Christopher Germer has learned a paradoxical lesson: We all want to avoid pain, but letting it in--and responding compassionately to our own imperfections, without judgment or self-blame--are essential steps on the path to healing. This wise and eloquent book illuminates the power of self-compassion and offers creative, scientifically grounded strategies for putting it into action. You’ll master practical techniques for living more fully in the present moment -- especially when hard-to-bear emotions arise -- and for being kind to yourself when you need it the most. Free audio downloads of the meditation exercises are available at the author's website: www.mindfulselfcompassion.org. Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) Self-Help Book of Merit

    The first book for the millions of daughters suffering from the emotional abuse of selfish, self-involved mothers, Will I Ever Be Good Enough? provides the expert advice readers need to overcome debilitating histories and reclaim their lives.

    While modern social life can make even the best of us feel gawky, for roughly one in five of us, navigating its challenges is consistently overwhelming—an ongoing maze without an exit. Often unable to grasp social cues or master the skills and grace necessary for smooth interaction, we feel out of sync with those around us. Though individuals may recognize their awkward disposition, they rarely understand why they are like this—which makes it hard for them to know how to adjust their behavior.Psychologist and interpersonal relationship expert Ty Tashiro knows what it’s like to be awkward. Growing up, he could do math in his head and memorize the earned run averages of every National League starting pitcher. But he couldn’t pour liquids without spilling and habitually forgot to bring his glove to Little League games. In Awkward, he unpacks decades of research into human intelligence, neuroscience, personality, and sociology to help us better understand this widely shared trait. He explores its nature vs. nurture origins, considers how the awkward view the world, and delivers a welcome counterintuitive message: the same characteristics that make people socially clumsy can be harnessed to produce remarkable achievements.Interweaving the latest research with personal tales and real world examples, Awkward offers reassurance and provides valuable insights into how we can embrace our personal quirks and unique talents to harness our awesome potential—and more comfortably navigate our complex world.

    . . no better guide for learning about and clinically assessing the phenomenology of suicidal states. Penned with a compelling elegance and charm, The Practical Art of Suicide Assessment is brimming with clinical wisdom, enlightening case illustrations, and a vibrant sense of compassion."-David A. Jobes, PhD, past president, American Association of Suicidology "If I were asked to recommend only one book to equip clinicians to conduct the best possible suicide risk assessments, The Practical Art of Suicide Assessment would be it."-Thomas E. Ellis, PsyD, ABPP, past director, Clinical Division of the American Association of Suicidology "A concise, carefully conceptualized, well-written book . . . highly recommended for all psychiatric residents and all other mental health students."-Journal of Clinical Psychiatry "This outstanding book is informative, interesting, and clinically useful."-American Journal of Psychiatry The Practical Art of Suicide Assessment covers all the critical elements of suicide assessment-from risk factor analysis to evaluating clients with borderline personality disorders or psychotic process. This highly acclaimed text provides mental health professionals with the tools they need to assess a client's suicide risk and assign appropriate levels of care using the highly acclaimed interview strategy for eliciting suicidal ideation-the Chronological Assessment of Suicide Events (the CASE Approach). Now available in paperback, the leading book on suicide assessment also contains three important new appendices: * How to Document a Suicide Assessment * Safety Contracting Revisited: Pros, Cons, and Documentation * A Quick Guide to Suicide Prevention Web Sites

    Perry and award-winning science journalist Maia Szalavitz interweave research and stories from Perry's practice with cutting-edge scientific studies and historical examples to explain how empathy develops, why it is essential for our development into healthy adults, and how it is threatened in the modern world.Perry and Szalavitz show that compassion underlies the qualities that make society work—trust, altruism, collaboration, love, charity—and how difficulties related to empathy are key factors in social problems such as war, crime, racism, and mental illness. Even physical health, from infectious diseases to heart attacks, is deeply affected by our human connections to one another.As Born for Love reveals, recent changes in technology, child-rearing practices, education, and lifestyles are starting to rob children of necessary human contact and deep relationships—the essential foundation for empathy and a caring, healthy society. Sounding an important warning bell, Born for Love offers practical ideas for combating the negative influences of modern life and fostering positive social change to benefit us all.

