How do you define “growing up”? Does it mean you achieve certain cultural benchmarks—a steady income, paying taxes, marriage, and children? Or does it mean leaving behind the expectations of others and growing into the person you were meant to be? If you find yourself in a career, place, relationship, or crisis you never foresaw and that seems at odds with your beliefs about who you are, it means your soul is calling on you to reexamine your path. With Living an Examined Life, James Hollis offers an essential guidebook for anyone at a crossroads in life Here this acclaimed author guides you through 21 areas for self-inquiry and growth—such as how to exorcise the ghosts of your past, when to choose meaning over happiness, how to construct a mature spirituality, and how to seize permission to be who you really are With his trademark eloquence and insight, Dr. Hollis offers a potent resource you’ll return to time and again to energize and inspire you on your journey to create a life of personal authority, integrity, and fulfillment.
Advice on Helping Your Loved Ones, from the medical director of the country's largest state mental health system and the mental health editor of The Huffington Post More than fifty million people a year are diagnosed with some form of mental illness. It spares no sex, race, age, ethnicity, or income level. And left untreated, mental disorders can devastate our families and communities. Family members and friends are often the first to realize when someone has a problem, but it is hard to know how to help or where to turn. Our mental health “system” can feel like a bewildering and frustrating maze. How can you tell that someone has a mental illness? What are the first and best steps for you to take? Where do you go to find the right care? The Family Guide to Mental Health Care is the first comprehensive print resource for the millions of people who have loved ones suffering from some kind of mental illness. In this book, families can find the answers to their most urgent questions. What medications are helpful and are some as dangerous as I think? Is there a way to navigate privacy laws so I can discuss my adult daughter’s treatment with her doctor? Is my teenager experiencing typical adolescent distress or an illness? From understanding depression, bipolar illness and anxiety to eating and traumatic disorders, schizophrenia, and much more, readers will learn what to do and how to help. Real-life scenarios and authoritative information are written in a compassionate, reader-friendly way, including checklists to bring to a doctor’s appointment so you can ask the right questions. For readers who fear they will never see the light at the end of the tunnel, this book gives hope and a path forward. As one of the nation’s leading voices on quality care in mental health, Dr. Lloyd Sederer has played a singular role in advancing services for those with mental illness. Now, the wealth of his expertise and clear guidance is at your disposal. From the first signs of a problem to sorting through the variety of treatment options, you and your family will be able to walk into a doctor’s office know what to do and what to ask.
Here he is, husband and father, scruffy romantic, a shambolic scholar--a man adrift in the wake of his wife's sudden, accidental death. And there are his two sons who like him struggle in their London apartment to face the unbearable sadness that has engulfed them. The father imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness, while the boys wander, savage and unsupervised. In this moment of violent despair they are visited by Crow--antagonist, trickster, goad, protector, therapist, and babysitter. This self-described "sentimental bird," at once wild and tender, who "finds humans dull except in grief," threatens to stay with the wounded family until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss lessens with the balm of memories, Crow's efforts are rewarded and the little unit of three begins to recover: Dad resumes his book about the poet Ted Hughes; the boys get on with it, grow up. Part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief, Max Porter's extraordinary debut combines compassion and bravura style to dazzling effect. Full of angular wit and profound truths, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers is a startlingly original and haunting debut by a significant new talent.
Psychodynamic Counselling in a Nutshell explains in clear, jargon-free style, the concepts at the heart of the psychodynamic approach, and, drawing on case material, describes the therapeutic practice which rests on those ideas. Assuming no previous knowledge of the subject, the book introduces: - the history of the approach, - the key main concepts, and - practical techniques used by practitioners In the first chapter, the author introduces a client, John, whose case is revisited throughout the book, connecting together theory and practice for the reader. This new and revised edition also now includes new material on supervision and ethics, on Freud and Jung, and on outcome research and the most recent developments in the field. Psychodynamic Counselling in a Nutshell is the ideal place to start for anyone reading about the psychodynamic approach for the first time.
