Quick Tip for Therapists by Martin M. Antony, PhD, author of Overcoming Health Anxiety and Bethany Gee, MA

A key component of helping a client overcome a specific phobia is encouraging the individual to face the fear directly. The first step is to work with the client to develop an exposure hierarchy. This is a list of the client's feared situations, with the most anxiety-provoking ones at the top and the least anxiety-provoking ones at the bottom. The hierarchy serves as a roadmap to guide the client through a series of exposure practices involving confronting the feared situations. The client should start with easier items, and work up to more difficult situations.

Quick Tip for Therapists by Stephanie Moulton Sarkis, PhD, author of 10 Simple Solutions to Adult ADD, 2nd edition

It is imperative that therapists practice good self-care in order to protect themselves from absorbing too much suffering. This includes admitting that while being sensitive, caring people can make us good therapists, it can also result in taking on too much pain.

Quick Tip for Therapists by Martin M. Antony, PhD, author of Overcoming Health Anxiety and Jenny Rogojanski, MA

Changing behavior can be extremely challenging for clients, and finding ways to reinforce progress between sessions can be critical for successful therapy. In particular, the client's environment, culture, or social context may act as a barrier to making changes outside of the therapy session. One strategy that may be helpful for overcoming this is to include a supportive family member or close friend as a "helper" who can motivate the client to make changes between sessions. At times, a client's partner may not support the client's efforts to change, which can interfere with progress. In these cases, it is particularly important to get the client's partner on board.

Quick Tip for Therapists by Randy J. Paterson, PhD, author of Private Practice Made Simple

It's sometimes difficult to get hardworking clients to contemplate the value of life outside work. One option is simply to recite the old maxim, "No one reaches the end of their life and says 'I wish I'd spent more time at the office.'" Based on my experiences sitting by a lot of deathbeds in my time, this seems to be true. I've never seen a shred of regret about not working harder.

Another option is to lead the client into the discussion like this:

Quick Tip for Therapists by Stephanie Moulton Sarkis, PhD, NCC, LMHC, author of 10 Simple Solutions to Adult ADD, 2nd ed.

A therapist can determine if a client's relationship is healthy by looking at the levels of control within a relationship. A healthy relationship is one that is interdependent: the partners are emotionally intimate and rely on each other, but also have their own interests and abilities. One partner does not try to control the other.

Quick Tip for Therapists by Martin M. Antony, PhD, author of Overcoming Health Anxiety and Heather Hood, MA

Although exposure-based treatments can be highly effective for helping clients overcome problems with anxiety, you can enhance treatment outcomes by paying attention to the way that you conduct exposure therapy. Successful exposure therapy follows these guidelines:

Quick Tip for Therapists by Martin M. Antony, PhD, author of Overcoming Health Anxiety and Valerie Vorstenbosch, MA

There are many reasons why clients are often noncompliant with homework assignments in therapy. They may face competing demands for their time, believe the assignments to be overly challenging or irrelevant, assume that the assignment will not be helpful, misunderstand what is expected for the assignment, or simply have limited motivation for change. Strategies for improving compliance depend on the reasons for noncompliance, so a first step to investigate factors that may be getting in the way of homework completion.

Quick Tip for Therapists by Sheri Van Dijk, MSW, author of Don't Let Your Emotions Run Your Life for Teens, Bipolar Workbook for Teens and DBT Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder

Sometimes, one of the hardest things about psychotherapy is knowing how to set appropriate boundaries with clients. Usually therapists have come into this field because they want to help, so it can feel counter-intuitive to say "no" when a client contacts you excessively by telephone or email, tries to extend appointment times, or wants more frequent appointments. But not saying "no" can lead to negative consequences like burnout. So when clients start making excessive requests, it's important to think about a couple of things.

by guest blogger Randy Paterson, PhD, author of Private Practice Made Simple

Human beings have dozens of ways to increase their level of misery. One of these is regret. In essence, the person casts their mind back to a decision point at some time in the past, a moment when they could have chosen another path into the future, and made what seems to them to be the wrong choice.

The interesting thing about regret is how often the individual stuck with it seems to oscillate on the moment of the decision. “I could have said no, but I said yes.” But of course there are many moments that they could focus on: the time of the decision and all the moments since.

Quick Tip for Therapists by Bill Knaus EdD , author of The Procrastination Workbook.

Part three of a three-part series on client procrastination

Activity is a useful remedy for depression, but often not easy for your client to execute. When your client's depression lingers, you can use counter-procrastination techniques to spur positive activity.

A five-minute plan to break a procrastination cycle may help limit your client's lingering depression. The method involves getting a client commitment to engage a meaningful, measurable, and achievable activity for five minutes, such as light exercise. The client can choose to do five more minutes, or stop. Here are steps that I follow: