Interesting Psychotherapy Articles

If you find an interesting article regarding psychotherapy, therapists, transference etc place it here please. NOTE: this is just an archive for articles please start another thread for discussions.

Long Term Effects of Psychotherapy

Long-Term Effects of Psychotherapy: The Internalized Therapeutic Relationship | Psychiatric Times

The Attuned Therapist
http://www.drdansiegel.com/uploads/T...-therapist.pdf

Transference and Countertransference, written for the Therapist. I especially like the fact that this tells Ts they have to watch their own stuff and should at some point had therapy themselves.

Handling Transference and Countertransference Issues with the Difficult Patient.

Neuroscience of Attachment
The Neuroscience of Attachment | Linda Graham, MFT, Resources for Recovering Resilience

More on attachment stuff and what the therapist does about it:
Attachment Informed Psychotherapy

Your brain is particularly vulnerable to trauma at two distinct ages - Quartz

Our brain’s ability to process information and adapt effectively is dependent on a number of factors, including genes, nutrition, and life experiences. These life experiences wield particular influence over the brain during a few sensitive periods when our most important muscle is most likely to undergo physical, chemical, and functional remodeling.
According to Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and senior lecturer at MIT, your “terrible twos” and those turbulent teen years are when the brain’s wiring is most malleable. As a result, traumatic experiences that occur during these time periods can alter brain activity and ultimately change gene expressions—sometimes for good.
The “terrible twos”

Throughout the first two years of life, the brain develops at a rapid pace. However, around the second year, something important happens—babies begin to speak.
“We start to understand speech first, then we start to articulate speech ourselves and that’s a really complex thing that goes on in the brain,” Swart, who conducts ongoing research on the brain and how it affects how we become leaders, told Quartz. “Additionally, children start to walk—so from a physical point of view, that’s also a huge achievement for the brain.
Learning and understanding a new language forces your brain to work in new ways, connecting neurons and forming new pathways. This is a mentally taxing process, which is why learning a new language or musical instrument often feels exhausting.

“We start to understand speech first then we start to articulate speech ourselves and that’s a really complex thing that goes on in the brain.”

With so many important changes happening to the brain in such a short period of time, physical or emotional trauma can cause potentially momentous interruptions to neurological development. Even though you won’t have any memories of the interruptions (most people can’t remember much before age five), any kind of traumatic event—whether it’s abuse, neglect, ill health, or separation from your loved ones—can lead to lasting behavioral and cognitive deficits later in life, warns Swart.
To make her point, Swart points to numerous studies on orphans in Romania during the 1980s and 1990s. After the nation’s communist regime collapsed, an economic decline swept throughout the region and 100,000 children found themselves in harsh, overcrowded government institutions.
“[The children] were perfectly well fed, clothed, washed, but for several reasons—one being that people didn’t want to spread germs—they were never cuddled or played with,” explains Swart. “There was a lot of evidence that these children grew up with some mental health problems and difficulty holding down jobs and staying in relationships.”
Swart continues: “When brain scanning became possible, they scanned the brains of these children who had grown up into adults and showed that they had issues in the limbic system, the part of the brain [that controls basic emotions].”
In short, your ability to maintain proper social skills and develop a sense of empathy is largely dependent on the physical affection, eye contact, and playtime of those early years. Even something as simple as observing facial expressions and understanding what those expressions mean is tied to your wellbeing as a toddler.
The research also found that the brains of the Romanian orphans had lower observable brain activity and were physically smaller than average. As a result, researchers concluded that children adopted into loving homes by age two have a much better chance of recovering from severe emotional trauma or disturbances.
The teenage years

By the time you hit your teenage years, the brain has typically reached its adult weight of about three pounds. Around this same time, the brain is starting to eliminate, or “prune” fragile connections and unused neural pathways. The process is similar to how one would prune a garden—cutting back the deadwood allows other plants to thrive.
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“At that age, they’re starting to become more understanding of social relationships and politics. It’s really sophisticated.”

During this period, the brain’s frontal lobes, especially the prefrontal cortex, experience increased activity and, for the first time, the brain is capable of comparing and analyzing several complex concepts at once. Similar to a baby learning how to speak, this period in an adolescent’s life is marked by a need for increasingly advanced communication skills and emotional maturity.
“At that age, they’re starting to become more understanding of social relationships and politics. It’s really sophisticated,” Swart noted. All of this brain activity is also a major reason why teenagers need so much sleep.
Swart’s research dovetails with the efforts of many other scientists who have spent decades attempting to understand how the brain develops, and when. The advent of MRIs and other brain-scanning technology has helped speed along this research, but scientists are still working to figure out what exactly the different parts of the brain do.
What is becoming more certain, however, is the importance of stability and safety in human development, and that such stability is tied to cognitive function. At any point in time, a single major interruption has the ability to throw off the intricate workings of our brain. We may not really understand how these events affect our lives until much later—which is why efforts to unlock the secrets of the brain’s inner workings remain so vital.
You can follow Vivian on Twitter at @vivian_giang. We welcome your comments ideas@qz.com.

Love this one!!!

A Helpful Way to Conceptualize and Understand Reenactments

About trauma reenactments...

^

What a waste of intellectual ability writing some of these articles. It's as if they were required writing to pass a course and impress the professor. Well, I for one am not impressed. Sometimes a duck is just a duck and we needn't go back looking to blame the mother or father on every failing someone has. Society, as a whole, is often the culprit in my opinion. It can make you or break you. All of us are contributing factors.

Which one do you speak of? All of these? I thought this thread was not to be for discussion... I for one, think a person can learn from anything a person writes. Seems like you learned that there is nothing good from the things people write and that they are a waste of time. Sad.

I never said they were good articles or particularly well-written ones. I feel that if some people find an article interesting others might find them interesting also. If you wish to debate the validity or credibility of a certain article please feel free to make a thread in the forum. I am sure you will get a lively debate.

For those that are doing / are interested in psychoanalysis, I think this is a nice article about the process from a modern psychoanalytic perspective. It has quite detailed discussion about different types and stages of transference and countertransference as well.
http://www.nacsw.org/Publications/Pr...ansference.pdf

Yoga and PTSD by Bessell Van der Kolk
http://www.traumacenter.org/about/.....u09.p12-13.pdf

It would be interesting to hear specifics about what you find so objectionable about these articles. Perhaps you'd be willing to start another thread related to this. I don't think that Ad Hominem attacks against the authors are very productive.

I don't know what the addy is but there's a wonderful article, or book, by Judith Nelson titled, "Crying is a two person behavior".

Also, I agree that "Sizzling" could be more specific about what is wrong with each article in particular. And it sounds like Sizzling has gotten hurt by some experiences that lead to throwing it all into the trashheap. To give Sizzling some credit, though, Freud said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But he also was shortsighted about transference issues, that have been better understood and treated in recent decades. He treated mostly neurotic patients and was very short on how to deal with the schizoid problems. Therapy is very different for those, respectively. I learned the hard way how being treated like a neurotic was all wrong, as I was schizoid. Now, when I read books or articles, I know to make a difference between neurosis treatment and schizoid treatment. BPD requires different approaches, too. Most of us on the site for awhile, know about this, I realize.

10 therapy interventions
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...s-introduction

Informative article for anyone with CPTSD or childhood trauma

GRIEVING and COMPLEX PTSD By Pete Walker, M.A.
Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Thanks for posting this article. I haven't seen it explained this clearly before. In going to look up the author.

Hi! I was wondering if any of you have tried to adopt a radical paradigm shift with regards to mental health. While there is no specific research, it appears that several Far eastern approaches to mental illness and spirituality work just as well as psychotherapy