hart caplan

hart caplan

Counselling - General
Bernadette Amiscaray

A dream is a wish your [neurons and/or unconscious] makes

While I’m no expert, I’ve learned about dream work by doing. My Jungian therapists over the past 18 years have helped me tend to this part of myself and it was likely the greatest education I could’ve received. The only hard-and-fast rule that I’ve gleaned is that the client, not the therapist, needs to take the lead in terms of offering their feelings, their interpretations, their point of view about their dream

April 25, 2023
Counselling - General
hart caplan

Perfectionism, Part I: The Problem of the Product

Perfectionism causes personal and professional problems for perfectionists themselves and those around them. And, in a bitter twist of irony, it turns out to be an inefficient and ineffective way of producing good work with any consistency. Perfectionism is not segregated in any single population, but it is one of the most common difficulties experienced by people with adhd.

April 24, 2023

How do Counsellors Help? Part IV – Healing the “Hard-Wired” Brain

There is one single fact that makes this kind of experience so productive for healing and change, something finally being confirmed by the hard sciences in the last twenty years: neuroplasticity. Up until now our understanding of the brain was that it was largely “hard wired”—the term we’ve been using up to this point. The hard wired brain is like a computer—that is, the software might change but the structure remained the same. Neuroplasticity turns this idea on its head and suggests that we can actually change both the software and the hardware. This means that the same kind of experiences which “wire in” patterns of movement when we are children are possible to repeat as adults. In reality, we are not hard wired, we are “soft wired.” And this makes us capable of change in ways that psychologists one hundred years ago never thought possible.

Neuron
"Neuron" by NIH-NCATS is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Of course, we’ve all watched how fast children learn, and it’s true that our brains are more plastic when we are children compared to adulthood. Despite this, we can accelerate the learning we do in these therapeutic experiences by circling back to “talk therapy.” When Counsellors add this layer of verbal reflection on top of powerful experiences then we are using all the parts of the brain together: cognitive, emotional, and neural, also known as the conscious, the subconscious, and the body.
 
Therapists who consciously use co-regulation are leveraging the unique human ability to share emotional states in real time. With this approach, a stable and grounded therapist can help create some relief from uncomfortable feelings in just a few minutes. Once relaxed, the opportunity presents itself for new experiences—one which is specific and safe—and the journey begins towards learning lessons that can’t be “unlearned.” Although we can easily forget cognitive lessons (Who invented the printing press? How do you do long division?), we never forget how to ride a bike. And therapeutic learning which re-wires patterns of movement in the brain becomes just like riding a bike, requiring less and less effort until it’s as natural as any other movement.