My Team Pranked Me – And What We Can Learn From It
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About thirty minutes into a regular weekly team meeting, I started losing my concentration. You might not know this, but there is a small team
I’ve just returned from the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in Washington, D.C. It’s a gathering that continues to be one of the most stimulating and wide-ranging conferences in our field. Each year when I return from this conference, I enjoy sharing a few reflections with you.
This year I will highlight two keynotes and my own workshop.
What always strikes me is not just the quality of the speakers but taking the time to feel the collective pulse of the profession. I could feel what clinicians are grappling with right now:
How do we work effectively in an age of dysregulation?
How do we hold complexity without collapsing into simplification?
How do we continue to integrate what we know about trauma and the brain into our work?
And perhaps most importantly how do we help people grow, not just cope?
Several keynote speakers spoke to the growing intensity therapists are facing. The world brings more external stress each day.
There was a shared recognition that many clients are arriving more overwhelmed, reactive, and entrenched in polarized ways of thinking. The language may differ – trauma, nervous system activation, attachment injury – but the clinical reality is familiar: high intensity, low differentiation.
One thing I greatly appreciated was the emphasis on presence and authenticity, not just following medical model precepts without thinking. What’s important isn’t technique for technique’s sake, or the perfect intervention. It’s the therapist’s capacity to stay grounded, think clearly, and make intentional authentic choices in the midst of emotional pressure.
That, in many ways, is where real clinical effectiveness lives.
Two keynotes focused significantly on trauma.
One of these speakers, Dr. Bruce Perry, brought a powerful reminder of something deceptively simple:
He challenged us to think more deeply about how what we know about brain functioning actually translates into what we do in the therapy room.
If the brain develops through repetition, then we have to ask an uncomfortable question: Are 45-minute sessions, once a week, really designed for optimal change?
His answer clearly was no.
Instead, he emphasized that growth comes through patterned, repeated, practiced experiences and more specifically, through a particular kind of stress:
This stands in stark contrast to the kind of stress many of our clients have experienced:
The implication for therapy is significant.
We are not simply trying to reduce stress.
We are trying to reshape a person’s relationship to stress and build new neural pathways in the brain. Our challenge is to help clients take risks without overwhelm. To not just comfort, but to build capacity.
This is deeply aligned with the perspective of The Developmental Model™ and how we at the Couples Institute® encourage practice and repetition in our couples.
We know that development doesn’t occur in the absence of stress. Rather, it occurs through the right kind of stress, experienced over time, in a relational context that supports growth.
Bruce Perry also made a broader call that I found compelling:
To move beyond over-pathologizing – especially when working with children who have experienced trauma – and to expand our thinking toward community-wide approaches to healing.
To teach about trauma.
To normalize adaptive responses.
To create environments – not just therapy sessions – that support regulation, connection, belonging and growth.
It’s a shift from asking, What’s wrong with this person? to asking, What has this person adapted to – and what do they need now to grow?
And perhaps even more importantly: How do we create systems – not just sessions – that make that growth possible?
Bruce Perry’s message was highly aligned with another keynote that stood out for me, the one from Nadine Burke Harris.
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris brought both urgency and optimism to the conversation through her work on the ACEs Aware Initiative in California.
Her message was clear, and deeply hopeful:
What makes the difference is not simply what a child has been exposed to, but what happens next.
With early detection and effective intervention, children with dysregulated stress responses can move toward healing and resilience instead of being on an unavoidable course towards anxiety, depression, substance abuse, or physical illness.
But that requires a shift in how we think about care. The move towards healing and resilience doesn’t happen only 1-1 inside a therapy office. Instead, it is something that is embedded in systems and communities.
She outlined a clear roadmap:
Screening for ACEs and stress-related symptoms early, before patterns become deeply entrenched is critical. As a society we cannot afford to wait until problems become crises.
There are effective treatments. Children’s stress-response systems are malleable. With the right interventions, we can help recalibrate dysregulated systems and support healthier development.
Perhaps most compelling was her emphasis on rapid connection to community networks. Healing does not happen in isolation.
Children need buffering relationships and supportive environments in families, schools, and neighborhoods. She emphasized the coordinated systemic networks of care that have been built in California. She is now reaching to other states to build these networks that work together to provide stability, predictability, and care.
Nadine Burke Harris emphasizes that resilience is not an individual trait. It is built in relationship. It is supported by systems. And it is strengthened over time through repeated, positive experiences. You can learn more at https://www.acesaware.org/
In my workshop – Healing Relationships in Individual Therapy: When Only One Partner Is in the Room – I focused on how some of these same stress-related principles apply in everyday practice with individual clients.
Because even in individual therapy, we are always working with a relational system.
And when we lose sight of that, our therapy can unintentionally lead to disconnection, destabilization, and keeping our clients stuck.
Common pitfalls include:
These approaches may feel supportive in the moment, but they often increase polarization, reinforce reactivity, and limit growth.
A relational lens asks something different:
How is this client functioning within their relationships? And what needs to change and develop first inside of them?
In the workshop, I introduced several Developmental Model™ tools designed to move therapy from insight into action, including:
At the center of this work is helping clients take ownership of their role in relational patterns without blame, but with clarity.
Autonomous goals are particularly powerful in individual therapy because they shift the focus from changing others to changing oneself.
A strong goal is:
Effective goals are built on understanding the vulnerability and self-protections driving ineffective patterns of defensiveness, withdrawal, and hostility and then translating that awareness into concrete behavioral changes.
This process involves:
As clients begin to function differently, the relational system around them begins to shift because someone showed up differently.
What struck me most across these presentations is how aligned they are, even coming from different domains – neuroscience, public health, and clinical practice.
They point to a shared truth:
Change is not just a 1-person endeavor. Change is created through repeated, relational experiences with ongoing support that build capacity over time.
This is a shift for our field. We move from…
And perhaps most importantly:
From helping people feel immediately better…
to helping them become more capable human beings.
At its best, psychotherapy is not just a place for relief. It is a place for development. A place where people learn to:
Whether we are working with individuals, couples, or communities, the task is the same:
To create the conditions where growth can occur – through challenge, through relationship, and through repeated, intentional supportive action over time.
I hope I have been able to give you a little peek into an outstanding conference.
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We respect your privacy.About thirty minutes into a regular weekly team meeting, I started losing my concentration. You might not know this, but there is a small team
The Hidden Fear Beneath Hostile Interaction Many couples enter therapy in a state of intense distress. They are not just unhappy – they are entrenched
[Editor’s Note: This exercise for couples helps partners communicate to each other twice a day that they love, respect, value, or appreciate what they do
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Thanks, Ellyn. This all resonates so much with me. We are building resilience. We are helping our clients hold the differences, standing for their needs and desires in a way that actually builds relationship. And, my take away, we are being curious with our clients about baby steps they can be practicing daily so that beneficial neuro path ways are being formed.
Thanks so much for writing this Ellyn. I couldn’t agree more with the concepts you’re highlighting. I’m glad they are being emphasized by other voices in the field. I love the Developmental Model for these reasons. I especially love the focus of your presentation about working with individuals with relational concerns. Such an important topic! Thanks again for sharing your thoughts and what you learned here.
Thank you, Ellyn – really appreciate these blogs of yours that inform me of what’s up in the field and let me “sense the temperature”. For someone who’s recently in the field and lives in Latvia – that’s a real bonus!
Ellyn, it was fun to read your takeaways from the conference. I think the through line of “productive stress” and growth is so important and not always emphasized, which is what makes the topic of your workshop so timely.