Public Librarytherapy-aligned.com →
LLM-generated — everything in this wiki is AI-generated to help clinicians explore ideas. Verify against primary sources before any clinical use.
Therapy Aligned

Therapy AlignedTM Clinical Wiki

Therapy theories, modalities & cross-disciplinary frameworks — a clinical reference map

A living, LLM-generated cross-disciplinary therapeutic map of theories, modalities, and frameworks — drawn from psychology, philosophy, sociology, economics and beyond — indexed by the populations and problems-for-work they speak to. All theories, including cross-disciplinary ones, include sample treatment goals, SMART objectives, and therapeutic framing for progress notes.

How this wiki is made

Each article is drafted by AI from the sources listed at the end of the article. Articles are not individually reviewed by a clinician unless the page says so, so check claims against the primary sources before any clinical use. Suggested new articles and revisions from clinicians are reviewed by our clinical team before they are published. The Clinical Wiki was created by Andrew H. Kim, LCSW, LCADC, and is built by Therapy Aligned, a New Jersey behavioral health group practice that sees clients in person in Metuchen, NJ and virtually across New Jersey, with Therapy Aligned Solutions, its clinical-technology team. It is a free educational resource for clinicians, not clinical advice.

Check out the main Therapy Aligned™ site, the group practice behind the Clinical Wiki →

Explore the Public Library

Clinician-curated notebooks on The Bookshelf — published by the community.

Search the articles. Matching articles appear in the scrollable window above The Vault.

The Vault

Theory-only view Reset

Browse by discipline

Anthropology

  • Afro-Diasporic Religions (Santería / Candomblé / Vodou): A Clinician's Guide Orisha- and lwa-centered religions of the African diaspora that use trance possession, drumming, divination, and communal ritual to restore spiritual and social balance. For clinicians, they are not a treatment modality but a culturally rooted meaning-making and healing system that can be a core support, a source of distress, or both, and that demands cultural humility rather than pathologizing.
  • Cultural Concepts of Distress Cultural Concepts of Distress (CCD) is DSM-5's umbrella framework; comprising cultural syndromes, cultural idioms of distress, and cultural explanations/perceived causes; that superseded the older "culture-bound syndromes" category. It reframes culture as relevant to every diagnosis and is operationalized clinically through the Cultural Formulation Interview.
  • Curanderismo: A Clinician's Guide to Latino Folk Healing Curanderismo is a syncretic Latin American folk-healing system blending Indigenous, Spanish-Catholic, and herbal traditions to treat physical, spiritual, and emotional ailments such as susto, mal de ojo, empacho, and nervios. For psychotherapists, the clinical task is not to practice it but to recognize it, work respectfully alongside it, and avoid pathologizing the cultural idioms of distress it addresses.
  • Idioms of Distress Idioms of distress are culturally shared, socially acceptable modes of expressing and communicating suffering; somatic complaints and verbal idioms such as "thinking too much" or "nerves"; that may signal distress whose source is not captured by a biomedical diagnosis. The construct, introduced by medical anthropologist Mark Nichter, reframes symptom presentation as meaningful communication rather than mere pathology.

Behavioral

  • Applied Tension Applied tension is Öst and Sterner's behavioral technique of repeatedly tensing the large skeletal muscles to raise blood pressure and abort the vasovagal drop that causes fainting, enabling exposure-based treatment of blood-injection-injury phobia. It is the standard recommended technique for fainting-prone clients, though its empirical base rests largely on the originating group and its incremental benefit over exposure alone is unproven.
  • Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) for OCD Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is the gold-standard psychological treatment for OCD: the patient repeatedly confronts obsessional triggers while deliberately refraining from the compulsion or neutralizing response, allowing new, non-threatening learning to compete with the original fear. It is delivered as the behavioral core of CBT and is well supported by randomized trials, though its edge over other active psychotherapies is debated.
  • Exposure Therapy Exposure therapy is a learning-theory-based behavioral technique in which clients systematically confront feared stimuli, situations, or sensations to reduce avoidance and fear. Modern practice is increasingly guided by inhibitory learning theory, which prioritizes expectancy violation and new safety learning over within-session fear reduction.
  • Functional Communication Training Functional Communication Training (FCT) reduces challenging behavior by teaching a functionally equivalent communicative response that produces the same reinforcer the problem behavior was earning, identified through functional assessment. Introduced by Edward Carr and V. Mark Durand in 1985, it is one of the best-evidenced behavioral interventions for severe problem behavior in autism and developmental disabilities.

Coaching

  • Cognitive Behavioral Coaching Cognitive Behavioral Coaching (CBC) applies CBT and REBT principles; structured models such as ABCDE and PRACTICE, and the targeting of performance-interfering thoughts; to non-clinical goal attainment, performance, and stress in coaching populations. It is well-established within coaching psychology and shares the cognitive model with therapy, but is bounded to functional, goal-focused work rather than treatment of disorders.
  • Habit Formation Theory Habit formation theory holds that behaviors become automatic when repeated in a stable context, so a contextual cue eventually triggers the response without conscious intention or motivation. For clinicians, it reframes behavior change as engineering durable cue-response associations rather than sustaining willpower.
  • Health Action Process Approach (HAPA) The Health Action Process Approach (HAPA) is a health-psychology model that splits behavior change into a motivational phase (forming an intention) and a volitional phase (planning, action, and maintenance), with self-efficacy operating as a stage-specific driver throughout. It is widely used to explain and intervene on adherence, lifestyle change, and self-management in chronic illness.
  • Health and Wellness Coaching: A Clinician's Guide Health and Wellness Coaching (HWC) is a patient-centered, partnership-based modality grounded in motivational interviewing and goal-setting theory that supports sustained health behavior change in chronic disease and lifestyle medicine. It now has national certification standards and a growing randomized-trial base, though protocols remain heterogeneous in definition and dose.

