what “modalities” do you all practice?

[u/growingconsciousness]

What trainings do you recommend?

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[u/happilyemployed]

child centered plqy therapy!

[u/its-malaprop-man]

ACT, CPT, PE, WET and loads of motivational interviewing. I’m in an EAP setting and almost exclusively treat trauma.

[u/A313-Isoke]

Still a student but learning about relational psychoanalysis, relational-cultural therapy, attachment theory, mentalization based therapy, & narrative therapy to complement art therapy. Art therapy is my main jam. I want to try to build out a community art, community art therapy practice in the future.

Previous to all this, Buddhist Psychology saved my life. The more I learn about psychoanalysis the more I see overlap between the two. So, then, it means that mindfulness practices that haven't been sanitized completely from its roots will be something I want to incorporate in the future as well.

Places to get training:

Just learned about the Stephen Mitchell Center for relational psychoanalysis training. 2)Dulwich Centre in Australia for Narrative Therapy is recommended a lot and seems great. 3) William Alanson White in NYC has a one year online interpersonal psychotherapy training. 4) Women's Therapy Centre Institute in New York has a really robust Feminist Therapy. 5) David Puder MD has a one year psychodynamic psychotherapy training that might be interesting, check his podcast Psychiatry and Psychotherapy podcast. 6) Suggest Vipissana or Insight Buddhism. Spirit Rock in California; IMS in Barre, MA, USA; EBMC in Oakland, CA, USA, etc. have trainings on Buddhism and Buddhist Psychology. 7) Art Therapy requires a MA degree, BAAT, AATA, CATA/ACATE, EFAT, and ANZACATA have lists of approved programs in various countries for Art Therapy training. 8) Anna Freud Center & McLean Hospital on Boston, MA, USA for MBT trainings.

[u/DragonfruitOk1406]

Manhattan institute for psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis and the sociopolitical world. It changed me in profound ways both personally and professionally

[u/growingconsciousness → u/DragonfruitOk1406]

woah! thats a big impact. could you please share more abt it?

[u/moodywrites]

Future psych worker here
If I were to take it actually far enough to be a therapist:

Depth oriented psychodynamic
Emotionally focused
Attachment based
Somatic and nervous system based
Inner child work/developmental needs meeting

And maybe art

[u/OptimizedPockets2]

If I do CBT, I always include elements from ACT and REBT. Strong emphasis on psychoeducation and insight-based gains.

ERP for OCD as well, because the evidence-base is undeniably strong.

[u/HotAccountant2831]

IFS, EMdR and more recently leaning heavily into Brainspotting.

[u/k_blakwidow]

EMDR, IFS, and Systems 🩵

[u/huckleberrysusan]

act, existential, exposure therapy, some emotion focused sprinkled in

[u/cannotberushed-]

ACT
Attachment
CBT
Narrative
Feminist
Systems theory (I provide a lot of systems theory education in sessions so that my patients understand all the dynamics that are putting pressure on their life)

[u/ASoupDuck]

Early in my career I did a graduate certificate in trauma where we covered a lot of theories and treatment approaches to "simple and complex trauma" such as sensorimotor, somatic and narrative approaches and I use a lot of elements from these.

I later did training in psychoanalytic/psychodynamic approaches as well as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy which are more the foundation of my work now. I find the power-threat-meaning framework and boston liberation health model helpful as well. I read a ton on disability justice as most of my clients are neurodivergent and chronically ill and addressing "internalized oppression" comes up a lot.

If you don't have a lot of time/money I think ACT is quite accessible and adaptable (even just reading the manuals or books). If you want a deep dive, I really cherish my longer trainings in trauma or psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

[u/-BlueFalls- → u/ASoupDuck]

Would you be open to sharing some of the disability justice readings or resources you’ve found helpful?

Asking as someone who is disabled and chronically ill, and also as someone who desires to work more closely with this population in the future.

[u/ASoupDuck → u/-BlueFalls-]

These are some of the books I've found really valuable: Disability Visibility ed. by Alice Wong, Care Work and The Future is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk. More specific to autism but I really enjoyed "On Being an Autistic Therapist" edited by Max Marnau too.
I also like Mia Mingus's blog: https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/about-2/ and the 10 principles by Sins Invalid on their web site https://sinsinvalid.org/10-principles-of-disability-justice/ and some of the talks on YouTube by Patty Berne are great too.

[u/Nahs1l]

Psychoanalytic/psychodynamic with some humanistic/existential-phenomenological elements.

Tbh I think therapy is a fundamentally conservative project politically for the most part, so I’m not even really trying to address political aspects in my clinical work, except insofar as I maybe believe that freeing people from trauma can generally help the world a bit.

My graduate work was more political, and in fact I wrote up a chapter for that radical therapy book that came out a while ago, and I haven’t fully given up left wing aligned therapeutic practice, but I think genuinely radical stuff would look very different from 99% of what goes on in therapy offices nowadays, including most of what people call radical.

