Therapy's Best (By Howard Rosenthal) - Part IV

* Jeffrey Kottler - On Being a Therapist; Compassionate Therapy: Working with Difficult Clients; Travel That Can Change Your Life; Doing Good; and Making Changes Last. The Last Victim. What makes a very fine therapist - besides being moral, ethical, kind, caring, and other such qualities - is that we've each discovered our own unique way of helping that fits our personality, interpersonal style, clinical situation, and client population.

* Al Mahrer on Experiential Therapy - actualization forces, Adlerian social interest, Jungian polarities, deep-seated frustrations leading to aggressions, Allportian traits, behavior patterns shaped by positive and negative reinforcements, the unfortunate residue of pathological parents, the defining effects of my birth order, the soci0cultural imprinting of my background, and my unconscious wish. I learned the contents of my psyche.
Experiencing; The Complete Guide to Experiential Psychotherapy; Becoming the Person You can Become: The Complete Guide to Self-Transformation
1) Discover the deeper potential for experiencing; 2) Welcome, accept, cherish the deeper potential for experiencing; 3) Undergo a qualitative shift into being the deeper potential for experiencing in the context of recent, earlier, and remote life scenes; 4) Be the qualitatively whole new person in scenes from the forthcoming new post-session world.
Open the session by being able to unlock the usual controls, set aside the usual state of vigilant self-awareness and self-consciousness, free oneself of rigidly clining to the person one rigidly clings to being, entering a state of openness and readiness for deep-seated wholesale change.
1) Let go of, disengage from the continuing person you are and have probably always been, and to 2) throw yourself into fully and completely being the whole person who is the living, breathing deeper potential for experiencing that you had discovered.

* Nancy McWilliams on Psychoanalysis: We each have to do this work in a way that is authentic, that is true to our idiosyncratic self. Psychotherapy attracts rather androgynous people.
www.nancymcwilliams.com

* Lia Nower on Gambling Addiction: personality profile - impulsive, intensity seeking, addicted to other substances, and typically depressed or anxious, risk-taking behavior in childhood with abuse, neglect, and addicting caregivers.
1). initially for socialization, the addictive nature of variable ratio reinforcement; 2) family instability, low self-esteem or significant life losses, depression or anxiety, and/or comorbid addictions; 3) serious personality pathology, mood disorders, terrible childhoods, histories of antisocial behavior, and comorbid addictions, ADHD, risk-taking, impulsivity (biological components)
Be realistic. Gambling ~ fun, excitement, meaning, hope. You can't take that away from a person without replacing it.

* Edwin S. Shneidman on Suicidal Patients - Ten Psychological Commonalities of Suicide
A working, positive transference relationship is what, in my opinion, keeps chronically dysphoric pessimistic patients alive. What is needed is a safe sanctuary for exploration, for nonjudgmental disputation, for modeling with someone who affirms life's values.
The patient's proclivity for constriction of mental thought, all or nothing thinking; the therapist should have his third ear attuned to the word only, perhaps the most dangerous word in the suicidal patient's vocabulary. What is called for is to break up the binary way of thinking and to widen the patient's conceptual blinders.
Make a list of options. "And you can always commit suicide, but there is no reason to do that today." "Now, let's look at our list, and would you please rank order them from the absolutely least acceptable on up to the least distasteful."
The least-undesirable-choice-under-these-circumstances
Postvention
Pay close attention to the language.
The therapist's task is often not to take the question at face value but to change the question so it can be answered in a more life-affirming way.

* Henry A. Murray