Allison Bruce

Loneliness has become a recognized public health concern over the past decade, but in clinical practice it's still often misread. The common assumption is that loneliness follows from being alone: fewer relationships, more loneliness. The research doesn't bear that out. John Cacioppo and his colleagues at the University of Chicago, whose work on the subject is foundational, defined loneliness not by relationship count but by a subjective gap, the feeling that one's need for meaningful...

Francine Shapiro’s Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model proposes that traumatic experiences become dysfunctionally stored when they overwhelm the brain’s natural capacity to integrate experience (Shapiro, 2018). From this perspective, symptoms are not viewed as pathology but as adaptive responses to information that has not yet been fully processed. The goal of EMDR therapy, therefore, is not to teach clients to think differently, but to facilitate the integration of these...

What actually changes people? Psychotherapy has circled that question for decades, and every orientation answers it differently. When I was in graduate school I studied the work of Barry Duncan and Scott Miller as they explored the factors with the greatest influence on the change process in psychotherapy. They emphasized that client factors, the therapeutic alliance, and the client's perception of progress are among the strongest predictors of change. Duncan and Miller have often highlighted...