Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive


Marc Brackett - 2019
    Marc Brackett, author of Permission to Feel, knows why. And he knows what we can do. "We have a crisis on our hands, and its victims are our children."Marc Brackett is a professor in Yale University's Child Study Center and founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. In his 25 years as an emotion scientist, he has developed a remarkably effective plan to improve the lives of children and adults - a blueprint for understanding our emotions and using them wisely so that they help, rather than hinder, our success and well-being. The core of his approach is a legacy from his childhood, from an astute uncle who gave him permission to feel. He was the first adult who managed to see Marc, listen to him, and recognize the suffering, bullying, and abuse he'd endured. And that was the beginning of Marc's awareness that what he was going through was temporary. He wasn't alone, he wasn't stuck on a timeline, and he wasn't "wrong" to feel scared, isolated, and angry. Now, best of all, he could do something about it.In the decades since, Marc has led large research teams and raised tens of millions of dollars to investigate the roots of emotional well-being. His prescription for healthy children (and their parents, teachers, and schools) is a system called RULER, a high-impact and fast-effect approach to understanding and mastering emotions that has already transformed the thousands of schools that have adopted it. RULER has been proven to reduce stress and burnout, improve school climate, and enhance academic achievement. This book is the culmination of Marc's development of RULER and his way to share the strategies and skills with readers around the world. It is tested, and it works.This book combines rigor, science, passion and inspiration in equal parts. Too many children and adults are suffering; they are ashamed of their feelings and emotionally unskilled, but they don't have to be. Marc Brackett's life mission is to reverse this course, and this book can show you how.

Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters


Robert Augustus Masters - 2010
    The spiritual ideals of any tradition, whether Christian commandments or Buddhist precepts, can provide easy justification for practitioners to duck uncomfortable feelings in favor of more seemingly enlightened activity. When split off from fundamental psychological needs, such actions often do much more harm than good.While other authors have touched on the subject, this is the first book fully devoted to spiritual bypassing. In the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa’s landmark Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Spiritual Bypassing provides an in-depth look at the unresolved or ignored psychological issues often masked as spirituality, including self-judgment, excessive niceness, and emotional dissociation. A  longtime psychotherapist with an engaging writing style, Masters furthers the body of psychological insight into how we use (and abuse) religion in often unconscious ways. This book will hold particular appeal for those who grew up with an unstructured new-age spirituality now looking for a more mature spiritual practice, and for anyone seeking increased self-awareness and a more robust relationship with themselves and others.

The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships


Diane Poole Heller - 2019
    From our earliest years, we develop an attachment style that follows us through life, replaying in our daily emotional landscape, our relationships, and how we feel about ourselves. And in the wake of a traumatic event—such as a car accident, severe illness, loss of a loved one, or experience of abuse—that attachment style can deeply influence what happens next. In The Power of Attachment, Dr. Diane Poole Heller, a pioneer in attachment theory and trauma resolution, shows how overwhelming experiences can disrupt our most important connections— with the parts of ourselves within, with the physical world around us, and with others. The good news is that we can restore and reconnect at all levels, regardless of our past. Here, you’ll learn key insights and practices to help you: • Restore the broken connections caused by trauma • Get embodied and grounded in your body • Integrate the parts of yourself that feel wounded and fragmented • Emerge from grief, fear, and powerlessness to regain strength, joy, and resiliency • Reclaim access to your inner resources and spiritual nature "We are fundamentally designed to heal," teaches Dr. Heller. "Even if our childhood is less than ideal, our secure attachment system is biologically programmed in us, and our job is to simply find out what’s interfering with it—and learn what we can do to make those secure tendencies more dominant." With expertise drawn from Dr. Heller’s research, clinical work, and training programs, this book invites you to begin that journey back to wholeness.

Building Motivational Interviewing Skills: A Practitioner Workbook


David B. Rosengren - 2009
    The volume is packed with real-world examples from a range of clinical settings, as well as sample interactions and hands-on learning activities. The author is an experienced MI researcher, clinician, and trainer who facilitates learning with quizzes, experiential exercises, and reproducible worksheets. The reader learns step by step how to practice core MI skills: raising the importance of behavior change, enhancing the client's confidence, resolving ambivalence, solidifying commitment to change, and negotiating a change plan. The utility of the book is enhanced by the large-size format and lay-flat binding. The book shows how to navigate each session using microskills that many clinicians already know: open-ended questions, affirmations, reflective listening and summaries, or OARS for short. This title is part of the Applications of Motivational Interviewing Series, edited by Stephen Rollnick and William R. Miller.

