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Christian Conte, PhD, is a faculty member in the Department of Counseling and Edu-
cational Psychology at the University of Nevada. He has received the Silver Compass
Award for teaching; has published refereed articles in several professional journals;
and presented on a variety of subjects, including analytical psychology, Yield The-
ory, the Five Errors of Communication, and intertwining mythological tales with
clinical stories at state, national, and international conferences and for schools and
organizations across the country. Dr. Conte’s current research involves applying his
depth-counseling approach to domestic violence offenders in South Lake Tahoe,
California. He provides clinical consultations to community organizations in Nevada
and California.
Advanced Techniques
for Counseling
and Psychotherapy
CHRISTIAN CONTE, PhD
New York
Copyright © 2009 Springer Publishing Company, LLC
All rights reserved.
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Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8261-0451-9
09 10 11 12 / 5 4 3 2 1
The author and the publisher of this Work have made every effort to use sources believed to
be reliable to provide information that is accurate and compatible with the standards gener-
ally accepted at the time of publication. The author and publisher shall not be liable for any
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conte, Christian, 1973–
Advanced techniques for counseling and psychotherapy / Christian Conte.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8261-0450-2 (alk. paper)
1. Psychotherapy. 2. Counseling. 3. Communication in psychiatry.
I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Counseling—methods. 2. Psychotherapy—methods.
3. Communication. WM 420 C7602a 2010]
RC480.C635 2010
616.89—dc22 2009012548
Printed in the United States of America by Hamilton Printing
This book is for my daughter, Kaia.
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Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
1 Introduction 1
Techniques of Counseling and Psychotherapy 1
Mithridates 2
The Five Errors of Communication 4
The Analytic Self 7
2 Basic Therapy 9
The Rudimentary Skills 9
The Great Watermelon Slayer 10
Yield Theory 13
Attending 16
Active Listening 18
Reflection 19
Validating 21
Gathering Information 22
Questioning 25
Empathizing 27
Self-Disclosure 29
Focusing 32
Providing Feedback 33
Confrontation 34
Silence 39
Goal Setting 41
Modeling 42
Reframing 44
Presence and the Present 45
Termination 46
Everyday Use for the Stages of Change 48
Hierarchy of Needs 55
vii
viii Contents
Dealing With Resistance 57
Summarizing 58
3 Metaphor Therapy 63
Metaphors, Analogs, and the Five Errors 63
Plato’s Cave 66
The Tale of Two Monks 71
Master Fish 73
Snakes Are Snakes 75
Puramitra 77
King Midas 79
Edshu 81
The Room With a Thousand Demons 84
The King and the Crow 85
Ascalaphus 88
Amphitryon and Alcmena 91
Sisyphus 92
Gilgamesh 94
Tiresias 96
Be the Couch 98
Philemon and Baucis 100
The Giving Tree 103
4 Creative Therapy 105
Counseling With Impact 105
Live Video Game 107
The Continuum 109
Mimicking the Problem 113
Exacerbating the Problem 115
Puppet World 116
Scaling 117
How to Internally Motivate Anyone 122
The Essential Time Management Chart 126
The Push-Button Technique 128
Trouble in an Envelope 131
Jealousy as an Ugly Flower 132
Past, Present, Future 134
Want-Ad 138
The Screen 139
Free Pass 141
Role-Plays 143
The Use of Chairs 145
I Quit! 149
Contents ix
5 Projective Therapy 153
Practical Psychodynamics 153
Argument for the Unconscious 154
Parts of the Psyche 156
Defense Mechanisms 156
Introjections 158
Projections 161
Displacement 167
Regression 167
Denial 168
Reaction Formation 169
Confirmation Bias 169
Applying Psychodynamics 171
Persona 171
Ebullition 172
Enantiodromia 173
Moving Energy in the Psyche 174
Psychodynamic Circle 177
6 Classic Therapy 179
Perennial Approaches 179
The Empty Chair Technique 180
Clinical Example 181
Real Self/Ideal Self 183
Clinical Example 183
Spitting in the Client’s Soup 185
Clinical Example 185
Transactional Analysis 187
Cognitive Therapies 191
Fallacies 192
ABC Model of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy 195
Clinical Example 197
The Miracle Question 200
Clinical Example 1 200
Clinical Example 2 201
Confusion Technique 202
Clinical Example 202
W.D.E.P. 203
Clinical Example 205
Dr. Conte’s Four Cs of Parenting 206
Choices 207
Consequences 207
Consistency 209
x Contents
Compassion 211
The Four Cs in Action 212
Suicide Prevention 213
The Distraction Technique 219
Clinical Example 220
Epilogue 223
References 225
Appendix: Bibliography of Influential Works and Highly
Recommended Readings 229
Index 233
Preface
This book is about the essence of human interactions. Story after story
is told throughout this book: stories from tales and myths throughout
the world, brief stories, profound stories, lighthearted stories, stories of
hope, and real-life clinical stories that reflect picture after picture of
what counseling and psychotherapy really look like behind closed doors.
