreen” information,...
Outrospection
This originally appeared in the book, The First Kiss: Undoing the Intake Model and Igniting First Sessions in Psychotherapy, Chapter 19. “What is Your View of the Problem?” “Curiosity never killed the cat.” ~...
The Cobra Effect
Way back, the British wanted to reduce the amount of cobras in colonial Delhi, so they decided to start a bounty on those snakes. And they expected this would solve the problem. All of...
10 Frontiers Problems to Solve
Date: 23rd June 2020. I started writing the first draft of this list of problems to solve in April 2019. There were like 15-17 problems at first… and that was more than a year...
Circle of Development
Note: The original version of this article first appeared in Psychotherapy.net, June 2019. Today we are going to use the concept of Circle of Development (COD) to elaborate on how clinical supervisors can help...
4 Lessons from 20 Weeks of Very Bad Therapy
Ben and Carrie got me on their show for one of their episodes. (Listen to Episode 11, regarding the problem with an intake model. More about this in the book, The First Kiss). What they are doing is so underrated. I asked them in passing, “Wouldn’t it be super interesting to hear what you both learned after doing the first 20 episodes, so that we can learn too?”
I was surprised that they took up the invitation.
This is a guest post by Ben Fineman and Caroline Wiita.
The Domino Effect
A domino can knock over another domino about 1.5x larger than itself. A regular domino fall is a linear progression, whereas in a geometric profession, as described by physicist Lorne Whitehead “a very small...
9 Distinctions of Burn Out
Despite our sophisticated understanding of various psychological mechanisms that lead to stress, anxiety, and depression in our clients, we have a tendency to conflate the signal for the fire. The alarm bells tell us that something’s burning. Unless it’s a false alarm, the sirens aren’t the problem.
The experience of burnout is symptomatic of a compounded problem. What we need to gain clarity of is what cumulated to the emotional exhaustion.
Is Less Really More?
Turns out that in order to make better decisions, we need less information, rather than more. Director of the Harding Center of Risk Literacy at Max Planck Institute German psychologist Gerg Gigerenzer notes “Experts...
Personal Learnings: Looking Back In Order To Move Forward (Part II of II)
“What is essential is invisible to the eye.” ~Fred Rogers In the last blog post, I wrote about the personal side of I’ve learned from the peaks and troughs of 2018. Today, I’d...
Private Thoughts: Looking Back In Order to Move Forward (Part I of II)
I haven’t been able to hit publish for the past several weeks. I feel crippled by some intense glass walls. These walls seem to have voices that utter, “It’s not good enough,” “That’s nothing...
Follow the Spark
The paperback of the book, The First Kiss: Undoing the Intake Model and Igniting First Sessions in Psychotherapy is now available! The ebook from various retailers (Kindle, Apple, Kobo, etc.) with different reading formats is...
Follow The Pain
The paperback of the book, The First Kiss: Undoing the Intake Model and Igniting First Sessions in Psychotherapy is now available! The ebook from various retailers (Kindle, Apple, Kobo, etc.) with different reading formats is...
Avoid TBU (“True But Useless”) Information
Welcome back to Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development (FPD) blog. Today, another snippet from the recently released book, The First Kiss: Undoing the Intake Model and Igniting First Sessions in Psychotherapy. (Available here with various retailers).
Differences in Schools of Psychotherapy, and Why We Need Them.
Note: We take a breather from the topic of first sessions in today’s blog. A handful more chapters from the newly released book, The First Kiss, will be shared here in the coming weeks...
The 4P’s versus The 1P
Here’s chapter 3 of the book, The First Kiss. eBook is released today. Happy 4th of July to all American readers!
The Perils of an Intake Model
Here’s chapter two of the book, The First Kiss: Undoing the Intake Model…
Intake Second (Not First)
Over the next few blogs, I will share with you excerpts from the book, The First Kiss: Undoing the Intake Model… Each chapter is to the point. This book will be in ebook and...
Undoing the Intake Model in Psychotherapy
Below is an introductory excerpt from the forthcoming book, The First Kiss: Undoing the Intake Model and Igniting First Sessions in Psychotherapy.
What Therapy Is (Or Isn’t).
The psychodynamic camp says, “Your past is the problem.” The third wave mindfulness therapist says “Mindlessness is the problem.” The emotion-focused therapist says, “Your unresolved feelings are the problem.” The pioneering team at Mental...
Three Ways to Develop First Principles in Your Clinical Practice
Try this little thought experiment: Take a piece of paper, and in the next 2-3mins, in no more than 2-3 paragraphs, write down your philosophy of what guides you in therapy. Most of us...
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