Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy

03/01/2026

A quote from Diane Ackerman.
I hoped that when readers closed the book they would feel a blend of rapture and responsibility — the sense that our little lives and the vast lives of other worlds are made of the same dust, bound by the same laws, and therefore implicated in one another’s fate. I hoped for a lingering awareness that the “cosmic” is not elsewhere: the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, the mold on bread, the storms on Jupiter, and the quiet in deep space are all chapters of a single ancestral story, and once you feel that kinship it becomes harder to treat other lives or other landscapes as expendable scenery.

I also hoped readers might feel a bridge between awe and stewardship: the knowledge that we are latecomers in an ancient universe who nonetheless possess a frightening and beautiful power to scar or to shelter the only world (at the moment) we know to be alive. I wanted that double sensation to persist—a childlike wonder before the everythingness of everything, and braided through it, the mature realization that wonder alone is not enough, that love of the cosmos must express itself as care for this particular planet, with all its ordinary (though often overlooked) natural miracles.

02/24/2026

Supervision Group — Emotional Integration of Patient and Therapist With Jon Frederickson & Yuval Alon

Two groups : basic before - during core training and advanced therapists teachers group

THURSDAY GROUP For therapists before or during core training 🕘 9:00 AM EST · 3:00 PM CET

This group is for you if you have not yet completed — or are currently in — your core training. It is a place to develop your clinical presence from the inside out, while you are still building your foundations.

We work with real cases to explore what happens when a patient's past enters the room, and what your own reactions as a therapist are telling you. You will learn to use yourself as a therapeutic tool, build a working alliance, and become the kind of therapist whose patients feel less alone.

What happens each session (1 hr 50 min): · 20 min — Thematic learning with Yuval. Yuval introduces a theme drawn directly from the cases brought for supervision that session, grounding the learning in what is alive in the room. · 60 min — Live supervision with Jon. A therapist brings a case. Jon works with the therapist to explore the dynamics: the patient's history, the therapeutic relationship, the therapist's reactions, and how to move forward. · 30 min — Group discussion with Jon. The group reflects on the themes that emerged and on what each therapist is taking from the session.

📩 After every session: a written summary + full video recording sent to you.

Dates: Feb 26 · Mar 5, 12 · Apr 10, 17, 30 · May 14, 28 · Jun 4, 11, 18, 25 Fee: $600 USD Lower fees available for therapists from Iran or other lower-income countries — contact us directly.

payment : paypal - jf1844@gmail.com - copy to : a,yuval7@gmail.com

FRIDAY GROUP For therapists who have completed core training · and for teachers 🕘 9:00 AM EST · 3:00 PM CET

This group is for you if you have completed your core training — and for therapists who teach. Knowing something and living it are different things. This group works in that space.

The focus is emotional integration: bringing together what you know intellectually and what you carry as a person and as a clinician. For teachers, this group develops the skills to help your students not just understand the work, but feel it.

What happens each session (1 hr 50 min): · 20 min — Thematic learning with Yuval. Yuval introduces a theme drawn directly from the cases brought for supervision that session, grounding the learning in what is alive in the room. · 60 min — Live supervision with Jon. A therapist brings a case. Jon works with the therapist to explore the dynamics: the patient's history, the therapeutic relationship, the therapist's reactions, and how to move forward. · 30 min — Group discussion with Jon. The group reflects on the themes that emerged and on what each therapist is taking from the session.

📩 After every session: a written summary + full video recording sent to you.

Dates: Feb 27 · Mar 6, 13, 20 · Apr 10, 17, 30 · May 14, 28 · Jun 5, 12, 19, 26 Fee: $980 USD Lower fees available for therapists from Iran or other lower-income countries — contact us directly.

payment : paypal - jf1844@gmail.com - copy to : a,yuval7@gmail.com

We would love to have you with us. Questions or registration: a.yuval7@gmail.com

Jon and Yuval

02/17/2026

"The “Thou” is not a thing to be analyzed but a partner to be addressed. Language that turns the Thou into an “It” (e.g., objectifying, purely theoretical speech) has stepped out of the dialogical sphere." Ferdinand Ebner

02/14/2026

Feelings Triggered by Political Events

"I assume you are aware of the situation in my country. I am working with clients who have war-related anxiety, are grieving, and at the same time feel intense anger toward the government.
I know that attention and empathy are helpful for anxiety. But regarding anger toward the government, should this anger be explored? How?
Could this anger be related to rage impulses toward their parents? How should I address my clients’ guilt about those who were killed and their question of why they survived?" Thanks to one of our community members for sharing this question!