"Soars into sublime meditation...what makes this book so extraordinary is her willingness to reveal exactly what goes on in the sometimes mysterious encounter between therapist and patient."—The Los Angeles Times. A moving account of a true-life double healing through psychotherapy. In this brave, iconoclastic, and utterly unique book, psychotherapist Annie Rogers chronicles her remarkable bond with Ben, a severely disturbed five-ear-old. Orphaned, fostered, neglected, and forgotten in a household fire, Ben finally begins to respond to Annie in their intricate and revealing platy therapy. But as Ben begins to explore the trauma of his past, Annie finds herself being drawn downward into her own mental anguish. Catastrophically failed by her own therapist, she is hospitalized with a breakdown that renders her unable to speak. Then she and her gifted new analyst must uncover where her story of childhood terror overlaps with Ben's, and learn how she can complete her work with the child by creating a new story from the old—one that ultimately heals them both.
Philosopher of the Heart is the groundbreaking biography of renowned existentialist Søren Kierkegaard’s life and creativity, and a searching exploration of how to be a human being in the world. Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most passionate and challenging of all modern philosophers, and is often regarded as the founder of existentialism. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen pursuing the question of existence—how to be a human being in the world?—while exploring the possibilities of Christianity and confronting the failures of its institutional manifestation around him. Much of his creativity sprang from his relationship with the young woman whom he promised to marry, then left to devote himself to writing, a relationship which remained decisive for the rest of his life. He deliberately lived in the swim of human life in Copenhagen, but alone, and died exhausted in 1855 at the age of 42, bequeathing his remarkable writings to his erstwhile fiancée. Clare Carlisle’s innovative and moving biography writes Kierkegaard’s life as far as possible from his own perspective, to convey what it was like actually being this Socrates of Christendom—as he put it, living life forwards yet only understanding it backwards.
For Aristotle, excellence is not an act but a habit, and Hume regards habit as ‘the great guide of life’. However, for Proust habit is problematic: ‘if habit is a second nature, it prevents us from knowing our first.’ What is habit? Do habits turn us into machines or free us to do more creative things? Should religious faith be habitual? Does habit help or hinder the practice of philosophy? Why do Luther, Spinoza, Kant, Kierkegaard and Bergson all criticise habit? If habit is both a blessing and a curse, how can we live well in our habits? In this thought-provoking book Clare Carlisle examines habit from a philosophical standpoint. Beginning with a lucid appraisal of habit’s philosophical history she suggests that both receptivity and resistance to change are basic principles of habit-formation. Carlisle shows how the philosophy of habit not only anticipates the discoveries of recent neuroscience but illuminates their ethical significance. She asks whether habit is a reliable form of knowledge by examining the contrasting interpretations of habitual thinking offered by Spinoza and Hume. She then turns to the role of habit in the good life, tracing Aristotle’s legacy through the ideas of Joseph Butler, Hegel, and Félix Ravaisson, and assessing the ambivalent attitudes to habit expressed by Nietzsche and Proust. She argues that a distinction between habit and practice helps to clarify this ambivalence, particularly in the context of habit and religion, where she examines both the theology of habit and the repetitions of religious life. She concludes by considering how philosophy itself is a practice of learning to live well with habit.
Worldwide, an increasingly diverse and growing number of people are seeking therapy. We go to address past traumas, to break patterns of behaviour, to confront eating disorders or addiction, to talk about relationships, or simply because we want to find out more about ourselves. Susie Orbach has been a psychotherapist for over forty years. Also a million-copy bestselling author, The New York Times called her the 'most famous psychotherapist to have set up couch in Britain since Sigmund Freud'. Here, she explores what goes on in the process of therapy through a series of dramatized case studies. Insightful and honest about a process often necessarily shrouded in secrecy, In Therapy: The Unfolding Story is an essential read for those curious about, or considering entering, therapy. This complete edition takes us deeper into the world of therapy, with 13 further sessions and a new introduction.