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Are therapists more like shamans or family doctors? Explorers of human depths or more like Siri on your iPhone, just directing you from one place to another? I'm a skeptic about whether any clinical approach is good at getting clients consistently to the promised land of transformation. Maybe therapy is better understood as being about breakthroughs—small, medium, and large—rather than about transformation.

I used to get very excited when I thought that clients were about to embark on what I called a project—a course of action that crystallized a problem into a unifying undertaking. But however valuable creativity can be in setting up the conditions in which transformation may take place, change itself requires repetition and commitment to altering habits.

There are plenty of similarities between my clinical and sport psychology work. Like any group, however, athletes have their own lingo, culture, rituals, and lifestyle. Understanding the ins and outs of them can give you a leg up on establishing rapport, trust, and mutual understanding.

While working with child survivors during the 1992 Waco siege, I found that we had a group of children that had essentially been marinated in fear. The only way we could get them the help they needed was to apply our understanding of how fear affects the brain and then consequently changes behavior. We quickly learned that people, not programs, change people.

A therapist’s skill base and experience are vital to good therapy. But they’re rarely enough. The following story, taken from Daniel Siegel's 2017 Networker Symposium Dinner Storytelling piece, highlights the need to bring vulnerability and some measure of risk into the treatment room, letting go of any secret ambition to become a Master of the Therapeutic Universe. There’s no such person.

We've all experienced what happens when we get tied up in our clients' knotted lives. But how do we attune to our clients' experiences and not get knotted up ourselves? In essence, self-care becomes more than just taking enough time off, balancing our practice, and getting good supervision. It involves getting our bodies back.

Reflections on a Life, Legacy, and Growing Older. A maverick and a visionary in the '60s and '70s, Salvador Minuchin transformed the very idea of what a therapist was supposed to be—a brash interventionist willing to make people change regardless of what they were feeling, or even knew they were feeling. Beyond that, he put forth a brand new model of psychotherapy—family therapy. In the following article, he reflects on his journey as a therapist and what clinicians need to do in order to master their craft.

An Interview with Gabor Maté. Gabor Maté's TED talk on “The Power of Addiction and the Addiction of Power” has had almost 700,000 views. He insists that addictive patterns of behavior are rooted in alienation and emotional suffering. In the interview that follows, Maté explores the meaning of addictions.

Rekindling Our Moral Imagination and Courage. Both good writing and effective therapy rely on the ability to move beyond the self to understand how the world looks and feels to another person. Here, an author and psychotherapist argues that this quality of "moral imagination" is crucial to our ability to face the enormous challenges that face us, not only in our consulting rooms, but in the wider world we share with one another.

Expanding the conversation on couplehood. By questioning some of the fundamental premises of traditional marriage, couples therapist Esther Perel has become, at least for the moment, psychotherapy’s public face and most quotable voice. But what is she saying that’s so intriguing and makes her stand out from all the other relationship experts our field produces?