Jeff Levy, LCSW
(originally posted on Branching Out: The Live Oak Blog, and Linked In, December 2017)

I was recently thinking about sessions over the course of the last few weeks that went smoothly, and those where I felt like we hit some bumps or that we stalled.   I tried to remember the things I did or questions I asked that I thought helped all of us in the room feel some movement.  There were many ideas and questions I jotted down, but five stood out to me as particularly helpful.
 
While I know there are no quick fixes to change the direction of a session that feels like it is stalled, I still look for strategies to support people in making the changes that bring them to my office, even in the context of a single session.  Maybe it’s unrealistic to think that lasting change can happen in a session.  But I believe there are ways we can invite ourselves and our clients to consider intentional shifts, even in the context of a single session.

Jeff Levy, LCSW
(originally posted on Branching Out: The Live Oak Blog, June 2015)

During my first meeting with clients, I try to allow time to talk about what is bringing them to therapy while still saving time at the end of the meeting to talk about how I think therapy works. Sometimes, I don’t have to reserve time for this, because my clients will ask even before we talk about anything else. Other times, I may not be able to do this in the first session, but I try to do it as early in our work together as possible.
 
Part of the reason I share my thoughts about the process of therapy is for people to get a sense of my philosophy and orientation. I hope that this knowledge fosters informed decisions about goodness of fit. I’ve also found that for some—even those who have been in therapy at other times—sharing my perspective on how and why I think therapy may be helpful is not something they’ve heard in the past.

Jeff Levy, LCSW
(originally posted on Branching Out: The Live Oak Blog, February 2015)

Even after almost 40 years of working in mental health, I still get a little nervous when I am calling a provider I don’t know or have never worked with to coordinate services.  It’s not that I don’t value sharing information, I just find not everyone has the same philosophy and not everyone welcomes an opportunity to collaborate.  Or, there are those who are willing to collaborate, but whose definitions of collaboration are different than mine.

Jeff Levy, LCSW
(originally published on Branching Out: The Live Oak Blog, September 2014)

In the almost 40 years I have been in practice, I can’t count the number of times I have worked with someone who has a value system that is different than mine.  A number of weeks ago I wrote about how our differences still offer opportunities to foster deeper connections.  In that post, I talked about differences in aspects of our identities and experiences that may, in reality, create emotional and present moment experiences that are more similar than different.  And while I still believe that to be 100% true, I began to think about the times I have worked with an individual or family whose visible and invisible identities may be similar, but whose values have fundamentally conflicted with mine.