10 Ways to Use a Client's Resistance as Part of the Treatment
Resistance is not the obstacle to therapy. In strategic therapy, it is the material. Most therapists respond to a resistant client the same way: increase …
Books
12 Ways to Help a Silent Therapy Client Speak About Trauma
Some clients arrive with words ready. Others sit across from you session after session and say almost nothing about the thing that brought them in. This book is …
15 Paradoxical Techniques for Clients Who Won't Cooperate
Paradoxical intervention is the clinical tradition’s most misunderstood tool — described alternately as clever manipulation and as a last resort for cases …
How to Handle a Therapy Client Who Lies to You in Sessions
Clients lie in therapy. This is not a training problem or a countertransference failure — it is a clinical reality that every experienced therapist encounters. …
How to Keep Therapy Clients from Dropping Out in the First Month
Most early dropout decisions are made in the first session, or in the days immediately after it. By the time a client calls to cancel, the decision has already …
Reframing in Therapy: 20 Scripts for Common Presenting Problems
A reframe changes what a behavior, symptom, or situation means without requiring the client to change first. Haley identified the strategic reframe as one of …
The Client Who Won't Stop Talking: Redirecting Unfocused Sessions
A session that sprawls without direction is not a therapeutic failure. It is a clinical presentation. Every experienced therapist knows the pattern. The client …
What to Do When Your Client Refuses Every Suggestion You Make
The client who refuses everything is not a treatment failure. They are a clinical puzzle with a specific solution. Every experienced therapist knows this …
When the Therapy Client Says I Don't Know to Everything
Some clients answer nearly every introspective question with “I don’t know.” The question about why they do what they do. The question about …
When Your Therapy Client Won't Do the Homework
Between-session assignments are where strategic therapy does most of its work. And yet most therapists have at least one client for whom homework consistently …