What we’ve said about Containment

“What is technical containment? It is when you perceive the inner emotional experience of another person, you receive it, digest it yourself, and you communicate back to them in some fashion that you have done so, that you've perceived them. That's all. You're not giving information. You're not changing anything”

“he had a theory about thinking, in that it wasn't inherently possible for human beings to form thinkable thoughts, that before you could form thoughts into basically words, language that you communicate to other people and yourself, that you would just have sort of undifferentiated internal experiences”

“If you're not doing some amount of containment, technically, you're not really having a conversation so much as you're both talking at the same time”

“containment as more of processing and putting thoughts into a container and metabolizing thoughts in a way that they can kind of hear back and mirroring as a way to show that this person has an individual self that can be seen and is important and recognized”

“how often in your life has someone carefully listened to and paid attention to your internal experiences and then communicated their findings back to you in a way that you can accept”

“I want people to think that maybe people can't name emotions or put their internal experiences into words because of a lack of development. They weren't given the tools or the opportunity to be able to self-reflect”

“before you do any analysis, okay, before you do any interpretation, before you do any confrontation, contain, contain, contain. Demonstrate to the patient that you have actually heard and experienced something like what they have gone through within themselves emotionally, psychologically”

“So step one is you observe and hear what the patient is saying and doing in front of you, and also maybe what they're not saying and doing, or even what ordinary people might be experiencing if they're talking about or thinking about that”

“If you do technical containment within a interview for diagnosis, for example, judiciously, you will, in my opinion, jaw bolster, even in that moment, the patient's ability to elaborate on experiences and it builds rapport to and it really helps you get the more information”

“the concept of intrusive thoughts provides a container for their experience to help understand what's going on so it doesn't feel like all these wild, called unexplainable thoughts, and in a sense, contains them and makes them feel much better”

“there are a ton of patients that I feel used by and I feel dumped on by. And then there are patients that will have almost the exact same session, but in the context of my relationship with the patient, I find it's something that is necessary for them and helpful for them and therapeutic for them”

“don't be afraid to simply reflect back. And why is that important? Not only does it possibly underlie the whole development of thinking and emotional regulation, especially in traumatized individuals, but at the minimum, you're proving that you're actually listening”

“The actual core of motivational interviewing is the ability to do this technical containment, the Rogerian-type mirroring, and in it, allowing patients to actually notice areas of discrepancy within themselves that would not otherwise be noticed without these kinds of reflections”

“go on YouTube and watch Carl Rogers work. OK, Carl Rogers, follow. of client-centered therapy, which spawned motivational interviewing, his therapy technique and theory was only containment in my eyes. It was only reflective statements”

“venting itself is not actually helpful. It really bothers me when I see venting being documented as a psychotherapy intervention. The venting is not the operating procedure that actually helps people. It's the reflections you do”

“I fear that that's what occurs in a lot of therapies is just unconditional support for the primary process of what the person's experiencing rather than a curiosity and a desire to expand and understand it”