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Tiny Trainings for Therapists - Conceptualization Collection
by Candice Hamilton-Miller
When therapy stalls, the easy explanation is motivation. The more accurate explanation is usually something else: a protective structure, an identity anchor, a pattern that is doing exactly what it was designed to do. This volume maps five distinct mechanisms that each produce the presenting picture of a stuck client, covering individual presentations across the lifespan, adolescent stuckness, and systemic stuckness in couples and family contexts.
"Every therapist has sat with a client who says all the right things and still does not move. They come week after week, they engage with the work, they report understanding what is happening — and the presenting problem remains untouched. The easy clinical read is motivation. The more accurate read is usually something else entirely.
This book is about what that something else actually is.
Stuck examines the clinical mechanisms that operate beneath the surface when clients appear resistant, unmotivated, or treatment-refractory. These mechanisms are not failures of character or commitment. They are protective structures, identity anchors, and learned patterns that are, in most cases, doing exactly what they were designed to do.
What this volume covers:
- Five distinct pathways that can each produce the same presenting picture of a stuck client
- The role of identity investment in maintaining symptomatic presentations
- Secondary gain, systemic reinforcement, and the social function of staying stuck
- Fear of change as a rational response to an uncertain future
- Developmental stuckness in adolescent presentations
- Systemic stuckness in couples and family therapy contexts
- Formulation accuracy as the foundation of clinical movement
- What to do differently once you can see which mechanism you are working with
This is a clinician-facing book throughout. It is not about technique delivery. It is about the formulation accuracy, therapist self-awareness, and clinical decision-making that has to happen before any intervention can land.
The Tiny Trainings series is a collection of focused, practice-based learning guides designed for therapists, clinical trainees, and mental health professionals who want deeper clinical reasoning, stronger intervention skills, and more confidence in real-world therapeutic decision-making. Rather than functioning as academic textbooks, the books are written in a supervision-informed style that explores what therapy actually looks like in session, including conceptualization, pacing, alliance considerations, intervention timing, and common clinical pitfalls. Each collection within the series focuses on a different aspect of practice, including Foundations, Conceptualization, Neurodivergence, Modalities & Techniques, Populations, Process Challenges, Interventions, and Professional Practice.
The full print edition includes the Continuing Education Training Pack at the back of the book. This section contains guided reflection prompts, applied clinical decision-making exercises, implementation planning questions, and CE completion pages designed to help readers translate conceptual understanding into practical clinical application. These materials are intended to support independent professional development and reflective practice for clinicians who wish to engage with the material at a deeper level."
From insight to intention to change.
Candice is a seasoned psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, and educator with nearly three decades of experience supporting clients across the lifespan—from young children to older adults navigating complex life transitions. Her work has spanned schools, hospitals, community settings, and private practice, giving her a deeply integrated and practical understanding of mental health care. Known for her grounded, human approach to therapy, Candice blends clinical expertise with lived experience, emphasizing presence, curiosity, and authentic connection over rigid adherence to any single modality. Her work is rooted in ethical, client-centered care and an intentionally eclectic framework that adapts to the unique needs of each individual. In addition to her clinical work, Candice has spent years supervising and mentoring therapists at all stages of their careers. Through this work, she recognized a gap between what therapists are taught in formal training and what they actually need in the therapy room. This insight became the foundation for her writing. Candice is the author of The Tiny Training for Therapists Series, along with a growing collection of clinical training resources designed to support therapists in building practical, ethical, and confident practices. She also writes a wide range of accessible mental health resources for clients of all ages, translating therapeutic concepts into language that is clear, relatable, and usable in everyday life. Her work is not intended to prescribe one “right” way to practice, but to offer a flexible, experience-based toolbox—bridging the gap between theory and real-world clinical work. Through her practice, CHM Therapy Services, as well as her online platform for clients, called Mindful Humans Studio, and clinical online platform, The Therapist Circle, Candice continues to work closely with both clients and therapists, with a focus on developing skilled, self-aware practitioners and creating resources that make therapy more accessible, human, and effective for everyone.
