My new years resolution for 2020? To keep working with the homeless. Why would I make such a resolution? I hope at least some of my reasons are altruistic. I like working with this group people. They are very similar population to the prison population where I worked for a number of years. Psychologically quite …
The politics of diagnosis.
The problem being is the entire Australian population gets pathologized.
The life of a PK
I immediately found this an interesting discussion because I am also a PK. I am a psychologist’s kid (or psychotherapists kid).
Contracting in psychotherapy
The problem with demand contracts is the client may just lie to you.
Drugs and danger
You can’t keep lying to a group of people and not expect them to work that out.
Working with the demon in therapy
As I said, this was the first time we had ever had significant dialogue between me and this part of her. It will be interesting to see over time what happens, especially her reaction to me.
Death anxiety
One of the goals in trauma debriefing therapy is to reestablish this contamination in the client so they again begin to lie to themselves their potential mortality.
Workshop on the demon sub personality.
It is hoped this workshop can happen in the future. And that I can do demonstration leading on the demon in clients for people at the workshop to observe. However that means there will need to be people in the workshop who have identified this sub personality in them selves, as not all people have …
Understanding feelings in others. Is empathy possible?
Empathy is really quite a self involved process that is about self and not the other.
Understanding feelings in others. Is empathy possible?Read More
Make feels and LOC
People with an internal LOC are quite willing to have personal insight to how they may be contributing to their own problems such as their rackets and the games they may play.
Evidence based psychotherapy
As you can see psychodynamic therapy does quite well.
Introjection in psychotherapy
This provides an interesting insight into introjection in this instance. She hasn’t introjected what I have said but instead introjected my voice sound and quality. Then she has applied that introjected voice to her own words.
Working through scared feelings.
I personally disagree with this. In my view humans are naturally communal beings and we need (are dependent) on others at least to some degree.
Unconscious communication in therapy
If the conscious and unconscious want different things always give the client what the unconscious wants.
The shadow
But then after halloween is over that part of us is quickly packed away again safe from our conscious.
The suicide homicide attempt
2. If things get too bad I will kill myself and others.
My unconscious perceptions of psychotherapy
There were three clients I was making appointments with for the next week and they were all very heavily pregnant women. That was all the dream was.
Games and enactments
A game can then be viewed as an unsophisticated attempt by the person to repair self by bringing unconscious material to the surface.
Therapeutic community and who we are
Humans are naturally group like creatures. It is natural for them to form into groups. It is natural for them to form into groups and discuss things including the problems they are having both practical and psychological. Indeed it is argued by Farhad Dalal that the social or group is the most primal aspect of …
Therapeutic community culture and the Free Child
The Gouldings developed a method of group psychotherapy known as the marathon. This is a therapeutic experience where the members of the therapy group would live together for a period of time and are all part of a therapy group. This could last for one weekend or one week. This structure allows for the …
Three ways of using transference in therapy
The client is then asked to respond to the therapist, who is now seen as say mother, in a way they always wanted to, but never did as a child. For instance the client may have been angry at mother but never expressed it, or they only expressed it in a passive aggressive way.
The psychological need for violent images – Part 2
This blog post follows on from the previous one titled, “The psychological need for violent images.” In that it was proposed that humans have a natural inbuilt psychological mechanism that allows them to desensitise to offensive and distressing images. Humans will desensitise quite quickly to violent images. If one sees violence a few times then …
Therapy of self destructiveness
One does not seek to do therapy on this aspect of the personality but one embraces it and seeks to develop some kind of coexistence with it. One embraces their depression or learns to love their panic attacks one could say. It is accepted as a normal part of their thanatos. it can’t be changed even if one wanted to.
Curing alcoholism – switch the addiction
Where mother’s injunction says “Don’t leave me!” Synanon says “Stay here instead.” (p.185-186). He also says elsewhere, “Curing an addict is the easiest thing in the world – if.
Some therapeutic observations of the AA approach
In most counselling situations this can not occur. It may get too expensive and most often the person has to make appointments with the counsellor such that they have to wait days if not weeks to meet. Even if it is free or they can afford it most counsellors don’t really see the same client …
Stroke deprivation
As Eric Berne said, “A stroke is a unit of attention” and one can have positive strokes and negative strokes. As a therapist it is easy to forget the importance of strokes and the important therapeutic role they can play. The importance of them is no better demonstrated than by looking at a whole discipline …
Gambling addiction vs drug addiction
The DSM-5 includes gambling addiction in the substance-related and addictive disorders along with the drug and alcohol addictions. Whilst this could be seen as a widely held belief that gambling should be included in such a category along with drugs and alcohol it does have some difficulties. Firstly, in my book I see the dependent …