The Good Enough Therapist


Book Description

The Good Enough Therapist is a guidebook—not an instruction manual—written for beginning, intermediate, and experienced clinicians. It encourages readers to explore, accept, and embrace their flaws and failings in a way that promotes effective treatment as well as personal growth. It focuses both on craft and process—craft related to the tools, the strategies, and the tactics of treatment, and process related to the session-by-session struggle to implement these tools in ways that speak to and illuminate the experience of living and struggling as a human being. It does not endeavor to transmit a method, but a sensibility, a way of being with patients that results in a deeper recognition of the therapist’s, and the patient’s, vulnerability, resilience, imagination, and integrity.




Making of a Therapist


Book Description

Lessons from the personal experience and reflections of a therapist. The difficulty and cost of training psychotherapists properly is well known. It is far easier to provide a series of classes while ignoring the more challenging personal components of training. Despite the fact that the therapist's self-insight, emotional maturity, and calm centeredness are critical for successful psychotherapy, rote knowledge and technical skills are the focus of most training programs. As a result, the therapist's personal growth is either marginalized or ignored. The Making of a Therapist counters this trend by offering graduate students and beginning therapists a personal account of this important inner journey. Cozolino provides a unique look inside the mind and heart of an experienced therapist. Readers will find an exciting and privileged window into the experience of the therapist who, like themselves, is just starting out. In addition, The Making of a Therapist contains the practical advice, common-sense wisdom, and self-disclosure that practicing professionals have found to be the most helpful during their own training.The first part of the book, 'Getting Through Your First Sessions,' takes readers through the often-perilous days and weeks of conducting initial sessions with real clients. Cozolino addresses such basic concerns as: Do I need to be completely healthy myself before I can help others? What do I do if someone comes to me with an issue or problem I can't handle? What should I do if I have trouble listening to my clients? What if a client scares me?The second section of the book, 'Getting to Know Your Clients,' delves into the routine of therapy and the subsequent stages in which you continue to work with clients and help them. In this context, Cozolino presents the notion of the 'good enough' therapist, one who can surrender to his or her own imperfections while still guiding the therapeutic relationship to a positive outcome. The final section, 'Getting to Know Yourself,' goes to the core of the therapist's relation to him- or herself, addressing such issues as: How to turn your weaknesses into strengths, and how to deal with the complicated issues of pathological caretaking, countertransference, and self-care.Both an excellent introduction to the field as well as a valuable refresher for the experienced clinician, The Making of a Therapist offers readers the tools and insight that make the journey of becoming a therapist a rich and rewarding experience.




Good Enough Parent


Book Description

In this book, the preeminent child psychologist of our time gives us the results of his lifelong effort to determine what is most crucial in successful child-rearing. His purpose is not to give parents preset rules for raising their children, but rather to show them how to develop their own insights so that they will understand their own and their children's behavior in different situations and how to cope with it. Above all, he warns, parents must not indulge their impulse to try to create the child they would like to have, but should instead help each child fully develop into the person he or she would like to be.




A Good Enough Mother


Book Description

A literary psychological suspense thriller for fans of Apple Tree Yard, this novel promises to be as talked about as Lullaby.




Will I Ever be Good Enough?


