I read both Melissa and Jay's posts about Teens in Therapy before reflecting a bit on my experience with the reading. To give a bit of context: when I became a teacher I was immediately disillusioned and more than a little resentful about how inapplicable the larger body of my academic and theoretical preparation was for helming an actual classroom. (My student teaching wasn't as helpful as it could have been either, giving me the magnet school experience rather than something closer to the average of what a teacher can expect in Philadelphia.) I realized around three years into teaching that I'm not sure how much I could have learned from a educational training program that relied largely on classroom and book learning, certainly not much of the intuition that became the backbone of my skills as a teacher.
Melissa did a good job of pointing out this phenomenon in Bromfield--that the case studies and anecdotes that he provides are light on details and especially light on formula. It feels true to the idiosyncratic nature and ineffability of what particular signals gave the therapist an impression to pursue one line of questioning rather than another, or what body language shifts made a therapist recognize that a particular experiment had not had the desired outcome and ought to be reconsidered or needed to be repaired. For that reason, I appreciate the broad set of general principles for structuring therapeutic interventions that Bromfeld seems to argue hold significance across most therapeutic interventions. In fact, a lot of what he seems to be pushing is less of a a reliance on 'skills' and more emphasis on empathy and openness to a child's experience, something that I've found that I forget to do in correlation with how much faith I put into my 'skills' in a given situation.
I agree with Jay's point as well that some of what Bromfield writes feels like cheerleading for particularly successful interventions or strokes of insight that shifted the course of difficult cases, but I'll be honest in saying that I often find myself too far on the other side of things thinking that it's futile to try and intervene in such complex situations and doubting the effectiveness of therapy in reality. I appreciate occasionally reading about cases where clinical training, experience, and intuition lead to productive positive change in the lives of clients and patients, even if the exact route that change took is difficult to express in its entirety. As Jay also pointed out, it's helpful to read different authors on the same subject in parallel to each other. Having cases that get into the weeds of how difficult it is to gain the types of skills to become an effective therapist, and how complex many cases are in reality, provides a good foil to the equally powerful and true cases where effective therapy finds some degree of success, for one reason or another.