Dr. Kae Hixson joins me to discuss MBNET, the blended model we developed for treating patients struggling with complex interpersonal trauma.

How do we decide what human traits, behaviors, and subjective experiences to pathologize? What makes something about a person a problem that we try to fix?

If so many of us can agree that our diagnostic constructs need updating or reimagining, how do we do go about that? Today I'm in conversation with Dr. Miri Forbes, an expert in psychopathology who is doing innovative research on creating more empirically-supported diagnostic constructs.

Even if you never use diagnosis, the language and concepts of psychiatric diagnoses are out there. It shapes our professional discourse, past and present, and increasingly impacts our clients’ thinking when they arrive in our offices.

Dr. Awais Aftab and I dig into whether Borderline Personality Disorder is “real” and what that means, how it relates to the philosophical concept of epistemic injustice, how context influences the utility of a diagnosis, and more.

I want to explore some of the reasons why we might get angry with clients–some situational, some due to the very nature of the therapeutic dyad–and where we go from there, even if it gets messy or uncomfortable.

Be honest. When you think about overt conflict with a client, is your first thought that it’s a site of exciting progress, full of potential for movement?

Our journey towards treating our clients as independent adults begins with acknowledging our childhood patterns and the wounds we still carry. This self-awareness is not only a path to personal growth but also a key to improving our professional practice.

Our shared experiences as parentified children not only draw us to this field, but according to today’s guest, they fundamentally influence and shape how we practice once we become therapists.

In a relatively young field like neuroscience, paradigm shifts, misconceptions, corrections, retractions, and foundational remodels are inevitable. Which causes problems when the paradigms we’ve adopted as true turn out to be mistaken.

Writer and cultural critic Kristen Martin joins me to unpack some of the all-too-common misrepresentations and over-interpretations of neuroscience and the implications for our field and the people we treat.

Contending with therapy’s history opens a dialogue between ourselves and our forebears in ways that move the profession forward and bring us together in solidarity and kinship. And that is a project worth taking on.

If you go down a list of the founders and early theorists of therapy, you’ll find that many of them were Jews. Writer and therapist hannah baer, joins me to fig into therapy’s Jewish roots.

Riva and Dr. K Hixson have joined up to create The Kiln, a comprehensive supervision and training program for pre-licensed therapists in Oregon.

To wrap up season two of A Therapist Can’t Say That, I’m continuing my reflections on my ten years as a therapist.

After ten years of being a therapist, when the work I do has become part of the mundane fabric of my day, I still remember so clearly the magic of being so in it with my first client. So today, I’m reflecting on ten years of being in this field.

Today, I’m digging why so many parentified children end up in this field, and how the drives of the parentified child help and hinder us in this work.

Today, my dear friend and colleague K Hixson returns for a conversation about immediacy and why we believe that it is such a potent tool.

Inspired by my conversation in the last episode with Dr. Andrea Celenza, today I want to talk about tolerating paradoxes and about love in the context of therapy.

To guide us in wrestling with this very fraught subject in a deeper, broader, and more generative way, I am so excited to bring you my conversation with psychologist and author Dr. Andrea Celenza.