Handbook Of Experiential Psychotherapy

Integrating the work of leading therapists, the book covers both conceptual foundations and current treatment applications. The volume delineates a variety of experiential methods, and describes newly developed models of experiential diagnosis and case formulation.

Integrating the work of leading client-centered, gestalt, interpersonal, focusing, and process-oriented therapists, Handbook of Experiential Psychotherapy covers both conceptual foundations and current treatment applications. Contributors present well-articulated approaches to treating depression, PTSD, anxiety, and other problems, emphasizing the need to work with the client's own moment-by-moment experience of disturbing states and processes. The volume delineates a variety of experiential methods--from working with clients to symbolize bodily felt sense, evoke memories, and express intense feelings, to helping them reflect on their experience, maintain gains from session to session, and create new meanings for themselves. The role of the therapist's relational stance in promoting particular emotional processes is also examined, and newly developed models of experiential diagnosis and case formulation are described. This text will be of interest to practitioners and students of psychotherapy in a range of orientations.

This book provides both experienced and novice clinicians with a thorough guide to this increasingly popular form of therapy. This timely resource outlines the theoretical underpinnings of experiential psychotherapy, explores how the experiential model relates to other forms of therapy, and describes, in detail, how to practice this unique form of therapy. Using vivid case examples, it offers therapists a step-by-step guide to helping clients experience, understand, and re-direct their feelings.

Examining the actual moment-to-moment process of therapy, this volume provides specific ways for therapists to engender effective movement, particularly in those difficult times when nothing seems to be happening. The book concentrates on the ongoing client therapist relationship and ways in which the therapist's responses can stimulate and enable a client's capacity for direct experiencing and "focusing." Throughout, the client therapist relationship is emphasized, both as a constant factor and in terms of how the quality of the relationship is manifested at specific times. The author also shows how certain relational responses can turn some difficulties into moments of relational therapy.

This voluminous book of 47 chapters offers a good cross section of what is burgeoing in the field of client-centered and experiential psychotherapy on the threshold of the nineties. it does not represent a single vision but gives the floor to the various suborientations: classics Rogerians; client-centered therapists who favor some form of integration or even eclecticism; experiential psychotherapists for whom Gendlin's focusing approach is a precious way of working; client-centered therapists who look at the therapy process in terms of information-processing; existentially oriented therapists... Remarkable is that - for the first time in the history of client-centered/experiential psychotherapy - the European voice rings through forcefully: more than half of the contributions were written by authors from Western Europe.Several chapters contain reflections on the evolution--past, present, and future--of client-centered/experiential psychotherapy. The intensive research into the process, which had a central place in the initial phase of client-centered therapy, is given here ample attention, with several creative studies and proposals for renewal. In numerous contributions efforts are made to build and further develop a theroy of psychopathology, the client's process, the basic attitudes and task-oriented interventions of the therapist. The chapters dealing with clinical practice typically aim at the description of therapy with specific client populations and paricularly severely disturbed clients. And finally a few fields are introduced which are new or barely explored within the client-centered/experiential approach: working with dreams, health psychology, couple and family therapy.

The narrative turn in psychotherapy entails practitioners seeing their work as appreciating client stories and helping clients re-author their life stories. Twenty-one chapters, presented by Angus (York U., UK) and McLeod (U. of Abertay Dundee, UK) bring together different strands of thinking ab

This Handbook covers all the many aspects of cognitive therapy both in its practical application in a clinical setting and in its theoretical aspects. Since the first applications of cognitive therapy over twenty years ago, the field has expanded enormously. This book provides a welcome and readable overview of these advances.