EMDR Therapy and Getting Past Your Past
This Friday, March 2nd, 2012, GoodTherapy.org is thrilled to welcome Dr. Francine Shapiro, creator of EMDR Therapy. Dr. Shapiro will present The Past is Present: Understanding the Effects of Unprocessed Memories and Using EMDR Therapy In Treatment, a FREE CE teleconference for GoodTherapy.org members available with 1.5 CE Credits. We encourage you to join us for this exciting event, so if you have not already, register... Read More
The label “energy therapy” has been applied to a variety of practices, including those in which a practitioner works on a client, such as in reiki, as well as to describe movement-based therapies that aim to balance one’s own energy, including qigong and tai chi. Energetic healing practices have been among the more difficult complementary and alternative medicine approaches for the conventional healthcare community to understand or embrace, as we do not yet have a method for directly observing or measuring “chi” (life force energy) or changes to it. Yet, interest in and use of energy... 
What Christmas gives to the family, Valentine’s Day offers to partners; a chance to revel in our romantic ideal versions of relationship. Both holidays are fraught with intense expectation and grave peril.
Thoughtfully matching all our feelings about our partner with a single, intensely meaningful gift is an impossible task. Even as we try to understand our partner's predicament, we can be left nursing an overriding sense of disappointment. How have you chosen to punish your partner for his or her fallible gift giving?
Whether or not your Valentine’s Day hopes have been gratified or crushed... 
There are many different paths one can take to healing through Expressive Arts Therapy. Let's begin by looking at a major component of this process, which is allowing the creative process to begin.
Releasing the Creative Spirit
Our healing journey is made possible by opening to our creative process. We invite flow again. We say, “Ah there you are, I’ve missed you.” When flow is permitted, we open a channel to buried treasures just beneath the surface of our unconscious yearning. We wonder why we waited so long to let go to our creative spirit. Perhaps we were bound by obligations, commitments,... 
After 5 years of sobriety, in 1985, I began to notice a pattern in my sexual relationships: Even if I really liked someone, I couldn’t go more than 3 months before my attraction to them fizzled. I would then find some reason to end the relationship, although I never really understood why, and it made me feel bad. Thankfully, while I was leading a weekend retreat on Spirituality in Recovery, one participant pressed for bringing the subject of sex into the process.
Although I was unprepared, it gave me the opportunity to address the issue, and I shared my struggles with the group. When I asked... 
Sometimes people wonder how they will find true love. Partly you have to be ready with open eyes and hearts to see it and act on it when it appears. Then you need to hang out together and make sure it’s really love and not just a flash in the pan. Live your love for awhile, get confident, but don’t take forever before you make it permanent. Like all things, love can spoil or get stale if it doesn’t develop into the full catastrophe of making a life together—picking up socks or cereal in the supermarket, deciding where to go on vacation, or live, or how to spend your money. Whose money?... 
This article is the second in a two-part series on Pragmatic/Experiential Therapy for couples.
Phase II: Developing New Habits for the Respectful Negotiation of Differences
In the second phase of therapy with Mary and Fred, attention shifted from the past to the present. I assisted Fred in developing internal habits that enabled him to avoid hitting the panic button when Mary became critical, dismissive, closed-minded, or inflexible, and I helped Mary develop the ability to check her tendency to blindly accept the validity of her knee-jerk interpretations of Fred’s actions. The process for... 
The COMBINE study of 2003 examined how behavioral modification and medication affected treatment outcome in people struggling with alcohol misuse. As a follow-up to that study, Katie Witkiewitz of the Department of Psychology at Washington State University evaluated the effectiveness of drink abstinence training as a component of COMBINE. Individuals with alcohol dependence can learn how to adaptively handle 
This case description is the first in a two-part series on Pragmatic/Experiential Therapy for couples.
“Things changed almost immediately once Johnny came along,” Fred explained. “Nothing I did was good enough. According to her, I was selfish and thought only about myself. At first I thought that maybe she was right, so I really tried to devote more attention to her. I called her during the day to say, ‘Hi,’ and I got babysitters so we could have dates, but it wasn’t enough. After awhile it became clear to me that I would never ‘meet the mark’ with her.” Mary painted a different... 
Toxic friends come in many forms—they can take much more than they add to the friendship; they can be a chronic complainer; they can tear you down—but the bottom line is that when you walk away from time spent with a toxic friend, you probably feel worse for the wear. If you think you might have a toxic friend in your life, take a moment to reflect on how you usually feel after being with this friend; if what you come up with includes words like drained, tired, unmotivated, worthless, or even downright depressed, you quite likely have a toxic friend. While it might be easy to identify the toxic... 
Families need to be together. After all, the family as a group exists to provide support, nurturance, food, shelter, resources, and a stable future to each member. While most families have their ups and downs, even stressed, impoverished, chaotic families want to live with one another. When is it in the family’s best interest for members to separate from one another? Can leaving the family home for a short while ever bring healing to the relationships in the long run?
Family separations occur in American culture in formal and informal ways. Formally, families can legally be ordered to separate... 
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an approach that is used to treat many mental health challenges, including 