Cognitive

  • Attribution Theory: A Clinician's Guide Attribution theory describes how people explain the causes of behavior and events along internal/dispositional versus external/situational lines, with predictable biases such as the fundamental attribution error and a depressive (internal-stable-global) attributional style that links the theory to learned helplessness and cognitive therapy.
  • Constructivist / Sociodynamic Career Counseling A constructivist, meaning-centered approach to career and life counseling that treats people as self-organizing meaning-makers living within multiple, socially constructed realities, and that collapses the false split between "career" and "personal" work. Best known through R. Vance Peavy's SocioDynamic Counselling and Mark Savickas's allied Career Construction Theory / Life Design.
  • Desirable Difficulties Desirable difficulties are conditions of practice (spacing, interleaving, retrieval practice, generation, and varied/reduced-feedback formats) that slow learning and depress short-term performance while strengthening long-term retention and transfer. The construct, developed by Robert A. and Elizabeth L. Bjork, is well established for verbal and skill learning and is directly useful for clinical training, supervision, and psychoeducation about skill acquisition.
  • Embodied / 4E Cognition and Enactivism A cognitive-science and philosophy-of-mind framework holding that mind is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended; arising through an organism's sense-making coupling with its world rather than from internal representations alone. For clinicians it is a conceptual lens (not a standalone treatment) that grounds somatic, mindfulness-based, and relational work with embodiment, dissociation, and trauma.

Cognitive-Behavioral

  • Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy (CBASP) CBASP is a manualized psychotherapy developed by James McCullough specifically for chronic forms of depression. Its signature method, Situational Analysis, plus disciplined personal involvement, teaches patients to perceive the consequences of their behavior on others and to solve interpersonal problems.
  • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Adult ADHD A manualized, skills-based cognitive behavioral therapy that targets the organizational, planning, distractibility, and self-defeating-thinking problems of adults with ADHD. Best evidenced as a next-step adjunct to medication for residual symptoms, with honest caveats about evidence quality against active controls.
  • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Hoarding Disorder A disorder-specific cognitive-behavioral protocol developed by Steketee and Frost that pairs an information-processing/attachment model of saving with in-session and in-home sorting practice, non-acquisition exposure, cognitive restructuring of beliefs about possessions, and substantial motivational work. Evidence is established but effects are moderate and most clients remain symptomatic, if improved, after treatment.
  • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Psychosis (CBTp) CBT for psychosis adapts Beckian cognitive therapy to reduce distress and conviction associated with delusions, hallucinations, and negative symptoms, typically as a 6-9 month adjunct to antipsychotic medication. The evidence base is established but the effects are modest and symptom-specific, strongest for delusions and weaker for functioning and quality of life.

Communication

  • Shannon-Weaver and Transactional Models of Communication: A Clinician's Guide A family of communication models tracing the evolution from Shannon and Weaver's linear sender-channel-receiver-noise schema to Barnlund's transactional model, in which both parties simultaneously encode and decode meaning within a shared context. Clinically, these models are conceptual scaffolding for communication-skills work, not standalone therapies.
  • Communication Accommodation Theory: A Clinical Lens on How People Adjust Their Speech Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) describes how speakers converge toward or diverge from a partner's speech style to manage social distance, identity, and approval. For clinicians it is a relational-process lens; best applied inside recognized modalities; for understanding alliance, rapport rupture, and cross-cultural miscommunication, not a standalone billable therapy.
  • Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) is a social-constructionist communication theory holding that people co-create their social worlds in conversation, with meaning organized in nested hierarchical contexts (speech act, episode, relationship, self, culture). For clinicians it is a lens and a set of mapping tools for systemic, couple, and family work rather than a standalone, manualized therapy.
  • Nonverbal Communication (Kinesics, Proxemics, Paralanguage) Nonverbal communication is the systematic study of body movement (kinesics), interpersonal space (proxemics), vocal qualities (paralanguage), touch, and gaze as channels carrying relational and emotional meaning. The descriptive taxonomy is well established and clinically useful for attunement, but real-time decoding of cues; especially emotion-reading and deception detection; is far less reliable and strongly shaped by culture and neurotype.

Developmental / Attachment

  • Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) is a dyadic, relationship-based treatment for children from birth to age 5 and their caregivers who have experienced trauma, working to repair attachment and reduce traumatic stress by addressing how the caregiver's own unresolved past intrudes on the relationship. It is among the most well-established interventions for treating trauma in infants and young children, supported by multiple randomized controlled trials.
  • Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up (ABC) Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up (ABC) is a brief, manualized, ~10-session coaching intervention developed by Mary Dozier that uses real-time ("in-the-moment") parent coaching to build nurturance, synchrony (following the child's lead), and non-frightening caregiving in families of infants and toddlers exposed to early adversity. Randomized trials show durable gains in attachment security and parental sensitivity, with more mixed or fading effects for some distal behavioral outcomes.
  • Attachment Anxiety and Avoidance Dimensions A two-dimensional model of adult attachment; anxiety about abandonment crossed with avoidance of intimacy; that underlies self-report measures like the ECR/ECR-R and reframes attachment as continuous dimensions rather than discrete categorical styles. It functions as an assessment and case-formulation tool that tailors work delivered within recognized modalities, not as a standalone therapy.
  • Attachment Theory Attachment theory holds that early caregiver bonds shape internal working models of self and others, producing enduring attachment patterns (secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized) that organize relationships across the lifespan. It is a foundational developmental theory and a clinical lens applied within modalities such as psychodynamic therapy and Emotionally Focused Therapy, rather than a standalone billable treatment.

