We've learned that full recovery is not only possible, but may actually be the most common outcome given the right conditions. Furthermore, Dr. Paris Williams' own groundbreaking research, as mentioned in the New York Times, has shown that recovery often entails a profound positive transformation. In Rethinking Madness, Dr. Williams takes the reader step by step on a highly engaging journey of discovery, exploring how the mainstream understanding of schizophrenia has become so profoundly misguided, while crafting a much more accurate and hopeful vision. As this vision unfolds, we discover a deeper sense of appreciation for the profound wisdom and resilience that lies within our beings while also coming to the unsettling realization of just how thin the boundary is between so called madness and so called sanity.

    Instead of struggling even harder to manage or eliminate your anger, you can stop anger feelings from determining who you are and how you live your life. Based on a revolutionary psychological approach called acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), the techniques in ACT on Life Not on Anger can help you let go of anger and start living your life to the fullest.Your path begins as you learn to accept your angry feelings as they occur, without judging or trying to manage them. Then, using techniques based in mindfulness practice, you'll discover how to observe your feelings of anger without acting on them. Value-identification exercises help you figure out what truly matters to you so that you can commit to short- and long-term goals that turn your values into reality. In the process, anger will lose power over your life-and, amazingly, you'll gain control over your life by simply letting go of your angry feelings.

    These five core capacities are associated with biologically based core needs that are essential to our physical and emotional well-being: the needs for connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, and love-sexuality. Recognizing these needs as well as five Adaptive Survival Styles set in motion when the core needs are not met early in life, authors Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre cut through the seeming complexity of life’s problems.   Explaining that an impaired capacity for connection to self and to others and the ensuing diminished aliveness are the hidden dimensions that underlie most psychological and many physiological problems, they introduce the NeuroAffective Relational Model® (NARM), a resource-oriented, psychodynamically informed approach that, while not ignoring a person’s past, emphasizes working in the present moment. NARM uses somatic mindfulness to re-regulate the nervous system and to resolve identity distortions—such as low self-esteem, shame, and chronic self-judgment—caused by developmental and relational trauma. Heller and LaPierre demonstrate how this therapy helps clients establish connection to the parts of self that are organized, coherent and functional, integrating the role of connection on all levels of experience as it affects a person's physiology, psychology, and capacity for relationship.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    All over the world scientists, psychologists, and philosophers are waiting to read Antonio Damasio's new theory of the nature of consciousness and the construction of the self. A renowned and revered scientist and clinician, Damasio has spent decades following amnesiacs down hospital corridors, waiting for comatose patients to awaken, and devising ingenious research using PET scans to piece together the great puzzle of consciousness. In his bestselling Descartes' Error, Damasio revealed the critical importance of emotion in the making of reason. Building on this foundation, he now shows how consciousness is created. Consciousness is the feeling of what happens-our mind noticing the body's reaction to the world and responding to that experience. Without our bodies there can be no consciousness, which is at heart a mechanism for survival that engages body, emotion, and mind in the glorious spiral of human life. A hymn to the possibilities of human existence, a magnificent work of ingenious science, a gorgeously written book, The Feeling of What Happens is already being hailed as a classic.

    Grodzki's business strategies are effective and immediately useful for a wide range of private practitioners, including social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, massage therapists, energy healers, life coaches, and chiropractors.Whether you are just starting out as an independent practitioner or looking to revitalize an existing practice, Building Your Ideal Private Practice provides a foundation for business and personal growth that will lead you to a new level of personal and financial enrichment. Presenting innovative business concepts in a format specifically adapted for the therapeutic profession, this book guides professionals at all stages of their careers.Bringing together years of experience and the key elements from her Private Practice Success Program with an easy and accessible writing style, Grodzki's book will help you not only build a successful practice outside managed care, but also ensure that your business reflects your true values and talents.

    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.

    Written by a prominent social work leader and trainer for social work licensing exams in the U.S., this guide is based on years of time-tested exam prep workshops conducted by the author. It mirrors the ASWB Clinical "Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities” upon which the exam is based, as well as incorporates information from the DSM-5, which will be included in the exam starting in mid-2015. The guide is comprehensive yet focuses on the material most likely to be included on the exam, so that students can prioritize information as they study. A self-assessment section helps readers identify their strengths and weaknesses before they tackle the material. The author shares her extensive knowledge of the exam by providing useful test-taking strategies and tips for overcoming test anxiety. The 170-question practice test at the end of the guide (with explanations of the correct answers) mirrors the actual exam in both length and structure. Content covers human development, human behavior in the environment, diversity, addictions, assessment and diagnosis, treatment planning, clinical interventions, case management, and professional values and ethics. This book will be a valuable asset for students and aspiring social workers throughout the U.S. and Canada. Key Features: Developed by a highly respected educator of social work licensure candidates Covers all the content areas on the examination, as well as new content added in 2015 Begins with a self-assessment section to help identify areas of strength and weakness Offers a wealth of test-taking tips and strategies to foster exam confidence Includes a practice test (with explanations of the correct answers) that mirrors the exam ASWB is a registered service mark of the Association of Social Work Boards, which neither sponsors nor endorses this product.

