Jonathan Shedler
Professor, psychologist, author. Tweets about psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy. I say the quiet part out loud.
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In every successful therapy, there is a period when the patient feels more lost than ever. They are relinquishing old ways of being & have not yet consolidated new ways We are cha...
1/ Listening non-judgmentally is not something therapists learn from a book or class. It takes years of work We can listen without judging because we have examined the dark corner...
1/ One of most important things I've learned: Severe personality problems find *camouflage.* No one thinks “I’m a sadist” or “I'm a malignant narcissist.” They find a belief syst...
1/ Social psychologists long ago proved something utterly terrifying People will disregard WHAT THEY SEE WITH THEIR OWN EYES to conform to what other people say In a classic 1951...
1/ I made a list a while ago, about therapy🚩 that should make you think long & hard about whether you’re seeing right therapist Starting another, please add -agrees with nearly e...
None of these diagnoses has any relevance to treatment. Big difference betw DSM diagnosis (categorizing) & *case formulation* (understanding what’s happening psychologically that’s...
1/ Ten “vital signs” of psychotherapy progress* 🧵 1️⃣Greater attachment security / sense of safety in relationships 2️⃣More integrated & coherent experience of self & others 3️⃣In...
1/ It drives me crazy when "therapists" violate patient privacy/confidentiality—and other therapists immediately frame it an "ethics" issue It's an ethics problem, sure. But more...
1/ If we had "evidence-based" sex, researchers who get little sex themselves would write manuals w standardized instructions, do studies showing instruction-manual sex better than...
"The unfortunate fate of many fashionable psychiatric terms is to be misused and overused. Just such a fate has befallen the term 'splitting...' This label is almost invariably app...
1/ Depression is the psychic equivalent of fever. Fever is a non-specific response to an enormous range of underlying physiological conditions, from the common cold to ebola. Depre...
1/ Patients will talk about what their therapists want to hear. Therapists take this as proof the things they themselves are preoccupied with are also psychologically central for t...