    - Neural rewiring to shift neural pathways of restriction, exercise compulsions, and anorexia-generated thoughts and behaviours in the brain. Using experience from her own recovery, and accounts from adults whom she has worked with as a recovery coach, Tabitha Farrar takes you through the process of building your own, personalised, recovery. As well as non-traditional ideas and concepts, this book delivers a "Toolkit" to help with the neural rewiring process, and action-based ideas to help you eat without restriction.

    It views the human animal as a unique being, endowed with an instinctual capacity. It asks and answers an intriguing question: why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatized? By understanding the dynamics that make wild animals virtually immune to traumatic symptoms, the mystery of human trauma is revealed.Waking the Tiger normalizes the symptoms of trauma and the steps needed to heal them. People are often traumatized by seemingly ordinary experiences. The reader is taken on a guided tour of the subtle, yet powerful impulses that govern our responses to overwhelming life events. To do this, it employs a series of exercises that help us focus on bodily sensations. Through heightened awareness of these sensations trauma can be healed.

    More than a giant collection of synonyms, the book includes thousands of useful words, phrases, clinical tips, and interview questions to help practitioners conduct thorough assessments, accurately describe nearly any clinical situation, and shape raw data into effective reports. Updated for compliance with HIPAA privacy regulations, the sixth edition features easier-to-navigate, reorganized contents; numerous additional terms; matched listings for DSM-IV-TR and ICD-9 diagnostic criteria; many helpful website addresses; and much more.

    We can feel authenticity in ourselves and in others. However, this innate wisdom is obscured by our conditioning-the core limiting beliefs, reactive feelings, and somatic contractions that fuel our sense of struggle and veil who we really are. In Touch is a groundbreaking, experiential guide to the felt-sense of our "inner knowing"-the deep intelligence available through our bodies. Each chapter presents moving stories, helpful insights from spirituality, psychology, and science, and simple yet potent experiments for integrating the gifts of inner knowing into every aspect of daily life. Join pioneering psychotherapist and teacher Dr. John J. Prendergast to explore: The phenomenon of "attunement"-how we accurately sense and resonate with ourselves and others-including an introduction to attachment theory, mirror neurons, and interoception (the ability to sense into the interior of your body) Felt-sensing and the subtle body-our ability to have a whole-body sense of reality and how the seven major energy centers relate to common psychospiritual issues "Shadows as portals"-how our dark and painful feelings and sensations can point us toward an essential radiance within The art of identifying and undoing our core limiting beliefs The four somatic qualities of inner knowing-relaxed groundedness, inner alignment, open-heartedness, and spaciousness-and how these subtle signals, once recognized, can guide our choices and help us to navigate life's challenges The fruits of inner knowing-the realization of who we are in our depths and the great intimacy with life we can all enjoy "As we tune into our deepest nature, our body relaxes, grounds, lines up, opens up, and lights up," writes Prendergast. "So far this extraordinarily useful subtle feedback has been largely overlooked; almost nothing has been written about it. We need to both sense and decode these signals if we are to benefit from them. These bodily markers are here to be seen and used as guides to enable us to more gracefully navigate life and to awaken. They are part of our birthright, available to anyone." Here is his invitation to start listening in a profound new way, deeply in touch with reality and our shared journey of awakening.

    In the intervening years, Herman’s volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims. In a new afterword, Herman chronicles the incredible response the book has elicited and explains how the issues surrounding the topic have shifted within the clinical community and the culture at large. Trauma and Recovery brings a new level of understanding to a set of problems usually considered individually. Herman draws on her own cutting-edge research in domestic violence as well as on the vast literature of combat veterans and victims of political terror, to show the parallels between private terrors such as rape and public traumas such as terrorism. The book puts individual experience in a broader political frame, arguing that psychological trauma can be understood only in a social context. Meticulously documented and frequently using the victims’ own words as well as those from classic literary works and prison diaries, Trauma and Recovery is a powerful work that will continue to profoundly impact our thinking.