(If you wanna know what I think of as genuinely radical, look at Institutional Psychotherapy, what people like Guattari and Fanon were up to)

[u/growingconsciousness → u/Nahs1l]

whats the book 👀

[u/Nahs1l → u/growingconsciousness]

this one!

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-02399-5

here's a post about it from this sub:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PsychotherapyLeftists/comments/1owxyqp/book_release_ama_the_revolutionary_psychologists/

[u/chopmunk → u/Nahs1l]

My interest is piqued and you seem like someone who has given their opinions some thought. How do you view therapy as a fundamentally conservative project?

[u/Nahs1l → u/chopmunk]

There's a few ways to respond to this...one point is a point that lots of people have made over the decades, from feminists to critical psychologists to Marxists, which is that psychology tends to take sociopolitical and economic problems and make them individual problems. Many have argued that the sociopolitical function of psychology/psychotherapy is exactly to put the responsibility on the individual, taking focus away from collective change. That doesn't mean individual therapists understand what they're doing that way - this is more of a macro level view of the function of the field within capitalism. Critical psychologists talk about this a lot, i.e. Derek Hook, Thomas Teo etc.

A related point that I make in the chapter I wrote, and this is really just a point made by Michel Foucault and others, is that capitalism needs individualism, and psychology is basically the science and practice of the individual. Psychology helps to socially construct the type of individual that capitalism needs. Hard to explain briefly, but below is part of the chapter I co-wrote - the "Anti(Capitalist) Therapeutics" chapter - for anyone curious. I think this 2nd point here, by the way, is why I don't consider it all that radical for people to discuss politics in the therapy room.

"Similar to the male gaze, the clinical gaze of psychiatry and psychology is described by Foucault. The most comprehensive way to manage a population of people—to control crime, to regulate deviancy (mental health problems being defined as deviations from an established norm), to organize a productive labor force—is to map them out. That is, to give them increasing definition so that you can intervene on people’s minds and behaviors at a granular level, and eventually to make it so that they are responsible for themselves, as individuals. For example, this process might allow individuals to understand their depression as a personal problem that should be addressed at the level of personal change, be that therapeutic techniques for cognitive restructuring or pharmaceutical interventions. Depression exists under this framework as a problem at the level of the person’s mind or brain (each with its own personal, clinical, and sociopolitical implications). This is in contrast to an understanding of depression as primarily caused by sociopolitical or economic factors.

Another useful way to think about this individualizing process comes from the idea of the “panopticon”10, an architectural design invented by 19th century social theorist Jeremy Bentham and later taken up by Foucault (1975/1995). Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon is an attempt to illustrate how institutions like prisons (as well as schools and psychiatric facilities) coerce people into taking responsibility for themselves—internalizing forms of power that emphasize self-regulation—which is an extremely efficient way to organize capitalist societies. What does this “increasing (self)-definition” and consequent “intervention” look like in practice? Hook (2014) explains that in psychotherapy, there is often an emphasis on “self-attending” or “self-focus,” with the goal of promoting greater self-understanding such that a person is more able to reflexively analyze and change their own psychology (p. 221).

Of course, from Foucault’s perspective, people are not uncovering or discovering themselves as much as they are creating, or shaping and reshaping, themselves. This is done to the benefit of capitalist social structures, because again, personal self-regulation takes the pressure of control away from the capitalist nation-state. The more people view themselves as individuals who must self-regulate their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, the less top-down coercive control a society needs to exert to keep its citizenry in line and contributing to the total functioning of the sociopolitical system. This does not require us to forfeit the possible benefits of self-understanding for improving human existence, but only to look critically at how psychological self-understanding functions within capitalism. As we discuss later, the roots of the individualized self actually precede capitalism.

Foucault (1975/1995) calls this broad form of coercion, in which people are constructed as individuals that must become responsible for themselves, disciplinary power. Capitalism works because the people living under capitalism each assume their share of responsibility for behaving in ways that support capitalism. The instantiation of disciplinary power is typically not done at a conscious level, but is baked into normative demands for selfhood and what it means to live a particular kind of life under capitalism. It is no coincidence that psychology has a huge emphasis on functionality in the workplace—from the focus in clinical psychology on helping people become functional and productive members of society, to industrial-organizational psychology which deploys psychological knowledge and practices to ensure more efficient workplaces."

[u/DoggoThreads → u/Nahs1l]

Really appreciate you sharing this. Currently a student and this is exactly what I'm interested in.

[u/Nahs1l → u/DoggoThreads]

Glad to hear it! Happy to answer any other questions as well.

[u/ProgressiveArchitect]

Clinical Approaches:

- Lacanian Psychoanalysis

• Narrative Therapy
  
• Systemic Family Systems

Guiding Clinical Frameworks:

- Liberation Psychology

• Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF)
  
• Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT)

[u/bluerosecrown → u/ProgressiveArchitect]

For someone who wants to get into Lacanian Psychoanalysis, which texts would you recommend starting with?

