Family Patterns

Revised and updated from the original, this honest and forthwright look at families of all shapes and sizes will help you down the path of healing (whether you know you need it or whether yo're just not sure). Unlocking Your Family Patterns combines decades worth of counseling wisdom and pastoral care insights into this one practical resource. Your past may hurt, and your family's patterns may have left emotional scars, but your future has not been laid in stone yet. There is hope for healing, there are lessons to learn, and there are paths toward family health. Using clinical, biblical and practical examples to help you uncover the patterns your family has lived in, this book might lead you toward the family u-turn you've been looking for.

Considers ways in which the traditions and values of Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans affect the behavior of emotionally disturbed adolescent boys from the two ethnic groups.

This text presents a picture of contemporary family patterns that might produce problems of social and psychopathologic deviance in adolescents. It is the outcome of the teamwork of 32 researchers and therapists, members of the Centre of Strategic Therapy in Arezzo. This work was put together over a period of five years, where the research-intervention group met on a monthly basis under the author's personal supervision, to put together the data gathered from thousands of cases of disturbed adolescents with the aim of better the application of specific strategic interventions in parent-child problematics. The purpose of this book is to point out clearly how some problems of contemporary adolescents can be triggered off and how they can be prevented or solved. It is meant to be a training text for specialists but it is also reader-friendly and can be appreciated both by parents and children so that both can come to avoid the traps hidden in relationships and their dysfunctional aspects. In other words, the aim is to 'correct' "the best intentions that produce the worst effects".

Christians don’t check their dysfunctional habits at the church door. Coiffed and buttoned-down on the outside, inside we still bring our compulsions and addictions, our urges to criticize, compare, and deny. Try as we might to cover up, we often behave in church just like we do at home. It’s time to stop pretending. No church is perfect, just as no family is perfect. This book calls us to accept the church’s humanness – the fact that we tend to make messes of our lives – as it explores eight common dysfunctions. But it also calls us to reaffirm that each local congregation in the body of Christ ought to be a place where we can come and feel loved, helped, forgiven – and given hope to go out and do better next time. After all, God created the church to be the best family in the whole world. Small group discussion questions and helpful excerpts from other books are included with each chapter.

Picking up where John Bradshaw left off, this active recovery workbook for exploring the roots of relationship styles reveals how to break free from one's past and create a life of one's own. Through a proven writing program, readers discover the complete story of their family, their parents, and themselves.