Psychedelic Safety & Harm Reduction Certification

Psychologist Leslie Farber distinguished between what he called the first and second realms of will. One we can control directly, another is beyond our direct control. His example is: 'I can will... going to bed, but not sleeping.' All of us know what he meant. You can make yourself lie down. That’s 100% within your control. Falling asleep is a different matter. It follows lying down, but also, in a way, it happens on its own. There is something else beyond our rational will that is causing us to fall asleep. The way Maxwell Maltz put it in his 'Psycho-Cybernetics': 'You must learn to trust your Creative Mechanism to do its work and not "jam it" by becoming too concerned or too anxious as to whether it will work or not, or by attempting to force it by too much conscious effort. You must "let it" work, rather than "make it" work.' When we cannot fall asleep, we can intensify our will to fall asleep. But trying too much doesn't help. Letting go does. Understanding this distinction is important because we want change to happen, we can will a conversation with a coach or therapist, but we cannot will an insight, change, or transformation. It happens by the involvement of the second realm of will, which we don't directly control. We may think the more effort we apply, the sooner we are going to achieve the change. But this relation is not linear. We need to intuit how much discipline, effort, and force is reasonable to apply and, on the other hand, how much relaxing, letting go of control, and surrender may be beneficial. Also, understanding this distinction would make one sceptical of promises of having _a_ life-changing coaching session. The tools and frameworks do facilitate progress to a certain degree, but cannot guarantee the shift, the change, the transformation. So whenever you see promises of 8-minute belief change or elimination of an impostor syndrome in one sitting, don't take it literally, please!

WHY MANY THERAPISTS AND COACHES FEEL UNDERPREPARED FOR TODAY’S CLIENTS Many, if not most, therapists and coaches are noticing that their clients’ distress is no longer just personal — it’s societal. Clients today are not simply dealing with personal trauma. They’re navigating what I call Societal Traumatic Stress Disorder (STSD) — the psychological impacts of living inside perpetual cultural upheaval in a chronically destabilized world. Many practitioners feel the strain of this gap. Even when they can help clients regulate distress, they frequently don’t feel equipped to help clients develop the deeper resilience needed to navigate today’s world. The attached visual depicts my architecture for helping clients move from societal overwhelm toward Impactful Resilience — a high-leverage set of learnable capacities that help people maintain clarity, agency, and purpose, while navigating a chaotic world. As you look at the STSD patterns on the left side of the diagram, you might ask yourself: How many of your clients are experiencing some version of these patterns right now? And equally important: What helps them move toward the capacities shown on the right? This is one of the themes I’ll be illuminating at the 2026 International Conference by the Association. for Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP)... and especially during the hands-on post-conference workshop on Impactful Resilience. At this year's ACEP Conference, I’ll be presenting in three programs exploring that challenge: • Research panel on definitional clarity in Energy Psychology • Learning Lab on facilitating spiritual emergence • Post-conference training on Impactful Resilience The post-conference workshop is where you'll be bringing the attached diagram alive by practicing those skills. will learn six experiential skills that help clients move from overwhelm toward self-sovereignty, purpose, and constructive impact. If your clients are struggling with the psychological effects of today’s societal upheavals, this training may be especially relevant. Early-bird registration runs through April 5, 2026. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gTm23C8k

I especially love the term "tensions competence" = how to mindfully hold and respond to different perspectives without being sucked into false dichotomies. David's work is thoughtful, robust, and both hopeful and pragmatic. If you don't already follow him, I highly recommend doing so.

WHY MANY THERAPISTS AND COACHES FEEL UNDERPREPARED FOR TODAY’S CLIENTS Many, if not most, therapists and coaches are noticing that their clients’ distress is no longer just personal — it’s societal. Clients today are not simply dealing with personal trauma. They’re navigating what I call Societal Traumatic Stress Disorder (STSD) — the psychological impacts of living inside perpetual cultural upheaval in a chronically destabilized world. Many practitioners feel the strain of this gap. Even when they can help clients regulate distress, they frequently don’t feel equipped to help clients develop the deeper resilience needed to navigate today’s world. The attached visual depicts my architecture for helping clients move from societal overwhelm toward Impactful Resilience — a high-leverage set of learnable capacities that help people maintain clarity, agency, and purpose, while navigating a chaotic world. As you look at the STSD patterns on the left side of the diagram, you might ask yourself: How many of your clients are experiencing some version of these patterns right now? And equally important: What helps them move toward the capacities shown on the right? This is one of the themes I’ll be illuminating at the 2026 International Conference by the Association. for Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP)... and especially during the hands-on post-conference workshop on Impactful Resilience. At this year's ACEP Conference, I’ll be presenting in three programs exploring that challenge: • Research panel on definitional clarity in Energy Psychology • Learning Lab on facilitating spiritual emergence • Post-conference training on Impactful Resilience The post-conference workshop is where you'll be bringing the attached diagram alive by practicing those skills. will learn six experiential skills that help clients move from overwhelm toward self-sovereignty, purpose, and constructive impact. If your clients are struggling with the psychological effects of today’s societal upheavals, this training may be especially relevant. Early-bird registration runs through April 5, 2026. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gikhxrzn