Many of the ideas in this book have come from my professional expe-
riences, spending over 11,000 hours clinically counseling individuals,
couples, families, and children, and from the thousands of hours I spent
clinically supervising and training counselors and therapists. It is my
hope that this work will offer something pragmatic and unique that will
add to the knowledge of counselors and psychotherapists. During my
years as a professional counselor and counselor educator, I have devel-
oped what I think are exciting ideas about human interactions and how
to help people make changes in their lives, ideas that, until now, have not
yet been presented in our field.
What makes this book different from other techniques books is that,
in this book, the reader will learn about the five errors of communication
in counseling and psychotherapy: a concept I have developed and coined.
They will learn about the analytic self from which they can evaluate extant
countertransference; Yield Theory, a systematic model of building rapport
that has been the foundation of so many close relationships; and the Four
Cs of Parenting, a concise and pragmatic way to teach others the fun-
damental skills for parenting and a tool counselors and psychotherapists
alike can draw from to help many clients. There are some new terms pre-
sented and discussed, such as ebullition and point of projection; and some
older concepts, such as confirmation bias, are articulated and defined in
new ways. Because this project stems primarily from my own work, I have
not directly referenced many books. I have, however, included a more
comprehensive bibliography in the Appendix to denote the works that
were most influential in shaping this book.
xi
xii Preface
Throughout this work readers will be presented with some original
techniques that stem from my clinical experiences. For instance, imple-
menting Plato’s allegory of the cave as a counseling technique can be an
insightful presentation of the counseling journey. With a simple, fun to
teach, and practical application, readers will learn how to be the couch to
change how they argue, and how to teach others to do the same. In this
book readers will gain a down-to-earth technique for motivating chil-
dren with the Essential Time Management Chart. Readers will also find
some energizing and creative techniques, such as the Live Video Game,
Jealousy as an Ugly Flower, Puppet World, and Past, Present, Future
technique, and they will learn how to give a Free Pass to clients to al-
leviate the pressure of having to remember everything that occurred in
therapy. This book is also unique in that I include a description of the
fundamental logical fallacies people make when attempting to reason,
which I have not found elsewhere in counseling literature.
I am aware that people are drawn to brevity in the modern world, so
I have attempted to make descriptions of the tales, techniques, and clini-
cal examples as brief as possible. This task became more challenging as
the book developed, because this work begins in a very basic way but later
moves into some fairly esoteric concepts. Whether the ideas in this book
are rudimentary or abstruse, they are all, I believe, practical and readily
useful for counselors. This book is titled Advanced Techniques for Coun-
seling and Psychotherapy, and whereas I attempted to spell out many
terms for the reader, I also worked from the assumption that this book is
intended for those who already have a basic grasp of counseling lingo.
This book will likely make more sense when the reader understands
the author’s background and philosophy. After obtaining an under-
graduate degree in psychology, I began my graduate work at California
University of Pennsylvania, where I studied under an expert Rogerian
therapist, Dr. Bob Brown. Though I integrated the core values of Rog-
ers’s approach, at the time, I was hungry to learn more. I simultaneously
began to study under Dr. Ed Jacobs at West Virginia University, where I
learned his Impact Therapy (a combination of Rational-Emotive Behav-
ioral Therapy, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt, and Adlerian Therapy).
During these years I also learned the art of motivational speaking from
renowned sports psychologist Dr. Kevin Elko. I moved on from these
teachers to learn from the master instructors at Duquesne University,
where I pursued a doctorate and began an in-depth study of Analyti-
cal Psychology and Constructivism. Today, as an assistant professor at
the University of Nevada, I have integrated my education and experi-
Preface xiii
ence into my own theoretical approach that I call Depth Counseling.
Depth Counseling is more than a psychodynamic theory; it is a holistic
approach to therapy, the core of which is predicated on helping others
discover their true selves. The fundamental difference between Depth
Counseling and other psychodynamic theories, however, is its emphasis
on taking a balanced approach to working with both conscious and un-
conscious aspects of the psyche.
The “voice” of this book is largely colloquial, and that is not without
purpose. Counseling and psychotherapy are dialogical in nature; thus,
I attempted to write as I speak so as to engage readers as they in turn
will engage clients. The words on the pages to follow can come to life
when readers find themselves actively identifying with them and the ex-
amples presented. That the writing style in this book is conversational by
no means implies that it is casual; to the contrary, everything within is
written with intentionality to help readers connect with the material. By
using a conversational voice, it is hoped that readers will identify wholly
with the experiences offered in the pages to come.
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