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.

    Reasons to Stay Alive is Matt’s inspiring account of how, minute by minute and day by day, he overcame the disease with the help of reading, writing, and the love of his parents and his girlfriend (and now-wife), Andrea. And eventually, he learned to appreciate life all the more for it. Everyone’s lives are touched by mental illness: if we do not suffer from it ourselves, then we have a friend or loved one who does. Matt’s frankness about his experiences is both inspiring to those who feel daunted by depression and illuminating to those who are mystified by it. Above all, his humor and encouragement never let us lose sight of hope. Speaking as his present self to his former self in the depths of depression, Matt is adamant that the oldest cliché is the truest—there is light at the end of the tunnel. He teaches us to celebrate the small joys and moments of peace that life brings, and reminds us that there are always reasons to stay alive.

    That, combined with her keen writing abilities has made her Beliefnet blog, Beyond Blue, one of the most trafficked blogs on the site.BEYOND BLUE, the book, is part memoir/part self-help. It describes Borchard's experience of living with manic depression as well as providing cutting-edge research and information on dealing with mood disorders. By exposing her vulnerability, she endears herself immediately to the reader and then reduces even the most depressed to laughter as she provides a companion on the journey to recovery and the knowledge that the reader is not alone.Comprised of four sections and twenty-one chapters, BEYOND BLUE covers a wide range of topics from codependency to addiction, poor body image to postpartum depression, from alternative medicine to psychopharmacology, managing anxiety to applying lessons from therapy. Because of her laser wit and Erma Bombeck sense of humor, every chapter is entertaining as well as serious.

    With the intimacy of private journal-like entries and the language of a poet, she carries us from her childhood to her teen years when hallucinations began to hijack her mind and into adulthood where she began abusing alcohol to temper the punishing voices that only she could hear.This is no formulaic tale of tragedy and triumph: We feel Kristina's hope as she pursues an education and career and begins to build strong family connections, friendships and intimacy-and her devastation as the insistent voices convince her to throw it all away, destroying herself and alienating everyone around her. Woven through the pages of her life are stories of recovery from alcoholism and the search for her sexual identity in relationships with both women and men. Eventually, her journey takes her to a place of relative peace and stability where she finds the inner resources and support system to manage her chronic illnesses and live a fulfilling life.

    With welcome clarity and sanity, Mick Cooper efficiently lays out the concepts, techniques and directions adopted by several key figures in the broad field of existentially informed psychotherapy. In an excellent first chapter, Mick Cooper pointed out my `ontic′ from my `ontological′; and I could see, behind the long-words-with-dashes, the true resonance of these ideas with real human and therapeutic issues, dilemmas and goals′ - Clinical Psychology `This book proves to be a real treasure chest: what you always wanted to know about existential psychotherapy but failed to find anywhere else in such a comprehensive, clear and concise manner. In that sense, this publication provides a missing link. One merit of the book is its systematic structure. As extensive, and in part as heterogeneous as existential philosophy and therapy also maybe, Mick Cooper had nevertheless been able to build convincing clusters with, on the one hand, an enormous understanding of details and, on the other, a far-sightedness that, like a map, provides orientation in the diversity of existential therapy. I really appreciate this publication and can recommend it very strongly′ - Person-Centred and Experiential Psychotherapies `Existential Therapies will I suspect, suddenly make existentialism come alive. The author, Mick Cooper loves his subject, it fascinates and enthrals him, and we get to experience some of that, even though the book is academic. The connections and overlaps with person-centred psychology are there for us to be, but so are the differences′ - Person-Centred Practice `As an overview of a number of different existential therapies the book is extremely welcome and manages in a relatively short space to cover a wide arena. Overall I rate the book highly. To pull together a large and somewhat disparate literature, then make sense of it and finally retains the reader′s interest, is difficult′ - Existential Analysis `Mick Cooper has done an impressive job in writing a much needed, current and user friendly survey of the field of existential therapies. If I were to teach this course, I would use this book. I applaud Mick Cooper for having admirably achieved the aim he set out to achieve. All this makes Mick Cooper′s book a must-read for anyone wishing to explore the topic of existential therapy′ - Society for Laingian Studies Website `What makes this book unique is that all the different strands of Existential philosophy are always clearly linked to practice′ - Counselling and Psychotherapy Journal `This is a very fresh book, not treading well-worn paths and genuinely informing us about a small but important field. This is really an indispensable book for anyone who wants to understand existentialist approaches to therapy′ - Self and Society `This publication marks a milestone providing an excellent, clear and critical overview of the contrasting forms of the approach as it is currently practised′ - Emmy van Deurzen, New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, Schiller University, London `This is a book of superb thoroughness and scholarship - an unprecedented guide to existential therapy′s chief positions and controversies′ - Kirk J Schneider, President of the Existential-Humanistic Institute, USA `Combines scholarship with a writing style that makes difficult concepts accessible. This book should be required reading on any course where the existential tradition plays a part, and that includes person-centred courses and all sympathetic to the idea that psychotherapy is, in essence, a human encounter where warmth, understanding and a deep respect for the individual are key values′ - Tony Merry, University of East London What does it mean to practice in an existential way? What are the different existential approaches? What are their strengths and limitations? Existential Therapies addresses these key questions, and more, by providing students and practitioners with an invaluable introduction to the diverse and multifaceted world of existential therapeutic practices.Focusing on practical, face-to-face work with clients, the book:- introduces readers to six key existential therapies- discusses key figures and their contributions, including Irvin Yalom, Emmy van Deurzen, Ernesto Spinelli, Viktor Frankl and R D Laing- compares and contrasts the various approaches,highlighting areas of commonality and difference- outlines key debates within the existential therapy field- provides detailed suggestions for further readingExistential Therapies offers students and practitioners of all orientations much that they can incorporate into their own therapeutic work, and each approach is vividly brought to life through therapist-client dialogues and case studies. Written in an accessible, warm, and engaging manner, Existential Therapies is an essential introduction to this rich, vibrant and stimulating field.