Some of your behaviors go against your own best interests. A leader knows they interrupt people. Another knows they overanalyze. Another knows they become too defensive under pressure. Even when the awareness is there, and you do your best to address the issue, some pesky patterns still remain. More than a century ago, while working at the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich, Carl Jung began to understand why. At the time, the social mindset treated unwelcome, seemingly irrational behavior as either moral failings or symptoms of a mental defect. But Jung noticed something different. By investigating the patients’ history and context, he saw that their unwanted behaviors were often expressions of completely standard psychological tensions arising from their lived experiences. This realization changed the nature of his work. Jung began trying to understand what the psyche was attempting to express through those patterns which, at the surface level, were hard to understand. He then helped several of his patients see their symptoms dissolve once those deeper inner tensions were confronted and what the psyche was trying to express could be addressed. Jung increasingly saw inner tension not as pathology, but as a natural driver of psychological coherence within the personality. Depth coaching works precisely in this territory. Rather than prescribing solutions, the coach helps leaders examine the tensions shaping their reactions until a coherent way of responding becomes organic. No behavior curbing needed, no unnecessary pathologizing or mandatory life-long therapy — just focused adult development. Jung wrote in Memories, Dreams, Reflections: “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” The pain does not have to be a dead-end one gets stuck in. It can be the good pain of continuous expansion.

Is CBT better than Psychodynamics? - A reflection for Clinicians CBT has clear value and remains very useful for many people, especially when someone needs structure, symptom tracking, behavioural change, or help identifying repetitive thought patterns. The difficulty begins when it is treated as though it were sufficient for every person, every presentation, and every depth of suffering. Many psychological problems do not arise only from distorted thinking. They are organised around unconscious conflict, early attachment patterns, dissociation, shame, defended anger, relational expectations, and embodied states that a person cannot simply reason their way out of. In those cases, a purely cognitive approach can feel thin, premature, or subtly invalidating, especially when the person already understands their patterns intellectually but still finds themselves repeating them. Psychodynamic psychotherapy becomes especially valuable here because it stays with the deeper logic of the symptom. It asks what the depression protects, what the anxiety anticipates, what the avoidance prevents, and how the person’s inner world was shaped in relationship. It also pays attention to what emerges between therapist and patient, because many of the most important patterns do not appear only in narrative. They appear in the room through withdrawal, compliance, idealisation, mistrust, shame, testing, and rupture. That level of work can be more transformative for people whose difficulties are rooted in personality structure, developmental trauma, chronic relational pain, or a long history of feeling split off from parts of themselves. At the same time, psychodynamic therapists do themselves and their patients no favour when they become theoretically rigid. Depth matters, but so does responsiveness. Trauma often requires more than interpretation. Many patients need help regulating arousal, orienting to the present, and learning how emotion actually moves through the body. Somatic practices can support that. Mindfulness can strengthen observing capacity and reduce automatic enactment. Positive psychology, used thoughtfully, can help patients build contact with vitality, meaning, gratitude, pleasure, and agency rather than organising treatment only around injury. Jungian and expressive approaches can also open doors that ordinary language cannot, particularly when image, symbol, and creative process carry material that has not yet become thinkable. Good psychotherapy does not become shallow because it is integrative but when different methods are used in service of a coherent understanding of the person. The question is never which school wins. The more useful question is what this particular person needs in order to think, feel, regulate, relate, and change more fully. #Psychotherapy #PsychodynamicTherapy #CBT #Traumatherapy #ClinicalPsychology #SomaticTherapy #Mindfulness #DepthPsychology #IntegrativeTherapy