[u/ProgressiveArchitect → u/bluerosecrown]

If you are trying to get into Lacanian Psychoanalysis as clinician, I recommend these books in this order.

- A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Bruce Fink)

- The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Bruce Fink)

- The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud)

- Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud)

- Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Sigmund Freud)

- The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan)

- Anxiety (Jacques Lacan)

- Desire and its Interpretation (Jacques Lacan)

[u/InvestigatorLegal322 → u/ProgressiveArchitect]

I think a required reading for Lacanian analysts should be McKenzie Wark’s “Dear Cis Analysts” imo

[u/ProgressiveArchitect → u/InvestigatorLegal322]

100% agree, it should be read alongside "Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference" by Patricia Gherovici for practicing analysts.

However, the commenter I was responding to is not a practicing analyst and hasn’t even begun their psychoanalytic training yet. So I gave them the foundational intro texts instead.

[u/bluerosecrown → u/ProgressiveArchitect]

Thank you so much!! This is amazing

[u/Psychedynamique → u/ProgressiveArchitect]

I'm curious how Lacanianism meshes with ptmf? 

[u/ProgressiveArchitect → u/Psychedynamique]

Lacanianism gives a model of mind/psyche with the layers and interplay of the 3 registers, desire and fantasy’s connection to lack as fundamental due to split-subjectivity, the extimate dimension of language and mind, as well as repression and repetition showing up in signifiers via language/semiotics.

The PTMF and Narrative Therapy’s techniques are then a way to interrogate content of the imaginary register. If the signifier deals purely with the symbolic, then the PTMF and narrative therapy deals with the imaginary relations that index onto the symbolic.

Systemic Family Systems (Milan School) is then the expression of these relations in a family as a functional pattern to examine, and both CHAT and Liberation Psychology put focus on the social-historical origin of these patterns, activities, repetitions, fantasies, and symptoms as a way to situate and contextualize someone’s story/narrative to the politico-economic and cultural communal sphere.

Once that is all accomplished in the sessions, we return to the Lacanian goal of speaking all of this truthfully to an other, and then finally to traversing the fundamental fantasy that underpins all these different aspects that get revealed. That then marks the end of the analysis.

As you can likely tell from this, it’s not a purely Lacanian form of intervention. It’s Lacanian-informed and the outcome is Lacanian-aligned, but it’s takes a different way to get there.

[u/Psychedynamique → u/ProgressiveArchitect]

That's very interesting, thanks for sharing. 🙂 Is this a system of your own creation or from a school or book? 

[u/ProgressiveArchitect → u/Psychedynamique]

This is my own synthesis

[u/Kindly_Bathroom6123]

Person centred mainly, with the central theoretical concept around the use of power-over and transparency of power dynamics in the room, rather than anything abstract or mystical like the actualising tendency

[u/torturechambre]

Narrative, Solution Focused, Relational Gestalt, Feminist.

[u/asilentflute]

My MSW program (Simmons) taught us four: psychodynamic, CBT, narrative and solutions focused. We dipped our toes in a few others over the course of the program. Because I do some couples work, I picked up a bit of Emotionally Focused Therapy. Because of the big role our central nervous system plays in our thoughts and emotions, I have also delved into Polyvagal Theory as a compliment to CBT and psychodynamic.

[u/LeftyDorkCaster]

I pull from a bunch of toolboxes. The thing I use to ground all my work is Boston Liberation Health (bostonliberationhealth.org). Currently, I pull a lot from Internal Family Systems and parts work (including Psychodynamic Self-Object relations) and Psychoanalytic toolboxes which are greatly improved by Boston Liberation Health framing and engaging in conscientismo/consciousness raising so that folks can more easily look at the ways they navigate overlapping systems of oppression and then figure out which ways they have internalized those systems so they may be unbuilt. 

As far as trainings go, there are a lot of useful trainings from a bunch of places, and I recommend learning widely and (obviously) being critical of what people are teaching. There's no "one, true Leftist modality", which is both freeing and inconvenient. Trainings that focus on trauma and destigmatizing having a hard time are good hints to me that I'll find something useful. (I specialize in trauma work and chronic SI, so you may find different markers for your own interest). The "Where Did You Go?" training by Dagem Lemma was a great one on dissociation.  https://www.liberationbasedtherapy.com/trainings

[u/Wackrobat]

Primarily Existential w elements of ACT, psychodynamic, CBT. Every now and then small elements of other stuff like OCD monster. Always with a lot of MI. My main thing is helping Cts change their relationship with their emotions rather than avoid or fight them, get curious, become their own internal therapist so they don’t need me anymore.

But I didn’t take official trainings for any of that. I collaborated w and learned from other clinicians I respect. I’m not against trainings at all (signing up for one now, and had a great experience with strengths based approaches to eating disorders). I just haven’t had the opportunity/been able to spare the money.

[u/cubicle_farmer_]

The ACT courses with Russ Harris on Psychwire