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Most recent posts
- Psychotherapy and Medication
- Female Therapist or Male Therapist?
- The Failure of Categories
- Psychotherapy: Clinical Supervision and Training
- Anxiety plus Depression
- Addiction to Drugs and Alcohol: Self-hatred, cravings, and therapy
- Finding the best therapist
- Empathy is not enough
- Psychotherapy in NYC
- Experiential psychotherapy
- Advertising psychotherapy: Attraction not promotion
- Expect the unexpected: Living with alcoholics and dysfunctional families
- Psychotherapy and spirituality
- Trauma and dissociation
- Finding meaning: Existential psychotherapy
- The anxiety spiral
- Depression: Struggling in the dark
- Codependency: Being dependent on others’ dependency
- Therapy and the 12 steps
- Trauma and memory
- CBT and the zeitgeist
- Psychologists, Psychiatrists, and Social Workers
Tag Archives: experiential psychotherapy
The Failure of Categories
Experience does not neatly fit into a category. If you tell me that you have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, that communicates a list of potential criteria – mood swings, cycling, etc., but it does not tell me anything at all about your experience. When someone focuses exclusively on diagnostic criteria – your ‘symptoms’ – you become nothing more than a pathological entity. You are not merely a bundle of ‘symptoms.’ These diagnostic categories serve the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry, not you. Continue reading
Empathy is not enough
Empathy can be seen as the matching of feelings or the matching of minds. It can reflect compassion, recognition and communion. It reflects an emotional understanding of another person’s feelings or problems. The ability to be empathic can be a … Continue reading
Experiential psychotherapy
Whether we can know anything outside the world as we experience it is an interesting philosophical question, but it has profound implications when we try to understand another person. This is particularly true in the context of psychotherapy and trying to help another person heal. Continue reading
Posted in Psychotherapy & counseling nyc
Tagged anxiety therapy nyc, approaches to therapy, Buddhist therapy, depression therapy nyc, emapthic therapy nyc, existential psychotherapy nyc, experiential psychotherapy, holistic therapy nyc, humanistic psychotherapy, nondiagnostic therapy, nyc psychologists therapy
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CBT and the zeitgeist
CBT is a popular therapeutic style, now. The fad. In my view, lasting change of an important type cannot come from such goal-directed, externally-driven exercises. CBT relies on a logical and linear system, and in my experience, people in fact act globally and their actions represent the final common pathway that grows out of a gestalt of their drives, desires, needs, and unconscious and conscious processes. True change arises from an appreciation of complexity. Lasting change involves integration of different aspects of your personality, of understanding why you do things, of unfolding and deepening your understanding of yourself. Effective work with a good therapist involves facilitating change, not directing it. Continue reading