by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 27, 2025 | Psychotherapy Biographies: Historical Figures in the History of Psychology
In 1982, Richard Schwartz, a young, zealous family therapist fresh from his PhD at Purdue University, designed an outcome study he believed would prove family therapy had found the holy grail of psychological treatment. He recruited thirty bulimic teenagers and their...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 27, 2025 | Psychotherapy Biographies: Historical Figures in the History of Psychology
On a spring day in 1987, Francine Shapiro walked through a park near her home in Northern California, carrying troubling thoughts that had been persistent and distressing. She noticed something unexpected: as her eyes moved rapidly from side to side, following the...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 27, 2025 | Psychotherapy Biographies: Historical Figures in the History of Psychology
Janina Fisher: Revolutionizing Trauma Treatment Through Structural Dissociation and Parts Work On a September day in 1989, a young predoctoral intern sat in a grand rounds presentation at what would later become the Trauma Center, listening to Judith Herman challenge...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 27, 2025 | Alabama Local History, Birmingham
The Geology of the Grotesque The folklore of Birmingham, Alabama, occupies a unique stratum within the broader canon of Southern Gothic narrative. Unlike the coastal haunts of Charleston or Savannah, which are steeped in the aristocratic decay of the antebellum rice...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 27, 2025 | Psychology Topics and Articles
We often talk about the brain as if it were a single unified computer. We think that our Self which is that conscious voice in our head is the CEO making all the decisions. But neurology tells us a very different story. Consider the eye. In the very center of your...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 27, 2025 | Psychology Book Reviews and Non Fiction, Psychotherapy Biographies: Historical Figures in the History of Psychology
When a Dutch child grows up during Nazi occupation watching his father return from a work camp, watching hunger hollow out his neighbors, watching liberation armies arrive too late for too many, trauma stops being an abstract concept. It becomes the air you breathe,...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 27, 2025 | Somatic Experiencing In Alabama, Trauma Treatment in Alabama
In the early 1970s, while working as a technician and yoga instructor at a short-term psychiatric hospital, a young Pat Ogden noticed something her clinical training had not prepared her to see. Her patients exhibited a profound disconnection from their bodies,...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 26, 2025 | Alternative Medicine and Holistic Health, History of Psychotherapy, Psychology, Psychology Book Reviews and Non Fiction
The Dialectic of Spirit and Statistic The history of psychotherapy is often presented as a “Whig history”—a linear progression from the superstitious darkness of the past toward the illuminated scientific present. In this sanitized narrative, we move from...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 26, 2025 | Neuroscience and the Brain for Therapists, Psychotherapy Biographies: Historical Figures in the History of Psychology
When Daniel Siegel began examining the neurobiology of attachment relationships in the 1990s, he noticed something that seemed obvious in retrospect but had rarely been articulated explicitly: the mind develops at the interface between relationships and the brain....
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 26, 2025 | Neuroscience and the Brain for Therapists, Psychology Book Reviews and Non Fiction, Psychotherapy Biographies: Historical Figures in the History of Psychology
When Stephen Porges began studying heart rate variability in newborn infants in the early 1970s, he noticed something curious. Babies whose heart rates fluctuated rhythmically with their breathing, a phenomenon called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, responded better to...