Of course, people feel angry toward the government. This is not irrational or neurotic anger. It is a healthy response to injustice. It should not be reduced to a psychological category for analysis; it is a realistic response to be validated.

Of course, you will validate the anger as a sign of health: opposition to injustice. Of course, your patients feel grief: that is a healthy response to the death and injuries of loved ones who were abused by the government.

If they feel anxious, you can notice that something about feeling justified anger makes them anxious. Then you can ask: "Given that your anger is justified, do you have any sense of what feels risky about having this feeling here with me? Then you might discover that they are afraid you would judge their anger rather than validate it. This is a common fear when people live in a totalitarian government or in a country that is descending into fascism. Those who feel angry with the government are often threatened by the government or by attackers on social media. Again, you help them see the underlying fear people experience under fascism: rule by force.

As for guilt, you can point out that no one knows why you lived and others did not. That is a form of rumination that functions as a defense. However, we DO know why they died: government officials killed them. And we DO know who should feel guilty: the government forces. Then you can ask, "Should you borrow their guilt, or should we remember that this is THEIR guilt to bear?"

Authoritarian governments always deny their guilt and justify their violence. One way they do this is to claim that THEY should feel no guilt: supposedly, their violence is justified. Instead, they claim the dead and injured should feel guilt. Just as a psychopath will use projective identification to make the victim feel the guilt for the crime done to the victim, authoritarian regimes do the same.

Then we see rationalizations to justify hatred and violence. And those rationalizations even become another form of violence, designed to attack citizens' perception of reality. Thus, if authoritarians' rationalizations can distort citizens' ability to perceive reality, they can no longer think about it. And that inability to think guarantees the future of the authoritarian government.

This is why Erich Fromm said that insofar as the therapist helps patients see the lies of any culture or government, the therapist is inherently engaging in a revolutionary act.

01/16/2026

Healing Through Relating is now available in German!!! Thanks to Pierre Alain Emenegger, Ulrike Bartsch, Eik Niederlohman, and Katrin Dumalin-Kleisov for all their work to make this possible. I'm so grateful to all of you for making this deliberate practice skill-building book available!!!

01/02/2026

Denial of Death

A great book, but also a constant in human affairs. Today, we see this dynamic at work when aging dictators are suffering from illnesses. And these illnesses begin to erode their manic denial and omnipotence. It turns out that they are dying, will die, and will be forgotten in the mists of time.

To avoid this, they seek to appear larger than life. They try to leave a mark through grandiose architecture. (Look up totalitarian architecture.) Or they make a mark by destroying beautiful architecture, as if they are the great destroyer rather than facing the great destroyer, death. Or they make grandiose claims of fantasy accomplishments to avoid facing their real losses. And they try to eternalize their rule through voter restriction, taking voters off the rolls, or even extending votership to people outside of their country (Orban). Or they seek extreme wealth as if dollars will prevent dying. Or they invade other countries as a way to externalize how death is invading them or to reclaim a historical loss and, thereby, undo a symbolic death (Putin). I'm sure you can think of many parallels.

They often rationalize killing others so that they can "become death" rather than suffer the anxiety of dying. They make a great show of their health while their bodies tell the truth. And others lie to these leaders as well because the leaders are the conductors of these gravy trains. But death is stalking these leaders nonetheless. And while we wait for them to die, so many people and countries will suffer because of their denial.

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12/26/2025

The struggle against diversity is rarely a fight for truth, but rather a fight for power: whose truth will prevail, whose truth will be deemed truer. Thus, it is a defense against recognizing that any opinion we hold about others is a just a map, not the territory. Terrified to realize that we never can grasp the totality of another person, we become epistemological conquistadors: "I know exactly who you are. You are the same as my idea." Or, "I know exactly how the world is." How humbling to learn that another person does not fit our concept. Yet, every day we experience how we do not fit someone else's concept of us.

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12/21/2025

A reminder in these times.