I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression


Terrence Real - 1997
    And these escape attempts only hurt the people men love and pass their condition on to their children.This ground breaking book is the "pathway out of darkness" that these men and their families seek. Real reveals how men can unearth their pain, heal themselves, restore relationships, and break the legacy of abuse. He mixes penetrating analysis with compelling tales of his patients and even his ownexperiences with depression as the son of a violent, depressed father and the father of two young sons.

Clinical Handbook of Psychological Disorders: A Step-by-Step Treatment Manual


David H. Barlow - 2001
    Each chapter summarizes the clinical presentation, etiology, and diagnosis of the each of the most commonly enountered disorders; reviews the models or theories that guide intervention; and delineates step-by-step protocols for assessment and treatment, illustrated with transcripts and vignettes.

The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You


Karla McLaren - 2010
    When you learn to welcome them as your allies, they can reveal creative solutions to any situation. For 35 years, empathic counselor and researcher Karla McLaren has developed a set of practical tools for the real-world stresses of family, career, and the quest for personal fulfillment. On The Language of Emotions, she presents her breakthrough teachings for a new and empowering relationship with your feeling states.How to Harness the Energy of Your EmotionsYour emotions--especially the dark and dishonored ones--hold a tremendous amount of energy. We've all seen what happens when we repress or blindly express them. However, there is a powerful alternative.On The Language of Emotions, you'll learn to meet your emotions and engage with them to safely move toward resolution and equilibrium. Through experiential exercises covering a full spectrum of feelings from anger, fear, and shame to jealousy, grief, joy, and more, you will discover how to work with your own and others' emotions with fluency and expertise.Your Direct Link to Inner WisdomWhen we relate to our emotions with respect and authenticity, we can directly access our innermost wisdom, unfold the deepest parts of ourselves, and heal our most painful wounds. The Language of Emotions gives us a much-needed resource for self-understanding and freedom.Karla McLaren is an award-winning author and pioneering educator who has specialized in the study of emotions as an integrated system for more than 35 years. She is the author of five books and six audio courses on self-healing.Program HighlightsHours of practical insights and guided exercises for partnering with your emotions for wisdom and healing- How to overcome addictions, distractions, and unresolved trauma--the three primary impediments to emotional ease- Using the energy of anger to protect and restore personal boundaries- Step-by-step guidance in the five skills of the empath (someone skilled in reading emotions)- How to balance your "quaternity," a metaphor for the interplay of mind, body, spirit, and emotions- Honoring sadness as a source of release and rejuvenation- Joy, the natural response to beauty and communion

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook


Bruce D. Perry - 2007
    In The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, he tells their stories of trauma and transformation through the lens of science, revealing the brain's astonishing capacity for healing. Deftly combining unforgettable case histories with his own compassionate, insightful strategies for rehabilitation, Perry explains what exactly happens to the brain when a child is exposed to extreme stress-and reveals the unexpected measures that can be taken to ease a child's pain and help him grow into a healthy adult. Through the stories of children who recover-physically, mentally, and emotionally-from the most devastating circumstances, Perry shows how simple things like surroundings, affection, language, and touch can deeply impact the developing brain, for better or for worse. In this deeply informed and moving book, Bruce Perry dramatically demonstrates that only when we understand the science of the mind can we hope to heal the spirit of even the most wounded child.

Retelling the Stories of Our Lives: Everyday Narrative Therapy to Draw Inspiration and Transform Experience


David Denborough - 2013
    The ways in which we understand and share the stories of our lives therefore make all the difference. If we tell stories that emphasize only desolation, then we become weaker. If we tell our stories in ways that make us stronger, we can soothe our losses and ease our sorrows. Learning how to re-envision the stories we tell about ourselves can make an enormous difference in the ways we live our lives. Drawing on wisdoms from the field of narrative therapy, this book is designed to help people rewrite and retell the stories of their lives.The book invites readers to take a new look at their own stories and to find significance in events often neglected, to find sparkling actions that are often discounted, and to find solutions to problems and predicaments in unexpected places. Readers are introduced to key ideas of narrative practice like the externalizing problems - 'the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem' -and the concept of "re-membering" one's life. Easy-to-understand examples and exercises demonstrate how these ideas have helped many people overcome intense hardship and will help readers make these techniques their own. The book also outlines practical strategies for reclaiming and celebrating one's experience in the face of specific challenges such as trauma, abuse, personal failure, grief, and aging. Filled with relatable examples, useful exercises, and informative illustrations, Retelling the Stories of Our Lives leads readers on a path to reclaim their past and re-envision their future.