Tiny Trainings for Therapipsts - Foundations Collection
The most effective therapists in the room are often doing something that is hard to name. This Tiny Training makes it nameable. The Therapist's Bag of Tricks covers the invisible session engine: timing, pacing, therapeutic interruption, deepening moves, and the micro-decisions that create the conditions for clinical change without relying on technique delivery alone.
Tiny Trainings for Therapists - Conceptualization Collection
The visible work of therapy is possible only because of an enormous amount of invisible activity running underneath it. This volume covers the parallel cognitive track that experienced clinicians run alongside relational presence: building and revising formulation hypotheses in real time, reading clinical data across verbal and nonverbal channels, holding uncertainty without losing direction, and making the micro-decisions that turn information into intervention.
When the Skatepark Becomes the Therapy Room
"What do all the kids at the skate park know about courage, failure, and getting back up that most of us spend our entire lives trying to figure out?
Skate Therapy is a framework, a metaphor, and a practice — three things at once — for using skateboarding's embodied philosophy in clinical and educational work. Drawing on exposure work, narrative therapy, somatic approaches, cognitive-behavioral methods, polyvagal theory, attachment theory, and the research on play, mastery, and identity, this book takes seriously what skate culture has been teaching its kids implicitly for sixty years: that fear is information, that the ground is safety, that you act before you feel ready, that the basics are the destination, and that you do not regulate yourself — you regulate yourself through other people.
Each chapter pairs a principle from skate culture with the therapeutic concept that lives underneath it, grounded in research and in the lived practice of two composite teenagers — Adam, who cannot drop in, and Quinn, who cannot fill out the scholarship application — who teach each other across a single summer what an entire field has been trying to articulate for a century.
For clinicians, parents, teachers, coaches, and anyone who has ever been stuck at the top of their own bowl. The work is already happening. Everything you need is already under the wheels of your board.
Here, you try again."
The Workshop Series and Facilitator's Companion Guide
Most kids don't need to be told to try harder. They need to be shown how to fail without it becoming the whole story.
Grit on a Board is a twelve-lesson resilience workshop for children ages 7–12, built on what the skate park already knows about falling, getting up, and going again. Designed for camp counsellors, teachers, youth workers, and clinicians alike, it pairs a practical curriculum with a facilitator’s companion explaining the psychology underneath every lesson.
A Caregiver's guide to Navigating ARFID
"Tiny Bites, Big Fellings: A Caregiver's guide to Navigating ARFID
You have probably been told to try harder. To offer more variety. To not make it a big deal. You have probably also watched those strategies make everything worse.
This book was written for you.
Supporting Your Child with ARFID is a comprehensive guide for parents and caregivers navigating avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder — written by a registered psychotherapist who is also an ARFID parent. That combination matters. The clinical knowledge in these pages is grounded in the real experience of sitting at a table where every meal is a negotiation, every birthday party is a logistical challenge, and every well-meaning family member is a variable you can't control.
This guide covers: what ARFID actually is and how to explain it to others; why common approaches fail and what works instead; how to navigate schools, medical providers, and clinical teams; how to protect family relationships, partnerships, and siblings; practical meal strategies that reduce pressure without increasing rigidity; how to support your child's autonomy and self-advocacy; and how to take care of yourself while caring for a child with complex needs.
This book does not promise a cure. It does not offer a meal plan or a trick to get your child to eat more. What it offers is understanding — a clear explanation of what is happening in your child's nervous system and how to respond to it in a way that builds safety rather than resistance.
You are not failing. You are navigating something genuinely hard. This book walks with you."
Tiny Trainings for Therapists - Modalities and Techniques Collection
Graduate training provides exposure to theoretical frameworks and practice in specific modalities. It rarely provides a framework for thinking about integration. This volume covers the principles of intentional eclecticism, how to evaluate whether your combination of approaches is coherent or merely familiar, how to build an integration rationale, and how to move between modalities without losing theoretical clarity.
Tiny Trainings For Therapists - Foundations Collection
Every therapist brings a self into the room. The question is not whether that self is present — it always is — but whether you know enough about it to choose what to do with it. Drawing from real supervision group conversations, this volume covers trigger identification, countertransference as clinical data, deliberate use of personal experience, scope-of-practice as self-protection, and what genuine self-care looks like for working clinicians. Honest, grounded, and supervision-informed throughout.