A Healing Relationship is about a relationally focused psychotherapy, how the author works, and why. The first couple of chapters provide a brief orientation to relationally focused aspects of an integrative psychotherapy. The heart of the book are the transaction-by-transaction examples of what actually occurred in the psychotherapeutic dialogue. It is composed of three verbatim transcripts along with annotations about what the author was thinking and feeling when he engaged in psychotherapy with each client. Many of the annotated comments as well as the actual therapeutic dialogue will describe some elements of the process of relationally focused psychotherapy and the reasoning behind his therapeutic comments, silences, and challenge. This book is intended to elicit a dialogue between the reader and the psychotherapist / author and is written as though a personal letter. Psychotherapy is such an interpersonal encounter - an intimate meeting of two souls. No two psychotherapists will ever do the same therapy, even with the same client, even if they use the same theory and methods. It is important to appreciate how each think about theories, the concepts that underlie the methods chosen, how each assess the therapeutic setting, and express personal temperament. Richard G. Erskine has taken an important step in communication about the practice of psychotherapy. Not only with this excellent book but also with video footage of the three therapy sessions, which will be made accessible to purchasers of the book. The overarching aim is to stimulate important conversations between colleagues; to both agree and disagree, to influence each other, to grow professionally, and to share knowledge.
The specific focus of Martin Buber and the Human Sciences is "dialogue" as the foundation of and integrating factor in the human sciences, using dialogue in the special sense which Buber has made famous: mutuality, presentness, openness, meeting the other in his or her uniqueness and not just as a content for one's own thought categories, and knowing as deriving in the first instance from mutual contact rather than knowledge of a subject about an object. By the "human sciences" the authors/editors mean material that can be meaningfully approached in a dialogic way, hence, the humanities, education, psychology, speech communication, anthropology, history, sociology, and economics. The essays in Martin Buber and the Human Sciences demonstrate that thirty years after Buber's death his influence is still resonating in many countries and in many fields.
Understanding Experience: Psychotherapy and Postmodernism is a collection of innovative interdisciplinary essays that explore the way we experience and interact with each other and the world around us. The authors address the postmodern debate in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis through clinical and theoretical discussion and offer a view of the person that is unique and relevant today. The clinical work of Binswanger, Boss, Fromm, Fromm-Reichmann, Laing, and Lacan is considered alongside the theories of Buber, Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and others. Combining clinical data from psychotherapy and psychoanalysis with insights from European philosophy, this book seeks to fill a major gap in the debate over postmodernism and bridges the paradigmatic divide between the behavioural sciences and the human sciences. It will be of great interest to clinicians and students of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis who wish to come to terms with postmodernism, as well as those interested in the interaction of psychoanalysis, philosophy and social theory.
A groundbreaking approach to transforming traumatic legacies passed down in families over generations, by an acclaimed expert in the field Depression. Anxiety. Chronic Pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is compelling: the roots of these difficulties may not reside in our immediate life experience or in chemical imbalances in our brains—but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, supports what many have long intuited—that traumatic experience can be passed down through generations. It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood. As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for over twenty years. It Didn’t Start with You offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Diagnostic self-inventories provide a way to uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Techniques for developing a genogram or extended family tree create a map of experiences going back through the generations. And visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue create pathways to reconnection, integration, and reclaiming life and health. It Didn’t Start With You is a transformative approach to resolving longstanding difficulties that in many cases, traditional therapy, drugs, or other interventions have not had the capacity to touch.
Using clay in therapy taps into the most fundamental of human experiences - touch. This book is a comprehensive step-by-step training manual that covers all aspects of 'Work at the Clay Field', a sensorimotor-based art therapy technique. The book discusses the setting and processes of the approach, provides an overview of the core stages of Gestalt Formation and the Nine Situations model within this context, and demonstrates how this unique focus on the sense of touch and the movement of the hands is particularly effective for trauma healing in adults and children. The intense tactile experience of working with clay allows the therapist to work through early attachment issues, developmental setbacks and traumatic events with the client in a primarily nonverbal way using a body-focused approach. The kinaesthetic motor action of the hands combined with sensory perception can lead to a profound sense of resolution with lasting therapeutic benefits. With photographs and informative case studies throughout, this book will be a valuable resource for art therapists and mental health professionals, and will also be of interest to complementary therapists and bodyworkers.