“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.” John Steinbeck

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12/18/2025

Give the therapist in your life the perfect present for Christmas! Or maybe give yourself the perfect Christmas present, if you're a therapist:-)

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

10/09/2025

Supervision as a Change Experience

Jon Frederickson
MSW

Date and Time:
November 28, 2025
9 am to 3.15 pm PST

Location: Online (Zoom)

Course Objectives:

How to discern what the student needs to learn
How to assess a problem that interferes with learning
How to assess what the student is integrating and not integrating
Cost: $300 (CAD)

We regret that we are unable to offer Continuing Education credits for this workshop.

Register
We enter supervision to learn how to become better therapists. Yet research shows that 93% of supervision is inadequate, and supervision on average accounts for only 1% of patient outcome. Why is supervision so often unhelpful? What needs to change in supervision? How can supervision facilitate the change that supervisees seek?

This presentation will review a new model of psychotherapy supervision that integrates the latest research on learning, education, and metacognition. And we will analyze a video of a supervision session illustrating this integrative model. By doing so, we will learn how to assess what the student needs to learn, the problems he has learning, and how to assess what the student is integrating and not integrating moment by moment.

We often mistakenly believe that we need to teach the student. But that is the easy part. The hard part is assessing what the student is understanding and not understanding. We have to assess what the student is integrating and not integrating to help the student integrate new information.

Further, when students take in new information, old knowledge must disintegrate to integrate that new information. While this positive disintegration allows integration, the disintegration of old knowledge triggers much anxiety and distress in the student. Only by paying attention to the student’s emotional experience of new learning can we help the student manage this inevitable process of disintegration of old knowledge and integration of new information.

Through studying a video of supervision, we will see how to help supervisees with emotional problems interfering with their therapy without turning supervision into therapy. We practice forms of therapy that are experiential, where we help patients face the feelings and conflicts they usually avoid. This requires the therapist to face her own feelings and conflicts that the act of doing therapy evokes. Thus, the supervisor, to be optimally helpful, must help the student with her path of emotional growth and integration. This video of a supervision session will illustrate one way to do that.

If you have questions about this workshop, please email Zach at zach.aletheaservices@gmail.com

A smiling man with a beard is seated, wearing a maroon shirt and a patterned tie, in front of a bookshelf filled with books.
Jon Frederickson, MSW, is on the faculty of the Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) Training Program at the Washington School of Psychiatry. Jon has provided ISTDP training in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Italy, Switzerland, India, Iran, Australia, Canada, the U.S., and the Netherlands.

His most recent book (2024) is Clinical Thinking in Psychotherapy: What It Is, How It Works, and Why and How to Teach It.

He is also the author of over fifty published papers or book chapters and four books, Co-Creating Change: Effective Dynamic Therapy Techniques, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: Learning to Listen from Multiple Perspectives, The Lies We Tell Ourselves, and Co-Creating Safety: healing the fragile patient, Healing Through Relating, and Clinical Thinking in Psychotherapy: how to do it, why to do it, and how to teach it. His book, Co-Creating Change, won the first prize in psychiatry in 2014 at the British Medical Association Book Awards, and it has been published in Farsi, Polish, Hebrew, and Slovak, and is currently being translated into Spanish. His book The Lies We Tell Ourselves has been published in Polish, Farsi, Norwegian, German, and Danish and is currently being translated into Chinese, Arabic, and Bulgarian.

He has DVDs of actual sessions with patients who previously failed in therapy at his websites www.istdpinstitute.com and www.deliberatepracticeinpsychotherapy.com There you will also find skill-building exercises designed for therapists. He writes posts on ISTDP at www.facebook.com/DynamicPsychotherapy.

Contact
806 525 Seymour Street
Vancouver, BC V6A 1Y6
(604) 366-3112

Home On this website, we offer a series of skill-building exercise programs designed to help therapists of all orientations. As a therapist, how often are you setting time aside to develop your skills, analyze your video transcripts, watch your videotaped sessions, or going to supervision? Did you k...

10/04/2025

Are there situations so catastrophic that feelings become overwhelming or unbearable? Thanks to one of our community members for sharing this important question.

While reading Co-Creating Safety, I remembered you once said that it's never the feelings that are the problem or overwhelming, but depending on the specific case, anxiety and defenses create problems. Are there scenarios that are so catastrophic that feelings are actually overwhelming/unbearable? For example: An Iraqi man who lost his wife and 4 children to a bombing and related examples.

