Healing from a Narcissistic Relationship offers guidance about what to expect as the relationship unravels and how to cope with the fallout. It also helps the reader learn to truly disengage and move through the grief process.Presenting techniques for healing and rebuilding self-esteem and self-confidence, this book offers a guide to developing emotional strength and encourages forgiveness and reconciliation with the past. It shows the reader how to increase emotional self-protections, quit caretaking in relationships, and become more independent and self-loving. Using real stories, Margalis Fjelstad offers a process of healing that can direct the reader away from former patterns of inequitable relationships and toward loving, caring connections that can truly grow healthfully and flourish. It shows that ending a relationship with a narcissist may be the best thing that ever happened.--Elayne Savage, PhD, relationship and workplace coach; professional speaker; author of Don't Take It Personally! The Art of Dealing with Rejection and Breathing Room - Creating Space to Be a Couple

    

    In a style accessible to any lay reader or beginning student in psychology, Kahn presents key ideas such as the Oedipus complex, the repetition compulsion, guilt, anxiety, and defense mechanisms, along with recent research that has supported or expanded Freud's findings. He also presents case studies from his own work as a psychotherapist to show how Freudian thought has been instrumental in helping patients discover who they are and escape from destructive patterns. Readers aware of Freud's ideas and those discovering them for the first time will benefit from Kahn's fresh, informed, and unpretentious approach.

    Recognizing her face, her voice, the meaning of her moods, and her facial expressions is crucial to survival. Dr. Christine Ann Lawson vividly describes how mothers who suffer from borderline personality disorder produce children who may flounder in life even as adults, futilely struggling to reach the safety of a parental harbor, unable to recognize that their borderline parent lacks a pier, or even a discernible shore. Four character profiles describe different symptom clusters that include the waif mother, the hermit mother, the queen mother, and the witch. Children of borderlines are at risk for developing this complex and devastating personality disorder themselves. Dr. Lawson's recommendations for prevention include empathic understanding of the borderline mother and early intervention with her children to ground them in reality and counteract the often dangerous effects of living with a "make-believe" mother. Some readers may recognize their mothers as well as themselves in this book. They will also find specific suggestions for creating healthier relationships. Addressing the adult children of borderlines and the therapists who work with them, Dr. Lawson shows how to care for the waif without rescuing her, to attend to the hermit without feeding her fear, to love the queen without becoming her subject, and to live with the witch without becoming her victim. A Jason Aronson Book

    With this book Hillman initiated the soul movement in psychotherapy forty years ago.

    In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Elaine Aron, a clinical psychologist, workshop leader, and an HSP herself, shows you how to identify this trait in yourself and make the most of it in everyday situations. Drawing on her many years of research and hundreds of interviews, she shows how you can better understand yourself and your trait to create a fuller, richer life.

    Therapy then becomes aprocess of storying or restorying the lives and experiences ofthese people. In this way narrative comes to play a centralrole in therapy. Both authors share delightful examples of astoried therapy that privileges a person’s lived experience,inviting a reflexive posture and encouraging a sense of authorshipand reauthorship of one’s experiences and relationshipsin the telling and retelling of one’s story.

    It contains new insights and an organized methodological framework. The first part of the book comprises more than 100 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) regarding relationships with abusive narcissists and the Narcissistic Personality Disorder.What is a personality disorder? When the personality is rigid to the point of being unable to change in reaction to changing circumstances - we say that it is disordered. Such a person takes behavioral, emotional, and cognitive cues exclusively from others. His inner world is, so to speak, vacated. His True Self is dilapidated and dysfunctional. Instead he has a tyrannical and delusional False Self. Such a person is incapable of loving and of living. He cannot love others because he cannot love himself. He loves his reflection, his surrogate self. And he is incapable of living because life is a struggle towards, a striving, a drive at something. In other words: life is change. He who cannot change cannot live.The narcissist is an actor in a monodrama, yet forced to remain behind the scenes. The scenes take center stage, instead. The Narcissist does not cater at all to his own needs. Contrary to his reputation, the Narcissist does not "love" himself in any true sense of the word.He feeds off other people, who hurl back at him an image that he projects to them. This is their sole function in his world: to reflect, to admire, to applaud, to detest - in a word, to assure him that he exists. Otherwise, the narcissist feels, they have no right to tax his time, energy, or emotions.The posting of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Re-Visited on the Web has elicited a flood of excited, sad and heart rending responses, mostly from victims of Narcissists but also from people suffering from the NPD. This is a true picture of the resulting correspondence with them.This book is not intended to please or to entertain. NPD is a pernicious, vile and tortuous disease, which affects not only the Narcissist. It infects and forever changes people who are in daily contact with the Narcissist. In other words: it is contagious. It is my contention that Narcissism is the mental epidemic of the twentieth century, a plague to be fought by all means.This tome is my contribution to minimizing the damages of this disorder.

