Author: William Bishop, LPC, LMFT, AAMFT Approved Supervisor
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Addiction Intervention Debate | Increasing Freedom by fostering an increase in consciousness, reflective ability, and emotional availability | Is there always a choice or are certain stimuli too controlling?
This post will talk about the different views on treating substance abuse by looking at the themes of determinism, reflective ability, mindfulness, self-awareness of a person’s emotional self, moral compass, freedom, disassociation, empathy, and addiction. I will propose the controversial suggestion that some addiction interventions might be unintentionally decreasing a person’s ability to freely make…
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Support group for teens with type 1 diabetes
Quick summary: Research has shown that support groups for teens with type one diabetes are extremely beneficial to the participants overall well-being. In fact, people who have diabetes tend to have lower incidences of mental health concerns as compared to the general population – this is thought to be because of the amount of familial,…
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An example of ‘Auras’ and ‘Energy’ for our left brained friends
Quick clarification – When someone says “I can see your energy” they are stating – “I can see the boundary of you personal space and that boundary is implying how you desire to be interacted with at this moment… this gives me insight into your emotional disposition.”
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Compassionately Assertive – Maintaining Boundaries without Aggression – using empathy and clarity to get your needs met
Quick summary: This post will explain how to use empathy, self-awareness, and assertiveness to ensure that your personal boundaries are respected by others. Often we have a difficult time when an instance calls for decisive action in order to help the environment to respect our individual boundaries. Some react with aggressiveness that protects a person’s…
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Parenting questions for couples – Questionnaire to increase synergy, collaboration, empathy, and overall understanding for couples who are co-parenting a child.
The intention of this exercise is to foster an open dialog surrounding the different parenting philosophies and different desires/dreams that each individual has for their children. As a person gains a greater insight into their partner’s philosophies along with a greater understanding or the emotional significance of those philosophies, they become better able to meet…
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‘not -talked-about’ themes in Human Sexuality – normalizing
Quick summary – the topic of ‘normal’ or ‘day to day’ sex is perhaps not always given as much attention as could be helpful to the masses. As sexual education slowly decreases while pornography and celebrity gossip increases we find ourselves in a society that does not always know if they are more different or…
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Play therapy explained | How to use play therapy | Attuning to your child | how and why it works
Quick Summary: Play therapy is an effective and developmentally accommodating way for a child to communicate emotional or otherwise ‘complex’ information to an adult. A child will often tell you about what they are currently feeling or thinking about with their toys or drawing etc… If an adult can pay attention to the story line…
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What is empathy? How do I know if I am experiencing empathy?
Quick summary – Empathy is when a person opens up their emotional boundaries and allows another person’s feeling to be cradled and nurtured within the loving hands of his/her understanding. Empathy is holding a narrative of another person and allowing yourself to feel the person’s emotions related to his or her storyline while understanding that…
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Existentialism in Psychotherapy
Existentialism is used in Psychotherapy to allow clients to explore their freedom in creating their own meaning. When a client finds his/her freedom to create meaning they greatly reduce their anxiety. The new meaning that a client creates can greatly reduce their suffering and can aid in a person’s recovery from a difficult lived experience.
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pathologizing, labels, dichotomies, existentialism and acceptance
Quick summary: I am offering a discussion concerning the drive to label and how labeling impacts suffering. There is a heated debate in the field of psychotherapy as to whether psychiatric (DSM) labels help or hurt the client’s recovery. I am commenting on what encourages our emotional reactions and behavior related to the topic.
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Anger and Arguments – Are you defending the topic or your self?
Quick summary: as part of increasing your self-awareness I suggest that you take a look at the topics that really get you ‘heated’ with the goal of coming to an understanding of how you personally identify with that topic. In this self-exploration you might just find that your emotion has very little to do with…
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Existential Recovery – Emotional freedom inherent in the choice of meaning
Quick summary: Most of us believe that the outside world is responsible for our emotions, that our emotional dispositions are externally controlled (ex. he/she or this event etc made me feel this way). I am going to suggest that the meaning that you place onto an occurrence in often what you are emotionally reacting to……
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Empathy building exercise – learning to be empathetic – increasing emotional understanding
Quick summary: In difficult times often we really want someone to ‘just be there for us’ and to ‘show compassion and understanding for what we are dealing with’ as opposed to offering pragmatic solutions or taking initiative to ‘fix it.’ In short people very often simply want empathy and they can feel worse, alone, or…
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Vengeance and the Ego
Quick summary: Vengeance is a tool which creates instability in an attempt to create a stable ego.
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The Evolution of CBT = Mindfulness – moving from changing projections to eliminating projections
I am suggesting that CBT will evolve into mindfulness as mindfulness reduces the unwanted affects of both positive and negative projections where as CBT is designed to reduce the unwanted affects of negative projections alone.
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Past goals driving current choices? – Overcoming your inner teenager
Quick summary: What drives your choices, ambitions and behaviors? I am going to suggest that many (if not most) of us still carry values, goals, wants, wishes, desires etc that we forgot to let go of when we grew into adults. Being a teenager is truly difficult… you believe that you are an adult though…
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Who are you? How to stop conforming to expectations and to start presenting the self you would like to present
Quick summary: Most people both consciously and unconsciously and both intentionally and unintentionally present themselves with different characteristics, beliefs, opinions, dispositions, emotionality, and behaviors etc in different settings. Who is the real you? How are different settings encouraging you to present your self in a certain way? If you closely examine the expectations of your…
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Problems sleeping? 10 Tips to help you sleep
Quick summary: I am giving you 10 tips that will lead you to create and maintain a healthy sleep cycle. Sleep is vital for optimal health… you owe it to yourself to dedicate yourself to a good night of sleep. If you can stay dedicated you should be able to create a stable sleep cycle…