October 4, 2017 By Admin

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Building Emotional Resilience On a personal note, right now I am suffering. Its April 15th and I have a terrible viral infection (sore throat, chest congestion, and fever). I feel weak and miserable. Perhaps all that frigid air we endured in New England this Winter also kept infectious “stuff” under control for a while. However, […]

How to Find & Choose an Effective Therapist Recently The Harvard Health Newsletter posted some interesting questions to ask while seeking out a psychotherapist. I will add a few more details and areas of inquiry in this post. Keep in mind that these questions and inquiries do not mean you will be happy and improve […]

Your Regular Practice: Impact on Yourself From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont Compassion Training: Here is a quick self-assessment process to see if your regular compassion practice has had positive effects on you. Review the questions below and decide what your answers are. I hope you have noted pleasant […]

Wind Ridge Press NEW Publication! Author Anthony Quintiliani, a licensed psychologist with more than 35 years professional clinical experience, casts a wide net into the personal, clinical, and societal causes of prolonged human suffering and unhappiness in his book Mindful Happiness. The book’s guided interventions are aimed at helping to relieve depression, anxiety, traumatic reactivity, and […]

Practice: Yogi Deep Meditation on Inner Listening Carl Jung noted: Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside, awakens. The Katha Upanishads (800-400 BCE) noted: One path leads outward and the other inward. [The] way inward leads to grace. The Mind Cave Focus instructs us to close our eyes and expand your third-eye space to the back of […]

Inner Workings of Self-Medication Process To continue our discussion about the self-medication process we will first turn to the human brain. The human brain is the most complex system known to science. Here, my comments will be basic. Self-medication often has roots in the quality of our earliest childhood experiences (attachment and object relations with […]

Participate in Groups for Meditation, Problem-Solving, and Task Completion Meditation With The Sangha Among regularly practicing meditators and various meditation traditions, the sangha is the social, emotional and spiritual collective that continues to support ongoing serious practice and progress along the Path. Given that so much has been written about the many benefits of practicing […]

Happiness #5 – Last Post on Characteristics This will be my last post for a while on the important topic of happiness. Here I will hit a few highlights about simple joy and lasting inner experiences of true happiness. Simple Joy – We experience simple joy in simple experiences, small sometimes subtle events in our […]

The Holy Year of Mercy Like the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, Pope Francis in The Church of Rome, is sharing his opinion on compassion and mercy in life. Although Pope Francis distinguishes compassion (a human action) from mercy (a divine action), the two positive conditions are quite similar in values, attitudes, and behaviors. Pope […]

Emptiness – Meditation Practice The Brahma-Viharas (higher abodes) include four powerful meditation practices ( Loving Kindness/Maitri or Metta; Compassion/Karuna; Sympathetic Joy/Mudita; and, Equanimity/Upekkha) that involve boundless radiation outwardly all the way into the infinite universe. These boundless or infinite space meditations, working with deep absorption and projecting kindness outwardly, may lead to positive changes. Experienced […]

From The Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation, Monkton, Vermont – Five Breathing and Meditation Practices – Attention and concentration on the breath are common practices to attune meditation capacity. We use the breath as an object of attention in our mind training. The better your quality of attention and concentration, the better […]

Facing Addiction in America On November 17, 2016 The Surgeon General of The United States (Dr. Vivik Murthy) issued THE FIRST Surgeon General Report on our addictions problems. Since addictions in America may well be the single most threatening condition facing the nation’s health and economy, as well as casting strong doubt about a good […]

Psychodynamics of Alliance – Therapeutic Relationship Enhancement This post includes basic considerations, processes, and clinical skills necessary for developing a strongly positive clinical alliance and therapeutic relationship in therapy. Here the alliance is required for any substantial change in psychotherapy, and the therapeutic relationship rides the quality of the initial alliance to expand and inter-penetrate […]

America’s Opioid Problem-2020; A Brief Update Unfortunately, Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) is alive and well in 2020. Today approximately 150 People are dying each day due to opioid overdose. The CDC noted that from 1999 to 2017 approximately 399,000 people died in the United States from Opioid overdose. Related to chronic pain, this is one […]

The Failed “War on Drugs” – Let’s Try Treatment On Demand and Fund It The New York based Drug Policy Alliance (drugpolicy.org) and other sources have provided some important information about our failed drug and alcohol policies. Here are a few astounding facts. The United Stares has about 5% of the world’s population, but it […]

Drink a Cup of Tea with Thich Nhat Hanh According to the article “A Perfect Cup of Tea” by Noa Jones, The Great Meditation Master offers this sage advice about the best way to enjoy a great cup of tea. I suppose if you would rather drink coffee, the same suggestions may apply. Recognize that […]

Setting Emotional Boundaries from Work to Life Anthony R. Quintiliani, Ph.D., LADC Sometimes setting emotional boundaries from the psychotherapy room to your life outside of work can be a difficult thing to do. Shifting from “experience near empathy” (Kohut), “unconditional positive regard” (Rogers), “hovering attention” (Freud), “the holding environment” in “intersubjective space” (Winnicott), and compassionate […]

Self-Medication: Is Your Hand-Held Device a Dopamine Device? Mindfulness Activities: Here is a simple activity that may inform you about your personal level of addiction to your digital/electronic devices. Simply click the link below to download the PDF Worksheet; answer each question according to your personal opinions. Dr-Anthony-Quintiliani_HandHeldDeviceActivity Be sure to complete the meditation activity […]

How Most People Learn in Psychotherapy It is highly important that clients learn from their therapists. In most cases this includes alternative ways of thinking, emoting, and behaving. So what can we learn from educational research on how people learn? Of course we all know it begins with a solid therapeutic alliance – the […]

Effective Clinical Supervision Perhaps other than the mental health status of the therapist and her/his ethical clinical skills, there is no more important variable in successful clinical work than effective CLINICAL supervision. I emphasize “clinical’ because in today’s bureaucratic systems, so much supervision tends to be about required procedures like utilization level, reporting requirements, and documentation for services […]