Working With Your Dream: How to journal associations
This is a sample of one of the written prompts for the course, a free offering to give you a sense of how to use journaling to explore associations to your dream. The course will go beyond this to include both written and live group discussion, video presentations, responses to questions and more. It’s not
Do your dreams both fascinate and mystify you? We have answers!
Dreams are invaluable allies in our relationship with ourselves, but for most people, they seem like a nonsensical mystery, or they are barely ever recalled. How do we remember and make sense of them? I have some answers for you… When I wrote my first book, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy (Routledge, 2019), I
Come home to yourself via your dreams
Is your inner life getting lost in the fray? Are you feeling overwhelmed with information, tasks and all the shiny objects that bombard us from the online world? Yes, this is another invitation, but one with a difference. This is an invitation to slow down and look inward, an opportunity to come home to yourself
Four Reasons to Work with Dreams… and at the risk of being dramatic, they can even save lives!
By Dr. Leslie Ellis The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of my recent book which outlines 4 excellent reasons to work with dreams. This list is aimed at psychotherapists, but holds true for all dreamers! So, why work with dreams? They point to our most salient emotional concerns It may seem that
Gendlin’s Radical Impact on Psychotherapy: A summary of his top 3 papers
What matters is that the therapist is another human person who responds, and every therapist can be confident that he can always be that. (Gendlin, 1968) In honor of Eugene Gendlin’s lifetime achievement awards for contribution to psychotherapy theory (from APA, USABP and others), I have summarized his most important articles here. The radical
Strategies to tame the inner critic
In our lives, and in our clinical practice, we have all encountered the inner critic, and it can be a true impediment to connecting deeply with ourselves from the inside. Although everyone has a different version, the basic experience is the same: that of a repetitive and demeaning refrain that knows our particularly sensitive spots
Treating Complex Trauma: Straddling Two Worlds
A brief review of Trauma and the Soul: A psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interruption by Donald Kalsched (Routledge, 2013) In his book Trauma and the Soul, Kalsched (2013) asks us to stand between two worlds – with our embodied sense of all the trauma that is present in ourselves and in the world,
Safety is the treatment, but a moving target — and love is the answer
The following is a brief review of some key concepts from Clinical Applications of the Polyvagal Theory (Stephen Porges & Deb Dana, Eds., Norton, 2018). It is now well understood that until our trauma clients genuinely feel safe, no healing will take place. “Cues of safety are the treatment,” according to Dr. Stephen Porges. His Polyvagal
I was asked recently to recommend some books for new therapists. I offered my favorites, Irvin Yalom’s The Gift of Therapy, Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing, and Jacquelyn Small’s Becoming Naturally Therapeutic. They were not really what the intern was asking for, which was specific techniques, solutions and more certainty about what to say in sessions. I