How To Address Therapy Clients' "Undercurrents" and Stress In Therapy

September 1, 2021 Ili Rivera Walter, PhD, LMFT

Feeling confident when offering therapy to families is a goal for many therapists and counselors. When we face the limitations of an individual perspective on treatment, we are left to wonder, “What theory, or techniques, can help this client comprehensively?”

Dr. Scott Sells explains two techniques from the Family Systems Trauma Model (FST) that will reframe family problems and help lead to second-order change. FST is applicable to your work whether you see individuals, couples, or families.

Treating Traumatized Families: An Introduction to the Family Systems Trauma Model (FST), with Dr. Scott Sells

March 4, 2021 Ili Rivera Walter, PhD, LMFT

Treating Traumatized Families with Dr. Scott Sells

Dr. Scott Sells, PhD, LCSW, LMFT is my interview guest for this post. He is the founder of the Family Systems Trauma Model, and the Family Trauma Institute, as well as the author of three books on methods for treating families and children, within the context of family therapy.

By watching this video, or reading the transcript, you will learn:

A working definition of the term traumatized family
Three essential steps you may be missing in your clinical work with families.
One thing you can do right now to improve engagement and outcomes with your family clients.
How to learn more techniques that will reinvent your family therapy work.

The Importance of Using Metaphors and Metaphoric Tales as a Therapeutic Intervention

April 21, 2020 Carolina Díaz

Using Metaphor as a Therapeutic Intervention

Metaphor is a figure of speech that consists of naming, describing, or qualifying something through its similarity or analogy to something else. It’s not just about songwriting or poetry-- we use metaphors all the time. After all, we all “fall in love” or “get stuck” at some point in our lives.

In the psychoanalytic approach, metaphors have always been very important, since the unconscious mind is

Are Gottman Method and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) Compatible?

September 10, 2019 Margie Wheelhouse, LMFT

Are Gottman Method and EFT Compatible? | Family Therapy Basics

Couples counseling today is so much more effective than in decades past. There is almost too much information out there to guide therapists. It can be overwhelming.

I have seen many discussions about two of the main therapeutic models for couple therapy: Sue Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy, and John and Julie Gottman’s Gottman Method. The discussion can be, like so many discussions, very polarized at times. But there is such a richness and joy to learning from both (not to exclude all of the other contributors to the field right now) that the idea of folding together some of what these models offer seems inevitable.