A book for psychotherapists and their clients - and for anyone who wants to make the journey from shame to unshame. Carolyn Spring, author of 'Recovery is my best revenge: my experience of trauma, abuse and dissociative identity disorder', documents in this, her second book, her journey through psychotherapy to heal and resolve trauma-based shame, which had resulted in a catastrophic mental breakdown in her early thirties and an eventual diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID). She then embarked on a nearly ten year journey of psychotherapy through which she came to realise that shame had actually saved her life. However, the cost to this protective function is a life lived dissociated from feelings of joy, connection, love and belonging. This book explores Carolyn's pathway towards 'Unshame'. Suitable for both professionals and survivors alike, it is a fascinating insight into that most private and mysterious of places - the therapy room, and the mind. About the author Carolyn Spring helps people recover from trauma and to reverse adversity. She is author of numerous books and articles and has delivered extensive training throughout the UK for both dissociative survivors and professionals working with them. She set up PODS (Positive Outcomes for Dissociative Survivors) in 2010 to promote recovery from dissociative disorders. She now works more widely in the field of mental health and adversity and combines a wealth of personal experience with research in her writing and training, bringing a rare positivity and the belief that no matter what people have experienced, recovery is possible. For more information go to www.carolynspring.com.
Transformational Chairwork: Using Psychotherapeutic Dialogues in Clinical Practice is an exposition of the art and science of Chairwork. It is also a practical handbook for using the Chairwork method effectively with a wide range of clinical problems. Originally created by Dr. Jacob Moreno in the 1950s and then further developed by Dr. Fritz Perls in the 1960s, Chairwork has been embraced and re-envisioned by therapists from cognitive, behavioral, existential, Jungian, experiential, psychodynamic, and integrative perspectives. Transformational Chairwork builds on this rich and creative legacy and provides a model that is both integrative and trans-theoretical. The book familiarizes clinicians with essential dialogue strategies and empowers them to create therapeutic encounters and re-enactments. Chairwork interventions can be broadly organized along the lines of external and internal dialogues. The external dialogues can be used to help patients work though grief and loss, heal from interpersonal abuse and trauma, manage difficult relationships, and develop and strengthen their assertive voice. The internal dialogues in turn focus on resolving inner conflicts, combatting the negative impact of the inner critic and the experience of self-hatred, working with dreams and nightmares, and expanding the self through polarity work. Using both internal and external strategies, this book explores how Chairwork dialogues can be a powerful intervention when working with addictions, social oppression, medical issues, and psychosis. This is done through the use of compelling clinical examples and scripts that can be read, studied, and enacted. Chairwork’s central emphasis is helping patients express each of their voices as distinctly and as forcefully as possible. The book concludes with a review of the deepening technique—the strategies that therapists can use to help facilitate clarity and existential ownership.
Feminist therapy is more than a prescription of technique; it is a unique philosophy of psychotherapy. While much has been written on feminism and therapy, this bold book breaks new ground by making explicit and coherent the theoretical underpinnings of feminist therapy.Building on the revolutionary work of feminist scholars who have described how women employ strategies of knowing the world in a manner distinct from men, Laura S. Brown, noted for her pioneering work in the field of ethics and boundaries, shows how these insights should reshape the very nature of the therapeutic encounter. With meticulous care, the author examines key features of the therapeutic encounter with a feminist lens: the power of the therapist; assessment and diagnosis; the nature of change; the ethics of practice; and differences in race, class, and sexual identity. She constructs a vision of therapy that helps the client develop a sense of entitlement to satisfying and equal relationships outside the therapist's office. This powerful vision of feminist therapy is grounded throughout with case examples that illustrate how a dialogue between therapist and client can be healing, subversive, and transformative all at once.
Drawing on her extensive experience as a creative arts therapist, Martina Schnetz puts forward a new approach to the process of art in healing. She explores the dialogue between the internal world, external images, and words, shaping a new vocabulary for creative arts therapists. The Healing Flow: Artistic Expression in Therapy is a theoretical and experiential account of the author's work with survivors of childhood trauma and post traumatic stress. Case studies are presented in this model. Through providing deeper insight into the creative processes, participants recover meaningful patterns in their lives, and restore connectedness between themselves and the world.