    Beginning with Michael's first psychotic break—seeing God in his suburban bedroom window while high on LSD—Greg Bottoms recounts, in gripping, dramatic prose, the bizarre disappearances, suicide attempts, and the shocking crime that land Michael in the psychiatric wing of a maximum security prison. A work of nonfiction with the form and imagery of a novel, Angelhead enables the reader to witness not only the fragmenting of a mind, but of a family as well.

    She just knew she felt her best when she was empty, "like a straw", as she says "something you could blow through."For almost thirty years, Susan Burton has hidden her obsession with food and the secret life of compulsive eating and starving that dominated her adolescence. This is the relentlessly honest, fiercely intelligent story of living with both anorexia and binge-eating disorder, moving past her shame, and learning to tell her secret.When Burton was thirteen, her stable life in suburban Michigan was turned upside down by her parents' abrupt divorce, and she moved to Colorado with her mother and sister. She seized on this move west as an adventure and an opportunity to reinvent herself from middle-school nerd to popular teenage girl. But she hadn't escaped unscathed, and in the fallout from her parents' breakup, an inherited fixation on thinness went from "peculiarity to pathology." She entered into a painful cycle of anorexia and binge eating that formed a subterranean layer to her sunny life. She went from success to success--she went to Yale, scored a dream job at a magazine right out of college, and married her college boyfriend. But in college the compulsive eating got worse--she'd binge, swear it would be the last time, and then, hours later, do it again--and after she graduated she descended into anorexia, her attempt to "quit food."Binge eating is more prevalent than anorexia or bulimia, but there is less research and little storytelling to help us understand it. In tart, soulful prose Susan Burton strikes a blow for the importance of this kind of story; brings to life an indelible cast of characters; and tells an exhilarating story of longing, compulsion and hard-earned self-revelation.

    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.

    From childhood to diagnosis to mental hospitals, everything is included, including the ugly parts of being raised in a time period that did not understand mental illness and instead applied "tough love" to children who acted abnormally.

    It never apologises. Sometimes it is a shadow, ever present, without regard for the sun. Sometimes it is a well of dark water with no bottom, or a levitation device to the stars.Madness, a memoir is an insight into what it's like to live with psychosis over a period of ten years, in which bouts of acute illness are interspersed with periods of sanity. The world is beautiful and terrifying and sometimes magical. The sanctity of life is at times precious and at times precarious and always fragile. It's a story of learning to manage illness with courage and creativity, of achieving balance and living well. It is for everyone now living within the world of madness, for everyone touched by this world, and for everyone seeking to further his or her understanding of it, whether you think of madness as a biological illness of the brain or an understandable part of the continuum of the human condition.

    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.

    Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: at the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened?In a swift and breathtaking narrative, Cahalan tells the astonishing true story of her descent into madness, her family’s inspiring faith in her, and the lifesaving diagnosis that nearly didn’t happen.

    More than five million copies later, Dr. Eric Berne’s classic is as astonishing–and revealing–as it was on the day it was first published. This anniversary edition features a new introduction by Dr. James R. Allen, president of the International Transactional Analysis Association, and Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant Life magazine review from 1965.We play games all the time–sexual games, marital games, power games with our bosses, and competitive games with our friends. Detailing status contests like “Martini” (I know a better way), to lethal couples combat like “If It Weren’t For You” and “Uproar,” to flirtation favorites like “The Stocking Game” and “Let’s You and Him Fight,” Dr. Berne exposes the secret ploys and unconscious maneuvers that rule our intimate lives.Explosive when it first appeared, Games People Play is now widely recognized as the most original and influential popular psychology book of our time. It’s as powerful and eye-opening as ever.

    In this groundbreaking book, Dr Harville Hendrix shares with you what he has learned about the psychology of love during more than thirty years of working as a therapist and helps you transform your relationship into a lasting source of love and companionship. For this edition of his classic book, Dr Hendrix and his wife, Helen LaKelly Hunt, have added a new introduction describing the powerful influence this book has had on so many people over the years. With its step-by-step programme, GETTING THE LOVE YOU WANT will help you create a loving, supportive and revitalized partnership.

    Learn how to handle emotions properly.