Economics

  • Affective Forecasting and the Impact Bias Affective forecasting is the prediction of one's future emotional states; the impact bias is the robust finding that people systematically overestimate the intensity and duration of those reactions, especially after negative events. For clinicians, it reframes anticipatory anxiety, catastrophizing, and avoidance as forecasting errors that can be tested behaviorally.
  • Clinical vs. Statistical (Actuarial) Prediction A foundational finding in clinical decision science: when an expert's holistic judgment and a simple mechanical formula are given the same information, the formula usually equals or beats the expert at predicting outcomes. The result shapes how clinicians should weigh structured tools against intuition in risk assessment and diagnostic decisions.
  • Commitment Devices A commitment device is a behavioral-economics technique in which a person voluntarily constrains their own future options; by adding stakes or removing temptations; to bind a later, weaker-willed self to a present intention, sometimes pairing a "should" with a "want" (temptation bundling). It is an adjunct tool that operationalizes a client's goal within established behavioral and contingency-based treatment, not a stand-alone therapy.
  • Deaths of Despair "Deaths of despair" is a social-epidemiology construct describing the clustered rise in mortality from suicide, drug (especially opioid) overdose, and alcohol-related liver disease, concentrated among non-college-educated adults amid economic and social decline. For clinicians it functions less as a diagnosis than as an interpretive lens linking a client's substance use, suicidality, and hopelessness to eroded work, social, and meaning structures.

Education

  • The Discrimination Model of Clinical Supervision Janine Bernard's Discrimination Model is a widely used, atheoretical 3x3 supervision framework in which the supervisor flexibly adopts teacher, counselor, or consultant roles across three foci of supervisee skill; intervention, conceptualization, and personalization. It is valued for its accessibility and adaptability, though empirical work has questioned whether the consultant role is truly distinct and critics note it underspecifies the supervisory relationship.
  • Miller's Pyramid of Clinical Competence Miller's Pyramid is a four-level framework; knows, knows how, shows how, does; that organizes clinical competence assessment so that each method (written exams, OSCEs, workplace observation) is matched to the level of competence it can actually measure. It remains the field's default mental model for assessment design across the health professions, including behavioral health training and supervision.
  • Social Stories Social Stories are Carol Gray's short, criteria-bound narratives that describe a social situation and its expected cues and responses, making implicit social information explicit. They are a structured technique most often layered into a broader treatment plan rather than used as a standalone modality.
  • Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) Clinical Pastoral Education is an accredited, experiential, supervised training model that places clergy and chaplains-in-training with patients to learn reflective spiritual caregiving through the "action-reflection" method and the "living human document." It is a training standard rather than a billable psychotherapy, but its core stance and techniques translate readily into spiritually integrated and supportive psychotherapy.

Family / Systems

  • Internal Family Systems (IFS) Internal Family Systems (IFS) is an intrapsychic, parts-based model that views the mind as a system of sub-personalities (exiles, managers, firefighters) led by a core Self capable of healing them. It is widely adopted clinically and culturally, though its controlled-trial evidence base remains small and is concentrated in a few selective samples.
  • Solution-Focused Brief Therapy / Coaching Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) is a future- and strength-oriented brief model that targets the client's desired solution rather than the problem, organized around signature questions such as the miracle question and scaling questions. Meta-analytic evidence supports modest-to-moderate effects across internalizing problems in fewer sessions than many comparison treatments.
  • Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety Ashby's Law states that only variety can absorb variety: to keep an outcome stable, a regulator must command at least as many distinct responses as the disturbances it faces. For clinicians it is a systems-theory lens, not a therapy, that explains why rigid coping fails in complex relational fields and why flexibility is the substrate of control.
  • Externalizing Conversations Externalizing conversations are a narrative therapy practice that linguistically separates the problem from the person ("the person is not the problem; the problem is the problem"), often naming or personifying the problem so clients can examine and renegotiate their relationship to it. Widely taught and clinically established, though its dedicated empirical base remains modest and best supported by qualitative inquiry.

Group / Community

  • Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) is a team-based, intensive service-delivery model in which a multidisciplinary team provides individualized treatment, rehabilitation, and support directly in the community to people with serious mental illness who have not been well served by traditional office-based care. It is one of the most rigorously studied service models in psychiatry, with established evidence for reducing psychiatric hospitalization and improving housing stability.
  • Bystander Effect and Diffusion of Responsibility A social-psychology construct describing how the presence of other witnesses reduces any one individual's likelihood of helping in an emergency, as responsibility diffuses across the group and inaction is socially modeled. Clinically, it informs psychoeducation, assertiveness work, and the processing of inaction-related guilt and moral injury rather than serving as a standalone treatment.
  • Concept-Based (Hierarchical) Therapeutic Community The concept-based therapeutic community is a highly structured, hierarchical residential treatment model for substance use disorders that uses the peer community itself as the primary agent of change ("community as method"), with earned privileges, role-based responsibility, and (historically) confrontation. It is longstanding and globally entrenched, but its strongest empirical signal; retention predicts outcome; is correlational, and contemporary practice has deliberately softened the harsh confrontation of its Synanon-era origins.
  • Coordinated Specialty Care for First-Episode Psychosis Coordinated Specialty Care (CSC) is a recovery-oriented, team-based early-intervention package for first-episode psychosis that combines personalized low-dose medication, resilience-focused individual psychotherapy, family education, supported employment and education, and case management. Developed and tested through the NIMH RAISE initiative, it has randomized-trial support for better symptom, quality-of-life, and engagement outcomes than usual care and is now the standard of care for early psychosis in the United States.

