Notes on practice
Blog
Occasional writing on Motivational Interviewing, compassion, and the everyday work of helping people.
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Neuroaffirming Care: 5 Principles for Therapists
Neuroaffirming therapy honors neurodiversity through five principles: flexibility, lifelong learning, acceptance, advocacy and genuineness.
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Applied Acceptance: Accepting Ourselves and Accepting Others in the Helping Profession
Acceptance is a vital part of working with ourselves and others - but its importance is too often overlooked in the helping profession.
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Mindfulness: An Exploration of Mindfulness in Therapeutic Approaches
What is mindfulness, and why is it so often used as a therapy intervention? This article explores the often elusive nature of this buzzword.
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Is Venting Helpful? Emotional Venting, Compassion and Our Minds
Venting can feel like relief, but does it actually help? A look at emotional venting, compassion, and kinder ways to work with tough feelings.
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Motivational Advising: Motivational Interviewing and the Role of the Academic Advisor
The compassion and empathy at the heart of Motivational Interviewing fit many roles, including supervision, leadership, and academic advising. Here is how.
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Challenging Conversations and Complex Compassion: Revisiting the LARA (Listen Affirm Respond Add) Guidelines for Use in Diversity Dialogues
Conversations about difference, diversity, and equity can be difficult. The L.A.R.A. approach gives us some structure for these challenging conversations.
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Microaggressions, Microaffirmations, and Motivational Interviewing
What is the deal with microaggressions, and what can I do about it? This article explores how to use microaffirmations and the impact of microaggressions.
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Accepting Feedback: a Core Skill in the Practice of Cultural Humility
Exploring how the ability to receive and integrate feedback is essential for developing cultural humility in therapeutic and training contexts.
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Integrating Cultural Humility into the Motivational Interviewing Trainer's Toolkit
A guide for MI trainers on incorporating cultural humility principles to create more inclusive and effective training environments.
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Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) and Motivational Interviewing (MI)
An examination of how Compassion Focused Therapy principles can be integrated with Motivational Interviewing to enhance therapeutic outcomes.
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Is the MI Spirit Missing Something? Belonging, Inclusion, Liberation Psychology, Cultural Humility, and Motivational Interviewing
How belonging, inclusion, liberation psychology and cultural humility can widen the spirit of Motivational Interviewing.
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Mindful Self-Compassion, MI, and the Inquiry Method in Therapy
How Mindful Self-Compassion, Motivational Interviewing and the MSC Inquiry method fit together in therapy and helping work.
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Becoming a Culturally Humble Compassionate Mess
Being a compassionate mess means being a lifelong learner who will make clumsy mistakes, and meeting the hard feelings that come up with kindness.
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Bringing the Macro to the Micro in Mental Health: Structural Competence, Macro Motivational Interviewing (MI), and Socially Engineered Trauma (SET)
Macro MI, structural competency and socially engineered trauma: bringing macro issues into micro, one-on-one helping work in community mental health.
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What is the point of therapy?: race, culture & neurodiversity
Is therapy a tool for liberation or for fitting people back into the systems that harm them? Reflections on race, culture and neurodiversity in therapy.
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Reflections of a Wounded Healer
A therapist’s reflections on the wounded healer: how our own struggles and lived experience can shape, and strengthen, the way we help others.