I see many different ideas of what dissociation is, depending if it a psychologist, coach, integration coach or layperson providing their definition Dissociation is a spectrum, and even at the upper end of more complexity in dissociation, it has an adaptive function. That does not mean it continues to be adaptive or helpful to the person's present day reality Pierre Janet's definition of dissociation reflects a disturbance in the mind’s capacity for synthesis- the integration of psychological functions (perception, affect, memory, action tendencies) into a unified personal consciousness Under conditions of overwhelming affect, particularly emotions such as terror, shame, or rage, integrative capacity is compromised. Psychological phenomena that would ordinarily be synthesized into coherent experience become isolated from the central personality. Intense emotions can overwhelm the mind’s organising capacity and the experience does not get properly integrated. As a result, parts of it become split off and instead of becoming a normal memory that feels like it happened in the past, the experience remains emotionally alive. Janet rejected the metaphysical assumption of a unified and indivisible consciousness. Based on his clinical observations, he argued that a single individual may be governed by multiple concurrent or alternating 'nuclei of consciousness.' These nuclei may possess memory inaccessible to the dominant personality, influence behaviour outside voluntary control and interfere with each other. Dissociated phenomena are not unconscious in a dynamic sense- they are conscious within their own subsystem but lack associative linkage with the central personality (grounded adult self) Building on Janet’s work, van der Hart, Nijenhuis, and Steele developed Structural Dissociation Theory which explains that trauma can lead to a division between 'Apparently Normal Parts (ANPs)' where these parts focus on daily life, try to function and cope by avoiding traumatic memories and supressing emotion; and 'Emotional Parts (EPs)': that hold traumatic memories, carry intense fear, shame, anger, or grief, are stuck in trauma time and act as if the trauma is still happening If you are looking for supervision or support to understand dissocation in your practice, please reach out. I provide both individual and group supervision focused on working with dissociation

Just completed the overview of Third Wave Cognitive Behavioural Therapies with Paul Grantham. One idea threaded through everything that I can't stop thinking about: we don't choose our brains. We don't get a say in the threat-detection systems we're born with. We don't choose the families, cultures, or environments that shape how we respond to stress, difficulty, or pain. And yet most of us spend enormous energy blaming ourselves for the patterns that were never really ours to choose in the first place. What strikes me most about third-wave approaches in psychology, approaches like mindfulness, compassion-focused therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, is that they don’t start with “what’s wrong with you.” They start with highlighting “of course you’re struggling. Here’s why, and here’s what might actually help.” A few things I found really interesting: ꩜ Humans are uniquely cursed with imagination. A zebra chased by a lion forgets the threat almost the moment it passes. We don't. We replay it, anticipate it, live it in advance. We generate a full physiological stress response to something that isn't even happening. The image alone triggers the pituitary gland to release stress hormones, the body responding to a threat that exists only in thought. Anyone who has lain awake replaying an argument from three days ago knows exactly what this feels like. ꩜ Compassion isn’t just a soft concept. It activates a distinct neurobiological system that calms the threat response. It’s not about being easy on yourself, but having the courage to dive into those more uncomfortable experiences to get you where you want to go. ꩜ Mindfulness isn’t about emptying the mind. It’s about noticing what’s already happening and sitting with your feelings. Suppression works the way holding a beach ball underwater works. It takes constant energy, and eventually it comes back up anyway, often worse than before. None of this is simple to practice or easy to change - it's an extended process we have to work on. But I think there’s something important in the shift from "fixing yourself" to "understanding yourself". What’s your experience with these therapeutic approaches? #thirdwavecognitivebehaviouraltherapy #thirdwaveCBT #mindfulness #compassion #ACT #acceptanceandcommitment #psychology #mentalhealth #SDSseminars Have a peek at the regulatory model in Compassion Focused Therapy to manage mental well-being.

Psychologist says self discipline is closely connected to the brain’s ability to regulate impulses and delay immediate rewards. According to psychology and behavioral research, habits around food and daily routines can play an important role in strengthening this mental skill. The brain constantly balances short term desires with long term goals. Psychologist says resisting impulsive urges such as overeating or consuming unhealthy foods activates the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for decision making and self control. According to psychology, when people practice controlling small impulses regularly, the brain strengthens neural pathways related to discipline and emotional regulation. Over time this repeated practice can make self control easier in other areas of life. Researchers explain that habits around eating often require awareness, planning, and restraint. Psychologist says these same mental processes are involved when managing time, finances, productivity, and emotional reactions. According to psychology, developing discipline in one area can create a positive ripple effect across other behaviors. The brain becomes more comfortable choosing long term benefits over immediate gratification. Understanding how self control develops highlights the importance of building healthy routines. Small daily choices can gradually train the brain to strengthen focus, patience, and overall personal discipline. #PsychologyFacts #SelfGrowth