Humanistic / Existential

  • Kierkegaardian Anxiety and the Leap of Faith Kierkegaard's account of anxiety (angest) as the "dizziness of freedom" born of awareness of possibility, and despair as a misrelation of the self, resolved through authentic choice and the leap of faith. It is a foundational philosophy of existential psychotherapy rather than a manualized treatment.
  • Person-Centered Therapy: A Clinician's Reference A nondirective humanistic modality developed by Carl Rogers holding that clients possess an innate actualizing tendency that unfolds when the therapist supplies congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding. Its evidence base for depression is established at a moderate level versus usual care, though equivalence with CBT remains contested.
  • Absurdism: Lucid Revolt and the Clinical Use of Meaninglessness Absurdism, associated chiefly with Albert Camus, holds that the human demand for meaning collides with a silent, indifferent universe, and that the authentic response is neither suicide nor false hope but lucid revolt; living fully without appeal to external meaning. It is a well-established philosophical position with no standalone evidence base in psychotherapy, but its stance is clinically useful when delivered inside existential and meaning-centered treatment for existential distress, demoralization, and death anxiety.
  • Child-Centered / Nondirective Play Therapy A Rogerian, nondirective play therapy in which the therapist offers unconditional acceptance, empathic attunement, and reflective tracking, trusting the child's innate movement toward growth. It is the most researched humanistic play modality, with meta-analytic support concentrated in a single research lineage.

Hypnosis

  • Watkins & Watkins Ego-State Therapy: Covert vs. Overt Ego States Ego-state therapy conceptualizes personality as a "family of self" of part-selves arranged on a continuum from normal adaptive states to dissociated alters; covert (hidden) ego states can be hypnotically activated and given voice for "internal diplomacy" between conflicting parts.
  • Solution-Oriented (Ericksonian) Hypnosis A respectful, utilization-based approach to clinical hypnosis that demystifies trance and harnesses the client's own resources and experiences for change, integrating Milton Erickson's naturalistic methods with Bill O'Hanlon's solution-oriented framework. Best understood as an established clinical tradition whose general hypnotic methods enjoy more empirical support than its specifically Ericksonian techniques.
  • Past-Life Regression Therapy Past-life regression therapy uses hypnotic suggestion to elicit narratives clients interpret as memories of previous incarnations, popularized by psychiatrist Brian Weiss. Controlled research shows these reports reflect false-memory propensity, absorption, and magical ideation rather than recovered autobiographical events, and the technique carries clear iatrogenic risk that clinicians must understand.

Integrative / Common Factors

  • Contemplative Psychotherapy Contemplative Psychotherapy is a Buddhist-integrative modality developed at Naropa University that grounds clinical work in "brilliant sanity" (the client's innate health) and maitri (unconditional friendliness toward one's own experience), with the therapist's personal meditation practice as a core instrument of treatment. It is an established training lineage with a deep conceptual and clinical literature but a thin controlled-outcome evidence base.
  • Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) A comprehensive, principle-driven behavioral treatment that balances acceptance and change, delivering skills training in mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness alongside individual therapy and a therapist consultation team. Its strongest evidence is for borderline personality disorder and chronic suicidality, with growing application across dysregulation-driven conditions.
  • Schema Therapy: An Integrative Approach to Early Maladaptive Schemas and Modes Schema Therapy is an integrative, longer-term model developed by Jeffrey Young that targets entrenched early maladaptive schemas and schema modes underlying personality disorders and other chronic, treatment-resistant conditions. Its evidence base is most mature for borderline personality disorder, where a landmark randomized trial demonstrated efficacy.
  • The Biopsychosocial Model: A Clinician's Guide to a Foundational Framework The biopsychosocial model is a clinical framework, introduced by George Engel in 1977, that treats illness as emerging from interacting biological, psychological, and social levels of a nested system rather than from biology alone. It is foundational and widely adopted, but it is a lens for formulation and treatment planning rather than a billable, manualized therapy in its own right.

Mindfulness / Acceptance

  • Loving-Kindness Meditation (Metta): A Clinician's Guide Loving-kindness meditation (metta) is a phrase-based contemplative practice that cultivates unconditional goodwill toward self and others, drawn from the Buddhist brahmaviharas and adapted within compassion-focused and self-compassion approaches. Evidence is well-established for increasing positive affect and reasonably supportive for life satisfaction and self-compassion, with emerging but less mature data for depression, PTSD, and social anxiety.
  • Buddhist Psychology (Abhidhamma): A Clinician's Field Guide to the Mind The Abhidhamma is the systematic Buddhist analysis of mind, perception, and the moment-by-moment construction of experience, identifying craving (lobha), aversion (dosa), and delusion (moha) as the roots of suffering. It is a mature classical framework whose clinical relevance reaches contemporary therapy chiefly through its derivatives (MBCT, MBSR, ACT) rather than as a standalone, RCT-tested treatment.
  • Dark Night of the Soul John of the Cross's map of spiritual desolation as a purgative, transformative passage of faith, taken up clinically by psychiatrist Gerald May to help differentiate meaning-laden spiritual darkness from major depression in contemplative and religious clients. It is a theological construct with pastoral-clinical application, useful for assessment and meaning-making rather than an evidence-based treatment in its own right.
  • Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) MBCT is an 8-week, manualized group program that integrates mindfulness practices from MBSR with cognitive therapy to teach decentering and reduce depressive relapse. Its strongest evidence is for preventing recurrence in people with three or more prior depressive episodes.