    Surveying the vast diversity of family forms, life challenges, and value systems in our rapidly changing society, the volume has helped redefine the boundaries of "normal family life" for generations of students and practitioners. This fully revised and expanded third edition once again brings together leading contributors to illuminate the complexities of healthy family functioning across varied structural arrangements and sociocultural and developmental contexts. Existing chapters have been updated or fully rewritten to reflect the latest theories, research, demographic trends, and clinical practices. Seven entirely new chapters address single parent families, immigrant families, spirituality, family resilience, key processes in marital success and failure, and more.

    It educates prospective clinicians and counselors by guiding them, step-by-step, through the process of working with substance-abuse clients. Chapter content builds in sequence; however, each chapter can be taken as a stand-alone source of valuable information. Individual chapters on special populations add substantial depth to the text's treatment of its subject.

    Part memoir and part self-help guide, this very personal story traces the private struggles that Ellis faced from early childhood to well into his adult life. Whether you are already familiar with Ellis’s many best-selling psychology books or are discovering his work for the first time, you will gain many insights into how to deal with your problems by seeing how Ellis learned to cope with his own serious challenges.In his early life, Ellis was faced with a major physical disability, chronic nephritis, which plagued him from age five to nine and led to hospitalization. This experience then caused the emotional reaction of separation anxiety. At this time he also suffered from severe, migraine-like headaches, which persisted into his forties. Later in life, he realized that some of his emotional upset was the result of initially taking parental neglect too seriously. Active and energetic by nature, he gradually learned that the best way to cope with any problem, physical or emotional, was to stop "catastrophizing" and to do something to correct it.As Ellis points out in all of his work, when faced with adversity, we must realize that we have a real choice, either to think rationally about the problem or to react irrationally. The first choice leads to healthy consequences—normal emotions such as sorrow, regret, frustration, or annoyance, which are justifiable reactions to troubling situations. The second choice leads to the unhealthy consequences of anxiety, depression, rage, and low self-esteem. When we recognize irrational beliefs as such, we must then use our reason to dispute their validity. Ellis goes on to describe how these techniques helped him to cope with many other adult emotional problems, including failure in love affairs, shame, anger, distress over his parents’ divorce, stress from others’ reactions to his atheistic convictions, and upset due to his attitudes about academic and professional setbacks.Honest and unflinching yet always positive and forward-looking, Ellis demonstrates how to gain and grow from trying experiences through rational thinking.

    But as the twins approached adolescence, Pamela began to succumb to schizophrenia, hearing disembodied voices and eventually suffering many breakdowns and hospitalizations.Divided Minds is a dual memoir of identical twins, one of whom faces a life sentence of schizophrenia, and the other who becomes a psychiatrist, after entering the spotlight that had for so long been focused on her sister. Told in the alternating voices of the sisters, Divided Minds is a heartbreaking account of the far reaches of madness, as well as the depths of ambivalence and love between twins. It is a true and unusually frank story of identical twins with very different identities and wildly different experiences of the world around them.

    Erickson's theories in practice, through a series of case studies covering the kinds of problems that are likely to occur at various stages of the human life cycle. The results Dr. Erickson achieves sometimes seem to border on the miraculous, but they are brought about by a finely honed technique used by a wise, intuitive, highly trained psychiatrist-hypnotist whose work is recognized as a major contribution to the field.

    Lukas also offers a framework for thinking about that information and formulating a thorough assessment. This indispensable book helps therapeutic neophytes organize their approach to the initial phase of treatment and navigate even rough clinical waters with competence and assurance.

    Written by well-known and respected scholars, the book, in nine core chapters, provides an introduction to a set of disorders along with overviews of current research on etiology, treatment and prevention. Prior chapters give a context for the integration of Christianity and the scientific study of psychopathology, and articulate integrative themes discussed throughout the book, providing a foundation for the concluding vision for Christian health professionals and the church. This is a unique and valuable resource for Christians studying psychology and counseling, or providing counseling services, pastoral care, Christian healing ministries or spiritual direction. Though fully capable of standing on its own, it is also a useful companion volume to Modern Psychotherapies by Stanton L. Jones and Richard E. Butman.

    The book reflects an openness to new influences on dynamic technique, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy and positive psychology. It offers a fresh understanding of the most common problems for which patients seek help--depression, obsessionality, low self-esteem, fear of abandonment, panic, and trauma--and shows how to organize and deliver effective psychodynamic interventions. Extensive case material illustrates each stage of therapy, from engagement to termination. Special topics include ways to integrate individual treatment with psychopharmacology and with couple or family work. See also Practicing Psychodynamic Therapy: A Casebook, edited by Summers and Barber, which features 12 in-depth cases that explicitly illustrate the approach in this book.