Book Description

The first book specifically for daughters suffering from the emotional abuse of selfish, self-involved mothers,Will I Ever Be Good Enough?provides the expert assistance you need in order to overcome this debilitating history and reclaim your life for yourself. Drawing on over two decades of experience as a therapist specializing in women's psychology and health, psychotherapist Dr. Karyl McBride helpsyou recognize the widespread effects of this maternal emotional abuse and guides you as you create an individualized program for self-protection, resolution, and complete recovery.An estimated 1.5 million American women have narcissistic personality disorder, which makes them so insecure and overbearing, insensitive and domineering that they can psychologically damage their daughters for life. Daughters of narcissistic mothers learn that maternal love is not unconditional, and that it is given only when they behave in accordance with their mothers' often unreasonable expectations and whims. As adults, these daughters consequently have difficulty overcoming their insecurities and feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, sadness, and emotional emptiness. They may also have a terrible fear of abandonment that leads them to form unhealthy love relationships, as well as a tendency to perfectionism and unrelenting self-criticism, or to self-sabotage and frustration.Herself the recovering daughter of a narcissistic mother, Dr. McBride includes her personal struggle, which adds a profound level of authority to her work, along with the perspectives of the hundreds of suffering daughters she's interviewed over the years. Their stories of how maternal abuse has manifested in their lives -- as well as how they have successfully overcome its effects -- show you that you're not alone and that you can take back your life and have the controlyouwant.Dr. McBride's step-by-step program will enable you to:(1) Recognize your own experience with maternal narcissism and its effects on all aspects of your life (2) Discover how you have internalized verbal and nonverbal messages from your mother and how these have translated into a strong desire to overachieve or a tendency to self-sabotage (3) Construct a step-by-step program to reclaim your life and enhance your sense of self, a process that includes creating a psychological separation from your mother and breaking the legacy of abuse. You will also learn how not to repeat your mother's mistakes with your own daughter.Warm and sympathetic, filled with the examples of women who have established healthy boundaries with their hurtful mothers,Will I Ever Be Good Enough?encourages and inspires you as it aids your recovery.




The Not Good Enough Mother


Book Description

A psychologist who evaluates the fitness of parents when their children have been removed from their custody finds herself reassessing her own mothering when her son falls victim to the opioid crisis. Psychologist and expert witness Dr. Sharon Lamb evaluates parents, particularly in high-stakes cases concerning the termination of parental rights. The conclusions she reaches can mean that some children are returned home from foster homes. Others are freed for adoption. Well-trained, Lamb generally can decide what’s in the best interests of the child. But when her son’s struggle with opioid addiction comes to light, she starts to doubt her right to make judgments about other mothers. As an expert, a professor, and a mother, Lamb gives voice to the near impossible standards demanded by a society prone to blame mothers when anything befalls their children. She describes vividly the plight of individual parents, mothers in particular, struggling with addiction and mental illness and trying to make stable homes for their kids amid the economic and emotional turmoil of their lives—all in the context of the opioid epidemic that has ravaged her home state of Vermont. In her office, during visits with their children, and in the family court, the parents we meet wait anxiously for Lamb’s verdict: Have they turned their lives around under child welfare’s watchful eye? Do they understand their children’s needs? In short, are they good enough? But what is good enough? Lamb turns that question on herself in the midst of her gradual realization of her son’s opioid addiction. Amazed at her own denial, feeling powerless to help him, Lamb confronts the heartache she can bring into the lives of others and her power to tear families apart.




Winnicott and 'Good Enough' Couple Therapy


Book Description

Claire Rabin innovatively applies the Winnicottian theory of the ‘good enough mother’ to couple therapy, redirecting attention to the therapeutic relationship and the therapist’s self-awareness regardless of the methods used. Using this lens, even the therapist’s mistakes become an opportunity for repairing both the therapeutic relationship and the partners’ own personal maturity. The intensity and pressure of couple therapy can make each case a test of the therapist’s competence. The need for neutrality constitutes on-going pressure on the therapist and the proliferation of therapeutic methods can cause confusion about which might be most useful in each situation. Applying theory effectively is easier said than done within the context of the powerful emotions unleashed in sessions, which can result in a catastrophic atmosphere. These factors can make it hard for therapists to utilise their own skills and knowledge within sessions of couple therapy. The book explores how therapists and couples can unintentionally further ‘false selves’ without realising how the very tools of change may counter authenticity. Featuring interviews with an international range of couple therapists and case studies from the author’s own experiences, the key aspects of the ‘good enough’ concept are elaborated. Rabin shows how these ideas can strengthen therapists’ sense of security and safety in using their lived experience and intuition. Winnicott and Good Enough Couple Therapy is the ideal book for clinicians seeking an overarching framework for working with couples or families, as well as those concerned with the importance of the client-helper relationship.