Neuroscience

  • Central Sensitization Central sensitization is the amplification of signaling within the central nervous system that lowers pain thresholds and expands receptive fields, so that normally innocuous input becomes painful. It is the neurophysiological substrate of many chronic pain conditions, including fibromyalgia and complex regional pain syndrome, and reframes persistent pain as a problem of nervous-system sensitivity rather than ongoing tissue damage.
  • Hebbian Plasticity / Long-Term Potentiation Hebbian plasticity is the established cellular principle that co-active synapses strengthen (long-term potentiation) while disused ones weaken; the candidate substrate of associative learning and memory. For clinicians it is background neuroscience that explains why repetition, association, and timing change behavior, not a standalone, trial-validated therapy.
  • Memory Reconsolidation: The Neuroscience of Transformational Change Memory reconsolidation is the neural process by which a reactivated long-term emotional memory becomes briefly labile and can be updated or unlearned before re-stabilizing. It has been proposed as the core mechanism underlying durable, transformational change across effective psychotherapies.
  • Neuroplasticity Neuroplasticity is the established neuroscience construct describing the nervous system's lifelong capacity to reorganize its structure, function, and connections in response to experience, learning, and injury. For clinicians it is a psychoeducational and rationale-providing lens delivered inside existing modalities, not a standalone, RCT-validated therapy.

Other

  • Sleep Health and CBT for Insomnia as Adjunct A transdiagnostic framework that treats disturbed sleep itself; via stimulus control, sleep restriction, and cognitive restructuring (CBT-I) rather than sleep-hygiene advice alone; as a modifiable driver of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and pain outcomes. CBT-I is the established first-line treatment for chronic insomnia; its adjunctive, transdiagnostic application is supported but still maturing.
  • 12-Step Facilitation (12-Step Facilitation) 12-Step Facilitation (12-Step Facilitation) is a manualized, clinician-delivered therapy that actively links clients to 12-step mutual-aid groups such as AA and NA. For alcohol use disorder, high-certainty evidence shows manualized 12-Step Facilitation produces higher rates of continuous abstinence than other active treatments including CBT, with substantial healthcare cost savings.
  • Autogenic Training Autogenic Training is a standardized set of self-suggestion exercises (heaviness, warmth, calm heartbeat, regulated breathing, abdominal warmth, cool forehead) practiced with "passive concentration" to induce a low-arousal autonomic state. A century of mostly European clinical literature supports modest, durable effects; best as an adjunct for anxiety, tension headache, and stress-related conditions; while controlled trials show it is roughly comparable, not superior, to other relaxation methods.
  • Common Elements Treatment Approach (CETA) CETA is a modular, transdiagnostic treatment developed by Laura Murray and Paul Bolton's group at Johns Hopkins for delivery by trained, supervised lay counselors in low-resource settings. It assembles the common elements of cognitive-behavioral interventions so a single counselor can flexibly address comorbid trauma, depression, anxiety, and substance use within one course of care.

Philosophy

  • Alienation (Entfremdung) Alienation (Entfremdung) is a critical-theory construct describing a problematic separation between a self and something it properly belongs with; its work, others, the world, or itself. It runs from Marx's account of alienated labor through Seeman's five measurable dimensions to Jaeggi's "relation of relationlessness."
  • Critical Pedagogy and Conscientization: A Clinician's Guide Critical pedagogy is a dialogic, consciousness-raising educational philosophy in which learners critically examine and act upon the social conditions shaping their lives; its central process, conscientization, has been adapted by liberation-oriented, narrative, and feminist therapists to help clients reframe internalized distress as a response to oppressive social conditions.
  • Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder Jerome Wakefield's hybrid account defines mental disorder as a "harmful dysfunction"; a failure of an internal mechanism to perform a function for which natural selection designed it (the factual component), combined with resulting harm judged undesirable by social values (the value component). Clinicians use it as a conceptual heuristic to separate true disorder from normal-range suffering such as ordinary sadness, though critics argue its evolutionary core has intrinsically fuzzy boundaries.
  • Libet's Readiness Potential and "Free Won't" (the Veto): A Clinician's Guide Libet's experiments showed that a brain "readiness potential" precedes the conscious awareness of a decision to move by hundreds of milliseconds, leading him to propose that conscious will functions less as an initiator than as a late inhibitor or veto ("free won't"). The core finding is robustly replicated, but its interpretation, and the veto in particular, remain scientifically and philosophically contested.

Play / Creative Arts

  • Psychodrama / Sociodrama Psychodrama is an action-based group psychotherapy in which a protagonist enacts personal scenes with the help of auxiliary egos and a director, using techniques such as role reversal, doubling, and mirroring. Sociodrama applies the same Morenian action methods to shared social or group themes rather than one person's intrapsychic material.
  • Art Psychotherapy vs. Art as Therapy (Naumburg / Kramer Poles) The founding theoretical polarity of art therapy: Margaret Naumburg treated the spontaneous image as symbolic speech to be interpreted within a psychoanalytic frame, while Edith Kramer located the healing in the art-making process itself through sublimation. Contemporary practice integrates both poles along a process-to-product continuum.
  • Art Therapy Art therapy is an established mental health profession that uses visual art-making within a psychotherapeutic relationship to support expression, regulation, and insight; the discipline is well-credentialed, but its efficacy evidence base remains small, heterogeneous, and methodologically limited, and is frankly negative for schizophrenia.
  • Community Music Therapy & Therapeutic Drumming Community Music Therapy uses collaborative music-making to build social connection, belonging, and participation within and beyond clinical settings; therapeutic drumming (e.g., facilitated drum circles) is a widely used group format with promising but still preliminary controlled evidence for mood, anxiety, and social resilience.

