Techniques
How the inner work is actually done.
The practical tools the thinkers handed down — from free association to cognitive restructuring. Methods you can recognise, and in small ways, practice yourself.
Free Association
Say whatever surfaces, uncensored, and let the mind reveal its own connections.
Dream Analysis
Treating dreams as coded messages from the deeper self, worth decoding slowly.
Active Imagination
Entering a daydream consciously and dialoguing with the images you find there.
Reflective Listening
Mirroring back what someone means and feels, so they hear themselves clearly.
Empathic Presence
Being fully, warmly with another’s experience without rushing to fix it.
Cognitive Restructuring
Catching a distorted thought, testing it against evidence, and rewriting it.
Thought Records
Writing down situation, thought, feeling and response to see the pattern.
Paradoxical Intention
Deliberately wishing for the very thing you fear, to drain it of its power.
Dereflection
Turning attention away from yourself and toward meaning out in the world.
Behavior Modification
Reshaping habits step by step using well-timed reinforcement.
Graded Exposure
Approaching what you fear in small, planned steps until it loosens its grip.
Reflective Journaling
Writing to think — putting the inner weather into words so it can move.
Distress tolerance
Skills to survive a crisis without making it worse.
Chain analysis
Tracing the step-by-step links that led to a problem behavior.
Cognitive defusion
Seeing thoughts as passing words, not literal truths to obey.
Mindfulness meditation
Guided practice of resting attention on breath, body or the present moment.
Bilateral stimulation
Guided side-to-side eye movements, taps or tones during recall.
Relational work
Examining and reshaping current relationship patterns in session.
Empty chair
Speaking to an imagined person or part of yourself placed in an empty chair.
Chair work
Two-chair and empty-chair dialogues to access and transform emotion.
Limited reparenting
The therapist meets unmet childhood needs within safe professional bounds.
Compassionate mind training
Imagery and breathing that build a soothing, compassionate inner voice.
Miracle question
Imagining the problem solved overnight, to picture the wanted future.
Scaling questions
Rating where you are on a 0–10 scale to chart small progress.
Re-authoring
Helping a person rewrite their life story toward a preferred one.
Genogram
A multigenerational family map that reveals patterns and roles.
Enactment
Having the family act out an interaction live, so it can be reshaped.
Parts work
Getting to know and unburden each inner part from the Self.
Role-playing
Acting out scenes and relationships to explore and rehearse change.
WDEP planning
Clarifying Wants, Doing, Evaluation and a Plan for present action.
Art making
Creating images so feeling can surface and be worked with.
Group therapy
Using the live relationships within a group as the engine of insight and change.
Confusion technique
Deliberate ambiguity that overloads the conscious mind, opening room for new suggestion.
Therapeutic metaphor
Multilayered teaching tales that seed ideas indirectly, beneath conscious resistance.
Focusing
Pausing to sense a problem in the body and letting words and shifts arise from that felt sense.
Practice, gently
Reflective journaling is one tap away.
Psipas builds the simplest of these techniques into a daily habit — a question, an answer, a growing picture.