Of course! How does anyone bear that amount of grief? No one can bear it alone. The best we can do is try to bear it with him.
Sometimes, simply bearing witness is all the patient needs. And the last thing he needs is someone trying to "fix" what can never be fixed.

And how does someone bear that amount of rage? No one can bear it alone. The best we can do is accept it as a completely normal response to an abnormal event.

And his rage is not pathological. It's a normal response. Often, just accepting his responses as normal responses is powerful in itself.

His enormous grief and rage are not signs of pathology, but of health. And they will take time. He cannot push that natural shift that will occur over time, and neither can you. And somehow, if he realizes that you know this is normal and cannot be rushed, that, in itself, will be a powerful form of healing through validation.

He doesn't need answers because there are no answers to what he has endured.
He needs someone who knows there are no answers and doesn't try to provide them. So the questions become for us therapists: can we sit with the unbearable? Can we sit without having answers? Can we sit without offering pseudo-answers as a defense against sitting with our patient, both of us enduring the unbearable, so he is no longer alone?

One of my regrets looking back over my career is that I often thought a patient needed an answer from me when patients just needed my company, my ability to feel with them, to bear what they were feeling without having to explain it away.

The word compassion derives from the Latin, "to suffer with." Sitting with a man who lost his wife and four children is nearly impossible to bear, just as it is for him. But if we can sit with him, he is no longer alone. And if we can face the truth—there are no answers that make this go away—he can face the truth more easily because he is not alone.

Jon Frederickson, MSW
Author, Co-Creating Change: effective dynamic therapy techniques
The Lies We Tell Ourselves: how to face the truth, accept yourself, and create a better life, Co-Creating Safety: Healing the Fragile Patient
Psychotherapy videos and skill building exercises at:

Through education and training, The Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy Institute prepares therapists to practice ISTDP in a clinical setting.

08/30/2025

📚 Supervision Groups 2025–2026

Thursday Group – Starting September 18
For therapists, before or during Core Training
Fee: $800 for 15 meetings.
Fee for Low-income countries: $250 flat rate

Friday Group – Starting September 19
For therapists who have completed Core Training
We have been running this course for over three years, and each year we adapt and refine it to benefit you.
Fee: $1100 for 15 meeings.
Fee for Low-income countries: $250 flat rate

This year’s focus:
During the first 20 minutes with me (Yuval), we will make sure therapy is guided by the patient’s wishes, not our own. This plays a key role in the well-being of the therapist, the patient's progress, and avoiding burnout.
Course structure (each session – 1 hour 50 minutes):

0:00–0:20 – Patient wishes to heal (with Yuval)

0:20–1:20 – Supervision (with Jon)

1:20–1:50 – Group discussion & Q&A

Additional benefits:

Teachers have direct access to interact with Jon during the sessions.

All sessions are recorded and distributed to the group.

Key learnings are summarized (with the support of AI tools) and sent to participants

Payment: via PayPal → jf1844@gmail.com
Please send a copy of your payment confirmation to a.yuval7@gmail.com

🎓 Core Training 2026–2029
With Jon Frederickson and Yuval Alon
Starting in January 2026

12 blocks over 3 years (4 per year)

Each block: 3 full training days

Includes case presentations, skill development, and experiential learning.

Practice groups with Yuval (low fee) available alongside training

Fee: $1,000 per block

This program is designed for therapists who wish to advance their ISTDP knowledge to the next level.

🟦 Pre-Core Training (led by Yuval)
For individuals who want to develop basic alliance-building skills before beginning Core Training.

Dates: October 11, November 1, November 8 (3 full days)

Fee: $800

🟢 Practice Groups – Patient’s Wish to Heal (led by Yuval)
Focus: ensuring the therapy aligns with the patient’s desire to heal.

Method: experiential role-plays from your clinical work → therapists practice while gaining insight from the patient’s perspective.

Frequency: twice weekly

Monday – 11 am EST / 5 p.m. CET

Tuesday – 1 p.m. EST / 7 p.m. CET

Duration: 1 hour each

Fee: $200/month

This is a great opportunity to learn, practice, and grow in a safe environment that supports both therapists and patients.

We warmly welcome you to join us,
Yuval Alon & Jon Frederickson

Send a message to learn more