Political / Critical

  • Anti-Oppressive / Anti-Racist Practice Anti-oppressive practice (AOP) is a critical social-work paradigm that places analysis of power and structural oppression at the center of all helping work, while anti-racist practice applies the same lens specifically to racism at individual, institutional, and structural levels. Both aim to reduce practitioner-client power imbalances and align practice with social justice rather than to function as a standalone billable therapy.
  • Critical Race Theory: A Clinical Reference for Therapists Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an established framework from legal studies holding that racism is ordinary and structurally embedded rather than aberrant, centering counter-storytelling and the lived knowledge of people of color. In clinical work it functions as an informing lens for racial trauma, minority stress, and internalized oppression; operationalized through evidence-based modalities, not as a standalone therapy.
  • Crip Theory: A Clinician's Guide to Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence Crip theory is a critical-theoretical lens, anchored in Robert McRuer's work, arguing that "compulsory able-bodiedness" is interwoven with compulsory heterosexuality. It is an orienting framework for clinicians working with disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent, and LGBTQ+ individuals clients, not a standalone billable treatment.
  • Compulsory Heterosexuality and Heteronormativity Compulsory heterosexuality is the feminist/queer-theory claim that heterosexuality is socially enforced as a political institution rather than a natural default, and heteronormativity is the broader set of assumptions that treat heterosexuality and the gender binary as the unmarked norm. For clinicians, these are explanatory lenses on minority-stress-driven distress, not standalone therapies.

Psychedelic

  • Ayahuasca / Plant-Medicine Ceremonial Healing Ayahuasca ceremonial healing is a centuries-established Amazonian ethnomedical tradition in which a brew (Banisteriopsis caapi plus a DMT-containing plant) is used communally within an animistic cosmology, guided by a curandero, icaros (healing songs), and dieta. For Western clinicians it is most relevant as a context their patients encounter; calling for integration, harm reduction, and cultural humility rather than referral or replication.
  • Set and Setting Set and setting is the foundational principle that the effects of a psychoactive substance or altered-state experience are shaped not by pharmacology alone but by the user's mindset ("set") and physical, social, and cultural environment ("setting"). The principle itself is well-established and historically durable; what remains genuinely hard is experimentally isolating set from setting from drug, because the three interact and cannot be cleanly randomized.
  • Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy pairs sub-anesthetic or dissociative-dose ketamine with structured preparation, in-session support, and integration to treat depression, PTSD, and related conditions. The antidepressant effect of ketamine itself is well established, but rigorous evidence that adding formal psychotherapy improves outcomes beyond the drug alone is still limited and mixed.
  • 5-MeO-DMT-Assisted Therapy 5-MeO-DMT-assisted therapy pairs a brief, intensely ego-dissolving tryptamine experience (from synthetic compound or Bufo alvarius toad secretion) with preparation and integration psychotherapy, studied chiefly for treatment-resistant depression and anxiety. Controlled human evidence is early-stage and limited to drug administration; the psychotherapeutic "container" itself remains essentially uncontrolled.

Psychodynamic

  • Mentalization and Reflective Functioning Mentalization is the capacity to understand oneself and others in terms of mental states; reflective functioning is its operationalized measure. The construct develops within secure attachment, underpins affect regulation and epistemic trust, and anchors Mentalization-Based Treatment.
  • Process-Oriented Psychology (Processwork): A Clinician's Guide Process-Oriented Psychology (Processwork) is a Jungian-rooted, body- and signal-aware depth approach developed by Arnold Mindell that follows the "dreaming process" as it surfaces in symptoms, movement, perception, and relationships. It is a mature clinical tradition with strong theoretical and training infrastructure but a thin controlled-trial evidence base.
  • Brief Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Brief psychodynamic psychotherapy is a family of time-limited dynamic treatments (typically around 15 sessions, up to 40 hours) organized around a central conflict or focal theme, using the triangle of conflict and triangle of person to make warded-off feelings tolerable. Meta-analytic evidence supports efficacy for depression, anxiety, and somatic and personality-spectrum problems, with gains that tend to be maintained and may grow after treatment ends.
  • British Independent (Middle Group) Object Relations The British Independent or "Middle Group" tradition of object relations holds that the human is fundamentally object-seeking rather than drive-discharging, and that the quality of the early maternal environment shapes whether a person develops a vital "true self" or a compliant "false self." It supplies a relational vocabulary; holding, transitional space, the schizoid retreat, endopsychic structure; that remains widely used in psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Psychology

  • Complicated Grief Treatment A 16-session manualized therapy for Prolonged Grief Disorder, developed by Katherine Shear and informed by Holly Prigerson's diagnostic work, that combines motivational, cognitive, and exposure techniques; including imaginal conversation with the deceased and in-vivo exposure to avoided situations; within an attachment and dual-process framework. It is an established, randomized-trial-supported treatment that outperforms interpersonal psychotherapy for complicated grief.
  • Narrative Identity Narrative identity is the internalized, evolving life story a person constructs to give their life unity and purpose; its thematic features; agency, communion, redemption, contamination, and coherence; are reliably measured and longitudinally associated with mental health.
  • Positioning Theory Positioning theory is Harré and colleagues' discursive account of how moment-to-moment conversational "positions"; clusters of short-term rights, duties, and obligations bound to a storyline; shape identity, agency, and conflict. Clinicians borrow it from social psychology to map and shift how clients are positioned (and position themselves) within problem narratives.
  • Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) AEDP is a healing-oriented, attachment-based experiential psychotherapy developed by Diana Fosha that integrates affective neuroscience, emotion-focused and Rogerian traditions, and short-term dynamic roots to "undo aloneness" and transform suffering through the in-session processing of emotion within a deeply attuned relationship. Naturalistic effectiveness studies report large transdiagnostic effects with gains maintained at follow-up, though randomized controlled evidence remains limited.