Learning Cognitive-Behavior Therapy: An Illustrated Guide


Jesse H. Wright - 2005
    This easy-to-use guidebook offers full explanations of the most effective behavioral methods; a program designed for achieving competency that covers both basic methods for patients with depression and anxiety and advanced techniques for patients with bipolar disorder, psychoses, and eating and personality disorders; an integrated cognitive-behavioral/biological/interpersonal model for treatment; and instructions on fully integrating CBT with psychopharmacological intervention, as well as formulation and treatment methods endorsed by the Academy of Cognitive Therapy. Written by seasoned cognitive-behavior therapists who also demonstrate CBT methods on the accompanying DVD, Learning Cognitive-Behavior Therapy: An Illustrated Guide is indisputably the essential resource for students of multiple disciplines and practitioners who wish to learn the invaluable techniques of CBT.

The Skilled Helper: A Problem-Management and Opportunity-Development Approach to Helping


Gerard Egan - 1975
    Egan emphasizes the collaborative nature of the therapist-client relationship and uses a practical, three-stage model that drives client problem-managing and opportunity-developing action. Egan masterfully leads readers step-by-step through the counseling process, while giving them a feeling for the complexity inherent in any helping relationship. As readers begin to understand the various steps of the helping model, they are able to improve their competence and confidence measurably. In this new seventh edition, Egan has built upon the strengths of the last edition while focusing on a new "positive psychology," solution-focused theme.

Tales of Un-Knowing: Therapeutic Encounters from an Existential Perspective


Ernesto Spinelli - 1997
    Yet the dynamic between therapist and client remains an enigma. In Tales of Un-Knowing, Ernesto Spinelli presents eight tales of a therapeutic approach that has proven highly effective in assisting troubled individuals in confronting the problems of everyday life. According to Spinelli, therapy at its most fundamental level involves the act of revealing and reassessing the life stories that clients tell themselves in order to establish or maintain meaning in their lives. The role of the therapist is not only to listen, but to help the client to explicate and reconstruct this life story.Tales of Un-Knowing presents the lives of eight individuals whose experiences illuminate a variety of dilemmas and anxieties that most of us encounter at different points in our lives. We meet a man who refuses to grow old gracefully, a woman who fears that she is only loved for her body, and an octogenarian who lives simultaneously in the present and in the past. We also meet Giles, whose obsessive identification with Einstein led him to theorize about his sex until it became a living mathematics full of enthralling permutations and combinations. In the course of the book Spinelli tackles head on the last great taboo of therapeutic practice--sexual attraction between therapist and client.Existential therapy, then, requires that the therapist experience life through the client's eyes. This frequently leads to challenges to the therapist's own ways of being, and the underlying values, beliefs, and assumptions that maintain them. The term un-knowing refers to the challenge to the therapist, who must force him or herself to remain open to new interpretations of that which is familiar, and to treat the seemingly familiar as novel, unfixed in meaning, and accessible to previously unexamined possibilities.

The Courage to Create


Rollo May - 1975
    May draws on his experience to show how we can break out of old patterns in our lives. His insightful book offers us a way through our fears into a fully realized self.

Theory-Based Treatment Planning for Marriage and Family Therapists: Integrating Theory and Practice


Diane R. Gehart - 2002
    Unlike existing resources, this treatment planner provides a means to directly integrate family therapy theory and practice. By providing treatment planning strategies along with complete overviews of specific theories, the book provides a remedy for the common "missing link" between theory and practice. The purpose of this book is to fill the ever-widening gap between formal training in theory and actual practice in managed-care dominated workplaces. The text covers 11 of the most widely used family therapies providing a summary for each theory and then specific strategies for developing a treatment plan.

The Art of Being


Erich Fromm - 1989
    Some of these chapters are contained in the present volume. They deal entirely with the "steps toward being" that the individual can take in order to learn the Art of Being. How can we realize and actualize Love, Reason, and meaningful, productive work? Fromm here offers the Art of Being, a way of living based on authentic self-awareness that comes only through honest self-analysis. Wisely, he warns of the pitfalls of our attaining enlightenment without effort, or believing that life can be lived without pain. The tantalizing "spiritual smorgasbord" offered by our consumer-oriented world, Fromm maintains, only feeds our illusions of "easy awareness." Confronting the psycho-Gurus who preach these shortcuts to enlightenment, Fromm offers another way to self-awareness and well-being, one based on psychoanalysis and self-awareness through meditation. If the Art of Being - the art of functioning as a whole person - can be considered the supreme goal of life, a breakthrough occurs when we move from narcissistic selfishness and egotism - from having - to psychological and spiritual happiness - being. The Art of Being will be one of the most important works in the Fromm canon for years to come.