The Good Enough Studio


Book Description

Organize your space in the best way to achieve therapeutic significance. "The good enough studio"-derived from D.W. Winnicott's notion of the good enough mother-serves as a safe space where clients, students, and artists find modes of expression and being that unveil their own authenticity and connection to the archaic creativity of humanity. As a global art therapist and educator, Nona Orbach facilitates this profound alchemy of self-transformation by attending to the nonverbal, intuitive choreography that each individual uses in order to create. In Orbach's groundbreaking therapeutic model, the consciously organized studio is a place of acceptance where actions, materials, and the space itself "speak" and guide discovery.In this book readers will learn how to: Organize an open-studio setting Create an environment of acceptance and choice that facilitates transformation Understand action-material relationships as emotional and pedagogical communication Discern and mirror each individual's creative blueprint The insights of The Good Enough Studio will cultivate the work of those interested in the phenomenology of materials: artists, educators, therapists, and parents, as well as the nonprofessional and curious reader. Through guidance and case studies, Orbach shows how the creator's poetic truth can lead to integration and well-being. Nona Orbach is a multidisciplinary artist, therapist, blogger, lecturer, and facilitator of workshops for art therapists in Israel and around the world. Her artwork engages with archeological and historical contexts and is compiled under the title Tel-Nona. As an excavator in the Tel (mound) and preserver of the artifacts in a blog/virtual library, Nona metaphorically revives the great Alexandrian library that burnt down with its million scrolls in the first century BCE. Tel-Nona preserves its spirit of sharing knowledge in an international humanistic project. She also leads a social movement to change the Israeli education system through the learning and understanding afforded by the studio and the language of materials. Her online learning community includes over 7,000 participants from the fields of education and therapy. She has created an English blog and a study group with the title of this book to circulate her ideas internationally. Her previous book, The Spirit of Matter, co-authored with Lilach Gelkin, has been an immensely useful tool for therapists and educators for many years. Published in Israel in 1977, the PDF English version of the book is sold on her website.




Inside Therapy


Book Description

A scintillating collection of writings on the mysterious, controversial, and intimate process of psychotherapy. Everyone with an interest in the art and science of psychotherapy - practitioners, patients, students, and avid readers of Freud, Jung, et al-will find this lively anthology an engrossing read. A varied mix of essays, book chapters, case histories, and compelling fiction written by veterans of both sides of "the couch" and representing many schools of thought, Inside Therapy includes: Janet Malcolm's The Impossible Profession * Mark Epstein's Thoughts Without a Thinker * Eric Fromm's The Art of Listening * A. M. Homes's In a Country of Mothers * Theodore Reik's The Third Ear * and others. The foreword by Irvin D. Yalom, author of Love's Executioner, offers additional wisdom, humor, and perspective. At a time when managed care threatens the psychoanalytic tradition, this dramatic, inspiring collection reminds us of the healing power of insight and the unique gifts of the patient-therapist relationship.




Marry Him


Book Description

An eye-opening, funny, painful, and always truthful in-depth examination of modern relationships, and a wake-up call for single women about getting real about Mr. Right, from the New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. You have a fulfilling job, great friends, and the perfect apartment. So what if you haven’t found “The One” just yet. He’ll come along someday, right? But what if he doesn’t? Or what if Mr. Right had been, well, Mr. Right in Front of You—but you passed him by? Nearing forty and still single, journalist Lori Gottlieb started to wonder: What makes for lasting romantic fulfillment, and are we looking for those qualities when we’re dating? Are we too picky about trivial things that don’t matter, and not picky enough about the often overlooked things that do? In Marry Him, Gottlieb explores an all-too-common dilemma—how to reconcile the desire for a happy marriage with a list of must-haves and deal-breakers so long and complicated that many great guys get misguidedly eliminated. On a quest to find the answer, Gottlieb sets out on her own journey in search of love, discovering wisdom and surprising insights from sociologists and neurobiologists, marital researchers and behavioral economists—as well as single and married men and women of all generations.