Sociology

  • Recovery Model (Social / Identity Recovery) A personal-recovery paradigm in which recovery is a self-defined journey of Connectedness, Hope, Identity, Meaning, and Empowerment (the CHIME framework) rather than mere symptom remission. It reframes care around a life worth living, even alongside ongoing symptoms.
  • Conversation Analysis Conversation Analysis (CA) is an empirical method for studying the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction; turn-taking, adjacency pairs, and repair; that, applied to psychotherapy, reveals how alliance, resistance, empathy, and therapeutic change are accomplished turn by turn. It is a mature observational science, not a therapy model, and its clinical value lies in sharpening the practitioner's ear for the micro-mechanics of their own interventions.
  • Dramaturgy: A Sociological Lens on Self-Presentation for Clinical Work Dramaturgy is Erving Goffman's symbolic-interactionist theory that social life is staged like theater: people manage impressions through front-stage performances, back-stage relaxation, scripts, props, and audiences, and must manage a "spoiled identity" (stigma). For clinicians it offers a non-pathologizing formulation lens for social anxiety, shame, people-pleasing, and emotional-labor burnout, not a billable treatment in itself.
  • Goffman's Moral Career Goffman's "moral career" is the patterned, socially produced sequence of changes in self-conception and identity that a person passes through as they move into and through a status such as "mental patient." For clinicians it is a formulation lens; not a therapy; that locates a client's shifting sense of self in institutional and interpersonal processes rather than in pathology alone.

Spirituality

  • Teshuvah (Repentance and Return): A Clinician's Guide to a Jewish Framework for Moral Repair Teshuvah is the staged Jewish framework of "return"; recognition, remorse, cessation, confession, restitution, and changed behavior when re-tested; codified by Maimonides. Clinicians integrate it (not as a standalone evidence-based therapy) to scaffold work on guilt, amends-making, moral injury, and self-forgiveness with religiously committed clients.
  • Axis Mundi / Sacred Center: A Clinician's Guide to the Symbolic Center of the World The axis mundi is the history-of-religions construct for the symbolic "center of the world"; tree, mountain, pillar, cross, or human body; that orients a cosmos and links ordinary life to a transcendent order. For clinicians it offers a metaphorical scaffold for grounding, centering, and meaning-making with disoriented, dissociated, or spiritually struggling clients, but it is not an evidence-based intervention in its own right.
  • Inner Healing Prayer: Prayer-Guided Memory Work in Christian Healing Ministry Inner Healing Prayer is a family of prayer-guided practices, including Healing of Memories and Theophostic/Transformation Prayer Ministry, in which a person re-enters a painful memory and invites an experienced sense of divine presence to address the distressing beliefs attached to it. Practiced widely in church contexts and studied by Fernando Garzon as a Christian analogue of imagery-based psychotherapy, its evidence base is emerging and limited to case studies.
  • Sabbath-Keeping / Sacred Rest Sabbath-keeping is a structured weekly cessation from work and technology, rooted in Jewish and Christian Sabbath theology (Heschel's "palace in time"), now studied as a wellbeing practice and adapted clinically as a rest-and-boundary prescription for burnout and digital overload. The empirical literature is emerging and mixed, documenting both protective effects and observance-related costs.

Systems / Org

  • Complex Adaptive Systems: A Framework for Therapists Complex adaptive systems (CAS) is a framework from complexity science describing how many interacting, adapting agents produce emergent, self-organizing, non-linear, and often unpredictable system-level behavior. For therapists it is a lens; not a standalone treatment; that reframes families, teams, and symptom-maintenance cycles as adaptive systems best influenced through context and "simple rules" rather than top-down control.
  • Flashbulb Memory Flashbulb memories are vivid, detailed, confidently held autobiographical memories for the circumstances of learning about a surprising, consequential event. Decades of longitudinal research show they are subjectively vivid but no more accurate than ordinary memories; a confidence-accuracy dissociation with direct clinical relevance to how therapists hear and validate client recollections.
  • Psychological Contract Theory: A Clinician's Guide Psychological contract theory holds that the employment relationship rests on an unwritten set of mutual, perceived promises between worker and employer, and that the worker's cognitive recognition that those promises were not kept (breach) and the emotional sense of betrayal that follows (violation) drive cynicism, mistrust, disengagement, and intent to leave. For clinicians, it supplies a precise vocabulary for the work-related betrayal, demoralization, and grief that follow layoffs, demotions, and broken promises.
  • Resilience Theory (Adaptive Cycle & Panarchy) A complex-adaptive-systems theory from ecology holding that systems cycle through growth, conservation, release, and reorganization (the adaptive cycle), nested across scales (panarchy); resilience is the capacity to absorb disturbance and reorganize while persisting. In clinical work it functions as a borrowed lens for understanding adversity, collapse, and renewal rather than as a manualized therapy.

Trauma / Somatic

  • Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) A structured, manualized cognitive therapy for PTSD that helps patients identify and modify distorted "stuck points"; beliefs about safety, trust, power/control, esteem, and intimacy; that maintain post-trauma distress.
  • Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) Narrative Exposure Therapy is a short-term, manualized trauma-focused treatment in which the survivor constructs a chronological autobiography (a "lifeline") that embeds traumatic memories within the broader arc of a life story. Developed for survivors of multiple and organized-violence trauma, it has an established evidence base for PTSD across refugee and conflict-affected populations, with effects that are robust in the short term but more heterogeneous over long-term follow-up.
  • Biblical (Nouthetic) Counseling Biblical (nouthetic) counseling is an evangelical pastoral-counseling movement, launched by Jay Adams's 1970 Competent to Counsel, that holds Scripture to be sufficient for soul care and explicitly rejects secular psychology. For secular therapists it is essential cultural-competence knowledge; not a modality to deliver; when working with evangelical clients who have previously received it.
  • Cognitive-Behavioral Conjoint Therapy for PTSD (CBCT for PTSD) Cognitive-Behavioral Conjoint Therapy for PTSD is Monson and Fredman's 15-session, manualized couple treatment that targets PTSD symptoms and intimate-relationship functioning simultaneously, using shared psychoeducation, dyadic communication skills, and partner-assisted cognitive work. It is RCT-supported and recognized but rests on a relatively small efficacy trial base.
How to use the Vault

A quick guide to searching, saving, and contributing to the Clinical Wiki.

