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.

An exploration of what diagnosis is exactly, the many purposes it serves how to think differently about it, and how clinicians can use it better. This episode is the foundation for The Kiln’s continuing education course Getting Diagnosis Right: Going Beyond the DSM Without Throwing It Out, which we offer at regular intervals (sign up for our mailing list to be notified.)

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.

A guide for what to do when you encounter one of most therapists’ least favorite scenarios: getting angry with a client.

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?

Growing beyond repetition compulsion in our client relationships - for both their and our benefit.

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.

A meditation on the many layers of the therapist-client relationship, and the connections between transference/countertransference, love, and grief. I heard from more therapists after I released this episode than any other. What if loving our clients wasn’t taboo?

I felt very lucky to have this conversation with Dr. Celenza - her approach to this topic is honest, compassionate, and more thought-provoking than I ever would have imagined before I encountered her work. She should be required reading (or listening) for every therapist - even (or especially) if they think this topic could never be relevant to them.