To her surprise, dismay, and eventually relief, Mary Armstrong, a therapist with over thirty years of experience helping people heal from childhood trauma, uncovered her own history of child sexual abuse at the hands of her grandfather and father. As she tells her harrowing but heroic tale, she casts light as never before on the issue of repressed memories and the invisible wounds left by childhood trauma.
Have you ever felt so afraid to open up about your emotions that you felt helpless? Speaking up about your deepest and most sacred thoughts can be very challenging. Due to a long existing stigma around speaking on mental health and its effect on society, it can become even more uncomfortable to consider sharing your story. It is easy to feel that we are alone at times, or that no one would understand our challenges. I want you to consider this. Imagine what your life would look like if you were able to release years of trauma from the depths of your soul. Picture the peace of mind you would have. I want you to actually envision a life free of the overwhelming burden of bottling up your emotions. Author Clara Porterfield has experienced her share of mixed emotions. Growing up in conditions that weren't the healthiest at times, Clara spent a lot of her childhood harboring her emotions. That led to her carrying those years of pain and hurt into her adult years. At that point Clara had felt like she lost herself. In Confessions to the Therapist, Clara shares her story of how therapy changed the direction of her life. She discusses why and how she was able to address her past trauma and start to live a life of fulfillment. Through therapy, journaling, and other forms of self-care, Clara was determined to regain control of her destiny. She did just that, and now she is sharing some of her story in hopes that you will be encouraged and inspired. Clara Porterfield is a self-published author and a true woman of hope and inspiration. Her passion is to help others grow and push through life's challenges just as she learned to do through therapy and other wellness practices.
This book is about people that are uniquely situated between the realms of activism, within the Psychiatric Survivor Movement, and their careers as mental health professionals. It focuses on the co-authors’ navigation and juxtaposition of the roles of psychiatric survivor, mental health professional, and activist. Psychiatric Survivors is an international movement advocating for human rights in mental health systems and supporting humane and effective alternative options to mainstream practice for help-seeking. Drawing on past research as well as the co-authors’ own experiences, the volume explores identities of people who identify as both psychiatric survivors and mental health professionals, discussing the potential for further dialogue between psychiatric survivors and mental health professionals to create humane and person-centred communities of healing. This book is specifically targeted for practising psychotherapists and graduate students, to gain new insight into the Psychiatric Survivor Movement and to appreciate the value of lived experience and of psychiatric survivors’ efforts shaping the future of mental health care.
A therapy technique for inner awareness and meaningful change. “Focusing” is a particular process of attention that supports therapeutic change, a process that has been linked in more than 50 research studies with successful outcomes in psychotherapy. First developed by pioneering philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin, Focusing quietly inspired much of the somatically oriented, mindfulness-based work being done today. Yet what makes Focusing a truly revolutionary approach to therapeutic change has been little understood—until now. Focusing is based on a radically different understanding of the body as inherently meaningful and implicitly wise. Mere intellectualizing or talking about problems can keep clients stuck in their old patterns of behavior. Focusing introduces the concept of the “felt sense,” a moment in process when there is a potential to experience more than is already known and to break through old, frozen, stuck patterns. Clients who see real change during the course of their therapy work are often those who can contact and stay with a felt sense—but how to help them do so is not obvious. Ann Weiser Cornell, who has been teaching Focusing to clinicians for more than 30 years, shows how to help clients get felt senses and nurture them when they appear, how to work with clients who have difficulty feeling in the body, how to facilitate a “felt shift,” how to support clients who experience dysregulating emotional states, and much more. Beginning with a clear explanation of what makes Focusing so potentially transformative, she goes on to show how to effectively incorporate Focusing with other treatment modalities and use it to treat a range of client issues, notably trauma, addiction, and depression. Designed to be immediately applicable for working clinicians and filled with practical strategies, clinical examples, and vignettes, this book shows step by step how to bring Focusing into any kind of clinical practice. Cornell expertly demonstrates the Focusing process unfolding, moment by moment, in the therapy room, and illuminates its powerful capacity to support a client’s growth and change.
Emerging Practice in Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy brings together some of the world's most influential contemporary psychotherapists in the field to look at the future of Focusing-oriented approaches. Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy - a form of therapy that involves listening to the innate wisdom of the body - is a dynamic and growing field that has evolved greatly since Eugene Gendlin first published the text Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy in 1996. This book explores recent innovations such as Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy as a response to trauma, Wholebody Focusing, and how Focusing has been adapted in Japan and South Korea. One section looks at specific contemporary issues and emerging practical applications of Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy, such as how Focusing can be used in wellbeing counselling and to help decision making processes in counselling and therapy. By offering new alternatives to working effectively with difficult issues and specific client groups, this volume will appeal to a broad range of therapists, coaches, and other practitioners. Jessica Kingsley Publishers also publishes a companion volume, Theory and Practice of Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: Beyond the Talking Cure, edited by Greg Madison [9781849053242].
"Daniel J. Tomasulo chronicles and confesses his childhood delusions, his particularly challenging experiences as a parent, and his life as a psychologist with refreshing candor and laugh-out-loud humor. His memories of being a kid--controlling streetlights, avoiding any foods with seeds lest he get pregnant, enduring his mother's cold love--are vivid, and his life as a parent is riddled with dilemmas. To start, he finds himself locked in a rubber-walled hospital room while his wife is in labor, and later he faces the necessity of giving mouth-to-mouth to his daughter's suffocating Raggedy Ann doll. As a professional who specializes in the highly personal, he traces the unusual and illuminating connections between his own life and evocative scenes from the lives of his patients"--P. [4] of cover.
Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure is a collection of essays whose shared purpose is to offer an accessible interdisciplinary exploration of the social dynamics behind confessional discourse. As various contributors to this collection demonstrate, confession is ubiquitous in contemporary culture, not only within psychological or therapeutic frameworks or literary analysis, but also in internet discussion groups, in the criminal justice system, in political rhetoric, in so-called 'reality' and interview-style television programming, in writing pedagogy and, increasingly, in the testimonial strain observable in contemporary scholarship. Yet, 'telling one's story' raises questions, not only about authorial intent or authenticity, but also about the pressures disclosure can impose upon its audiences. Far less ubiquitous than confessions themselves, as these contributors suggest, are the critical tools that general audiences might employ in order to better evaluate the rhetoric of personal disclosure. It is, in fact, the shortage of such tools – responses and procedures that could be stated plainly and implemented by any reader or viewer – that Compelling Confessions sets out to address.