What is the Therapy Aligned™ Clinical Wiki?

A cross-disciplinary reference map of therapy theories, modalities, and frameworks, drawn from psychology, philosophy, sociology, economics, and beyond, indexed by the populations and problems-for-work each one speaks to. Every article includes sample treatment goals, SMART objectives, and therapeutic framing you can adapt for progress notes. It's a place for clinicians to explore ideas, not a substitute for training, supervision, or primary literature.

What is “The Vault”?

The Vault is the interactive map at the center of the page. Each node is a concept (a theory, modality, population, or problem) and the links between them show how they relate: shared lineage, discipline clusters, and which approaches apply to which populations and problems. Explore it visually, or just search if you already know what you're after.

How do I search the wiki?

Type any theory, modality, population, or problem into the search bar, for example “ACT,” “adolescents,” or “moral injury.” Autocomplete suggests matches as you type and is forgiving of spelling (type “acceptence” and it still finds Acceptance & Commitment Therapy). Results are ranked by what other clinicians have found most useful.

What do the colors and clusters in The Vault mean?

Nodes are grouped by discipline and type, so related approaches sit near each other. Use the Theory-only view to see just modalities and their lineage, or filter by a Population or Problem to light up only the approaches that apply to that clinical context, for instance, everything mapped to “veterans” or to “complicated grief.”

Can I save articles to read later?

Yes. Tap the bookmark on any article to add it to your Library (the icon in the top-right corner of every page). Your Library can hold several named notebooks, so you can group saves by topic, population, or case. Saved articles stay on your device (and sync across devices if you sign in), and you can open your Library anytime to revisit or export them.

How do I use my Library and notebooks?

Open your Library from the bookmark button in the top-right corner of any page. Inside, your saves live in notebooks: you start with one called “Saved,” and can add your own: “Adolescents,” “Grief work,” a case name, with New notebook. Bookmarking an article drops it into Saved; from inside a notebook you can move or copy an article into another notebook, rename or delete notebooks, and Export a single notebook to Markdown for NotebookLM. Sign in with Google to sync your whole Library across devices and to Publish a notebook. You can also browse the Public Library and save notebooks other clinicians have shared straight into your own.

Can the wiki read articles aloud?

Yes. Tap the speaker icon next to an article's title to hear the whole entry, or next to any section heading to hear just that part. A small player lets you pause, stop, and skip back or forward.

How do I get articles into NotebookLM or my own notes?

Open your Library, pick a notebook, and choose Export to NotebookLM (.md). It downloads that notebook's saved articles as a clean Markdown file you can upload into NotebookLM or any notes app. (We strip internal links on export, so you get the text, not a scrape of the whole wiki.)

What is the Public Library, and can I share a notebook?

The Public Library is a shared shelf of clinician-curated notebooks: themed reading lists assembled from the wiki. Browse what others have published, save any to your own Library, or publish your own: open your Library, organize a notebook, and choose Publish. You sign in with Google so each notebook is tied to a verified account, then decide whether to share anonymously or with credit. Publishing is immediate, and you can unpublish anytime. Listings are user-curated and credentials are self-reported, not reviewed or endorsed by Therapy Aligned.

How accurate is the content? Can I rely on it clinically?

Every article is AI-generated to help you explore ideas quickly, and is clearly labeled as such. Treat it as a starting point: verify against primary sources, your training, and supervision before any clinical use; sentences carry a source marker or an “LLM” tag so you can see what's citation-grounded versus model-generated. It's our hope that the clinical community will help improve accuracy and add knowledge through revisions. So much of therapy lives in our experiential knowledge as clinicians, and we want this wiki to be a place where that knowledge can start living and growing; you can suggest a revision on any article.

How do I suggest a new topic or a correction?

Use the Suggest a new article form on this page, or Suggest a revision at the bottom of any article. Add a source (a citation, a CEU, or de-identified clinical experience). We'll draft it and email you a preview to review. Once you approve, our clinical team gives it a final review before it's published.

Who is behind the Clinical Wiki?

It's built by Therapy Aligned, a New Jersey behavioral health group practice that sees clients in person in Metuchen, NJ and virtually across New Jersey, and Therapy Aligned Solutions, its clinical-technology team. Within Therapy Aligned, the Clinical Wiki was created by Andrew H. Kim, LCSW, LCADC, a doctoral candidate (ABD) with extensive experience conducting research and building dissemination products, with and without machine learning and AI at various points in the methodology. The wiki is a free educational resource for clinician learning only, not clinical advice.

Contribute

Spotted something missing from the wiki? Suggest a new article topic or revision. We'll draft it and email you a preview, and our clinical team reviews it before it's published.

Suggest a new article

Propose a theory, modality, or concept you think should be covered.

Public credit preference

Suggest a revision

Spotted an error, outdated citation, or want to expand an existing article? Every article has its own Suggest a revision form at the bottom — here's how it works:

  1. 1Find the article using the search bar above.
  2. 2Open it and scroll to the "Suggest a revision" section at the bottom.
  3. 3Submit your proposed change with a source (a citation, CEU, or de-identified practice experience).
  4. 4Our clinical AI drafts the integration and emails you to review it. Once you approve, our clinical team gives it a final check before it goes live.