by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Jan 2, 2026 | Psychology
The Scapegoat’s Burden: Why Toxic Families Target the Truth-Teller In the intricate and often perilous ecosystem of the dysfunctional family, roles are assigned not by individual choice or merit, but by the unconscious, survival-driven dictates of the family system...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Jan 1, 2026 | Models of Psychotherapy, Philosophy for Therapists, Psychology Topics and Articles
What Einstein’s elevator, Kekulé’s snake dream, and Oppenheimer’s abyss reveal about the primacy of subjective knowing, and why it matters for how we understand healing. There is a cultural artifact we all carry in our minds: the image of the genius...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 31, 2025 | Brainspotting in Alabama: Revolutionary Trauma Therapy for Deep Healing, Evidence Based Practice in Therapy, Mental Health and Psychotherapy Resources in Alabama, Psychology Topics and Articles
How a modality dismissed as “pseudoscience” by academic critics became the treatment of choice for thousands of trauma clinicians—and what this schism reveals about the broken relationship between research and practice. The Fracture Between the Ivory Tower...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 30, 2025 | Neuroscience and the Brain for Therapists
The clinical management of Major Depressive Disorder and Treatment-Resistant Depression is currently undergoing a paradigm shift of historical significance. For the better part of the last half-century the field of psychiatry has operated largely under the monoamine...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 30, 2025 | Neuroscience and the Brain for Therapists
The clinical landscape of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder treatment is undergoing its most significant transformation since the introduction of prolonged exposure therapies. For decades our dominant therapeutic paradigm operated on a top-down model which assumed that...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 29, 2025 | Alternative Medicine and Holistic Health, Brainspotting in Alabama: Revolutionary Trauma Therapy for Deep Healing, Evidence Based Practice and Research Psychology, Evidence Based Practice in Therapy, History of Psychotherapy
The unitary nature of consciousness is the most persistent intuition of human experience. We feel like a single protagonist in a continuous narrative. Yet, for the trauma survivor, this intuition is often a lie. As therapists, we are often the first to witness the...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 28, 2025 | Alternative Medicine and Holistic Health, Discover + Heal + Grow: Taproot Therapy Collective Podcast Episodes, Jungian Therapy and Depth Psychology, Lifespan integration in Alabama, Symbolism and Meaning in Psychotherapy
For decades, mental health has been dominated by a “maintenance” model. We treat symptoms like mechanical failures: fix the serotonin levels, reframe the negative thought, smooth out the behavioral glitch. But for many clients, this approach feels like...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 28, 2025 | Phenomenology and Existential Psychology, Psychology, Psychotherapy Biographies: Historical Figures in the History of Psychology
The Great Remembering: Why the Future of Psychotherapy is Just History Repeating Itself In the rush to modernize mental health treatment, the field of psychotherapy often suffers from a peculiar form of historical amnesia. We celebrate “new” modalities as...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 28, 2025 | Psychotherapy Biographies: Historical Figures in the History of Psychology
In 2003, David Grand sat across from a championship-level figure skater who had exhausted nearly every therapeutic approach without resolution. They had worked together for months using EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, psychoanalytic techniques, and what Grand called...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 26, 2025 | Uncategorized
For the last forty years, the gold standard of mental health care has been Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The premise of CBT is elegant and logical: your thoughts create your feelings. Therefore, if you can catch your negative thoughts (cognitive distortions) and...
