Courtney Armstrong's The Therapeutic "Aha!" explores the thrilling and rare moment when a client reaches an elusive realization, allowing them to make meaningful change. In 10 straightforward strategies, this practical book demonstrates how to shake things up in therapy when a client is stuck or stalled to jumpstart progress. Readers will learn how to spark the "emotional brain"--the part of the brain that houses automatic, unconscious patterns--and create new neural pathways that engage and advance the healing process.

Divided into three parts--(1) Awakening a Session, (2) Healing Emotional Wounds, and (3) Activating Experiential Change--the book walks readers through specific techniques for harnessing the emotional brain and re-patterning its routine. Elegant therapeutic insights and coping strategies only go so far; until we intervene with something our emotional brain can understand--a compelling felt experience--old, established neural patterns will persist. The brain-based strategies Armstrong presents include how to enliven the therapeutic alliance; elicit exciting goals; identify the root of an emotional conflict; reverse trauma with memory reconsolidation; invoke inspirational imagery; and use stories, humor, music, poetry, and even mindfulness to induce change.

Concise, reader-friendly, and filled with helpful case stories and client-therapist dialogue, this wonderfully accessible book puts a new spin on neuroscience knowledge, showing clinicians exactly how it can be used to make those once-elusive therapeutic breakthroughs more frequent, leading to greater healing for your patients.