    A mother, wife, and working professional, Reiland was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder at the age of 29—a diagnosis that finally explained her explosive anger, manipulative behaviors, and self-destructive episodes including bouts of anorexia, substance abuse, and promiscuity. A truly riveting read with a hopeful message.

      Sara suffered a debilitating fear of asserting herself. Spencer experienced crippling social anxiety. Bonnie was shut down, disconnected from her feelings. These patients all came to psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel seeking treatment for depression, but in fact none of them were chemically depressed. Rather, Jacobs Hendel found that they’d all experienced traumas in their youth that caused them to put up emotional defenses that masqueraded as symptoms of depression. Jacobs Hendel led these patients and others toward lives newly capable of joy and fulfillment through an empathic and effective therapeutic approach that draws on the latest science about the healing power of our emotions.   Whereas conventional therapy encourages patients to talk through past events that may trigger anxiety and depression, accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), the method practiced by Jacobs Hendel and pioneered by Diana Fosha, PhD, teaches us to identify the defenses and inhibitory emotions (shame, guilt, and anxiety) that block core emotions (anger, sadness, fear, disgust, joy, excitement, and sexual excitement). Fully experiencing core emotions allows us to enter an openhearted state where we are calm, curious, connected, compassionate, confident, courageous, and clear.   In It’s Not Always Depression, Jacobs Hendel shares a unique and pragmatic tool called the Change Triangle—a guide to carry you from a place of disconnection back to your true self. In these pages, she teaches lay readers and helping professionals alike   • why all emotions—even the most painful—have value. • how to identify emotions and the defenses we put up against them. • how to get to the root of anxiety—the most common mental illness of our time. • how to have compassion for the child you were and the adult you are.   Jacobs Hendel provides navigational tools, body and thought exercises, candid personal anecdotes, and profound insights gleaned from her patients’ remarkable breakthroughs. She shows us how to work the Change Triangle in our everyday lives and chart a deeply personal, powerful, and hopeful course to psychological well-being and emotional engagement.

    Psych 101 cuts out the boring details and statistics, and instead, gives you a lesson in psychology that keeps you engaged - and your synapses firing.From personality quizzes and the Rorschach Blot Test to B.F. Skinner and the stages of development, this primer for human behavior is packed with hundreds of entertaining psychology basics and quizzes you can't get anywhere else.So whether you're looking to unravel the intricacies of the mind, or just want to find out what makes your friends tick, Psych 101 has all the answers - even the ones you didn't know you were looking for.

    James Morrison details effective methods for posing clinical questions; what the clinician should ask to obtain complete, accurate information; and how to select the best strategy to meet any clinical situation. Throughout, the author interweaves research on what works in mental health interviewing along with fresh insights on how to build rapport and enhance patient motivation.

    are an unavoidable part of everyday life, and they sometimes have lessons to teach us--about our goals and values, about the person we expect ourselves to be. In contrast to the prevailing cultural view of shame as a uniformly toxic influence, Shame is a book that approaches the subject of shame as an entire family of emotions which share a "painful awareness of self."Challenging widely-accepted views within the self-esteem movement, author Joseph Burgo argues that self-esteem does NOT thrive in the soil of non-stop praise and encouragement, but rather depends upon setting and meeting goals, living up to the expectations we hold for ourselves, and finally sharing our joy in achievement with the people who matter most to us. Along the way, listening to and learning from our encounters with shame will go further than affirmations and positive self-talk in helping us to build authentic self-esteem.Richly illustrated with clinical stories from Burgo's 35 years in private practice, Shame also describes the myriad ways that unacknowledged shame often hides behind a broad spectrum of mental disorders including social anxiety, narcissism, addiction, and masochism.