    These beautifully rendered tales illuminate the fundamental pathways of life from birth to death.A woman finds herself daydreaming as she returns home from a business trip; a young man loses his wallet. We learn, too, from more extreme examples: the patient who points an unloaded gun at a police officer, the compulsive liar who convinces his wife he's dying of cancer. The stories invite compassionate understanding, suggesting answers to the questions that compel and disturb us most about love and loss, parents and children, work and change. The resulting journey will spark new ideas about who we are and why we do what we do.

    The views and strategies of a master clinician are presented here in such clear and precise form that readers can proceed directly from the book with comparisons and modifications to suit their own styles and working situations.Salvador Minuchin presents six chapter-length transcripts of actual family sessions--two devoted to ordinary families who are meeting their problems with relative success; four concerned with families seeking help. Accompanying each transcript is the author's running interpretation of what is taking place, laying particular stress on the therapist's tactics and maneuvers.These lively sessions are interpreted in a brilliant theoretical analysis of why families develop problems and what it takes to set them right. The author constructs a model of an effectively functioning family and defines the boundaries around its different subsystems, whether parental, spouse, or sibling. He discusses ways in which families adapt to stress from within and without, as they seek to survive and grow.Dr. Minuchin describes methods of diagnosing or "mapping" problems of the troubled family and determining appropriate therapeutic goals and strategies. Different situations, such as the extended family, the family with a parental child, and the family in transition through death or divorce, are examined. Finally, the author explores the dynamics of change, examining the variety of restructuring operations that can be employed to challenge a family and to change its basic patterns.

    But why does it work? And why does it matter that we understand how it works?In Why Therapy Works, Louis Cozolino explains the mechanisms of psychotherapeutic change from the bottom up, beginning with the brain, and how brains have evolved—especially how brains evolved to learn, unlearn, and relearn, which is at the basis of lasting psychological change.Readers will learn why therapists have to look beyond just words, diagnoses, and presenting problems to the inner histories of their clients in order to discover paths to positive change. The book also shows how our brains have evolved into social organs and how our interpersonal lives are a source of both pain and power. Readers will explore with Cozolino how our brains are programmed to connect in intimate relationships and come to understand the debilitating effects of anxiety, stress, and trauma.Finally, the book will lead to an understanding of the power of story and narratives for fostering self-regulation, neural integration, and positive change.Always, the focus of the book is in understanding underlying therapeutic change, moving beyond the particular of specific forms of therapy to the commonalities of human evolution, biology, and experience.This book is for anyone who has experienced the benefits of therapy and wondered how it worked. It is for anyone thinking about whether therapy is right for them, and it is for anyone who has looked within themselves and marveled at people's ability to experience profound transformation.

    Advancing a model of treatment as transformation through relationship, the author integrates attachment theory with neuroscience, trauma studies, relational psychotherapy, and the psychology of mindfulness. Vivid case material illustrates how therapists can tailor interventions to fit the attachment needs of their patients, thus helping them to generate the internalized secure base for which their early relationships provided no foundation. Demonstrating the clinical uses of a focus on nonverbal interaction, the book describes powerful techniques for working with the emotional responses and bodily experiences of patient and therapist alike.

    The text integrates contemporary research in biology, psychology, anthropology and sociology, utilizing the biopsychosocial model as the basic explanatory theme for health and health care. Gender, sociocultural and developmental differences in health and related behaviours are also integrated throughout the text. This systems approach is complemented by the integration of life-span development in health and illness in each chapter of the text.

    Lance Dodes has been successfully helping people master their addictions -- alcoholism, compulsive gambling, smoking, sexual addiction, and more with a radical approach. Dr. Dodes describes how all addictions have, at their heart, unrecognized emotional factors that explain:Why we feel the impulse Why we feel it when we do What alternatives (really) work in that critical momentIn this refreshing book filled with compelling case studies, Dr. Dodes debunks several such widely accepted myths as:Addictions are fundamentally a physical problem. People with addictions are different from other people. You have to hit bottom before you can get well. You are wasting your time if you ask "why" you have an addiction.

    Through vivid clinical illustrations, the book illuminates why some communications in therapy are particularly effective, while others addressing essentially the very same content may actually be countertherapeutic. Wachtel's powerful integrative theory also provides new insights into how psychological disorder evolves, how it is maintained, and how psychotherapy contributes to change.