It’s not that difficult to think like a therapist. A lot of it is just common sense. It’s not about knowing who is right or wrong, it’s about applying critical thinking to situations, having a good understanding of contextual information, knowing the role of empathy, staying current and relatable and being naturally curious. The art of doing psychotherapy, on the other hand, requires a lot of skill but thinking like a therapist can make a big difference right now in how you manage your problems. It is easy to know intellectually that this is true, yet it is so hard to live our lives with such wisdom. It is easier to pretend to ourselves that we will live forever, to deny the possibility of our own demise, and to just not think about it.

Over months, or years, Joseph works with his clients to peel away the layers and find something deeper behind their discontents and identify new understandings of what really matters. These revelations often seem to come out of the blue – lightbulb moments in which people suddenly gain a new perspective on how to lead their lives. In this new book, Joseph shares the most important of these realisations: the six ways in which we can begin to see ourselves and the world anew, without distortion, and embark on a road to personal growth and a more emotionally mature life.Jenny, for example, is a 56 year old woman who was stunned when she realized that she spent her entire life trying to take care of men who could not take care of themselves. Her insight was that she was filling a void left by an absentee father who was never there to take care of her. Aha! moments like these are always followed by, “that was so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner.” Her friends, on the other hand, wondered what took her so long. We tend to skip over obvious insights for deeper explanations, unconscious motivations, and more complicated solutions. Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, called it the psychology of the obvious, noting there is an obvious interrelationship between the surface structure and the deep structure of human behavior and that by skipping over these obvious relationships we relegate ourselves to either/or thinking. Jenny can change her relationship to men by learning how to let them take care of themselves or by getting in touch with the deeper emotional void she is trying to fill by chronically taking care of them herself. Whichever level she chooses to focus on will effect a change in the other level since they are both interconnected.

It's easy of think of relationship problems in terms of what your partner is or is not doing and how to change them. Congratulations on being productive today. Reading this blog post means that you are managing to accomplish at least one thing, and that is something to be proud of. The tremendous stress permeating our lives because of COVID-19 can be draining at best, debilitating at worst. What does it mean to think like a therapist? That is the title of my latest book, in which I wrote about some of the most important lessons in life that I had learned from being a psychologist, and especially as a therapist who has specialized in traumatic stress and post-traumatic growth.Thinking this way creates arguments over whose reality is right, power struggles over who needs to give in first. Great. Now what you want to do is facilitate a loving conversation about these fears. If you do a good job with this, their desire discrepancy will become easier to manage. Sex won't have to be the heated battleground with which deeper fears are enacted.