Healing In The Relational Paradigm

Already practiced by thousands of therapists around the world, Imago Relationship Therapy (IRT) has aroused the interest of a widening international psychotherapy community. Now, for the first time, Healing in the Relational Paradigm: The Imago Relationship Therapy Casebook brings you directly into the therapists office to see firsthand how the tenets of IRT can translate into powerful and enduring skills for couple clients. Providing access to Imago work with a broad range of couple types, the book reveals ways in which activities, such as Couples Dialogue and the Container Exercise, help couples expand and strengthen their relational vocabulary. The first chapter, which proposes a new way of conceptualizing child development and its impact on the forming and maintaining of intimate relationships, lays the foundation for the chapters to follow. Subsequent topics - each handled by a front lines Imago therapist - reflect a true picture of the spectrum of issues and identities that are present in therapy. The contents cover attachment, exploratory, identity and competence wounded couples. Other contributions describe work with African-American, Hispanic, and gay and lesbian couples, while the impact of HIV/AIDS and Attention Deficit Disorder is explored in a third section. Finally, contributors offer a clear relational lens through which to view the core couple issues of addiction, sexuality, infidelity and spirituality. Healing in the Relational Paradigm demonstrates Imagois flexibility and promise across populations and in the hands of very different practitioners. The book shows the Imago approach to be more than just another technique: it is a profound shift in perspective, reinforced by a network of positive assumptions and communication exercises that together create an environment for healthy change. This volume would be suitable for marriage and family therapists.

Couples counseling is distinct from individual and family therapy and, while ideas from these other formats may be overlapping, applying theoretical concepts to couples has distinctive challenges. Behavioral, Humanistic-Existential, and Psychodynamic Approaches to Couples Counseling is unique in that it addresses how to conceptualize various theories around a single case. By discussing only one case, the reader is more readily able to compare and contrast the theoretical ideas of each theory, as well as the pragmatics of techniques. Five theories are discussed around four consistent parts: history, theory of problem formation, theory of problem resolution, and case transcript.

A fresh look at the importance of dissociation in understanding trauma. A new model of therapeutic action, one that heals trauma and dissociation, is overtaking the mental health field. It is not just trauma, but the dissociation of the self, that causes emotional pain and difficulties in functioning. This book discusses how people are universally subject to trauma, what trauma is, and how to understand and work with normative as well as extreme dissociation. In this new model, the client and the practitioner are both traumatized and flawed human beings who affect each other in the mutual process that promotes the healing of the client—psychotherapy. Elizabeth Howell explains the dissociative, relational, and attachment reasons that people blame and punish themselves. She covers the difference between repression and dissociation, and how Freud’s exclusive focus on repression and the one-person fantasy Oedipal model impeded recognition of the serious consequences of external trauma, including child abuse. The book synthesizes trauma/dissociation perspectives and addresses new structural models.

This volume presents 18 different treatment modalities for the same case, demonstrating a rich variety of interventions available for treating relationship problems. Treatment approaches are divided into systems, psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, integrative therapies, and postmodern theories. For students who want to prepare for licensure or professional counselors and therapists who want to improve their practice with couples, this newly available and affordable paperback will be an essential resource.

Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing is both a personal analytic credo and a multidimensional approach to thinking about clinical interaction. The book’s central theme is that of analytic needed relationships—the science and art of co-creating unique, evolving relational experiences fitted to each patient’s implicit therapeutic aims and needs. Steven Stern argues that, while we need psychoanalytic theories to "grow the receptors and processors" necessary to sense, understand, and connect with our patients, these often tend to frame the therapist’s participation in terms of theoretical and technical categories rather than offering a more holistic view of the relationship in all of its human complexity. Stern believes that a new set of higher order constructs is needed to counteract this tendency. In addition to his own concept of needed relationships, he invokes principles from the work of renowned developmental researcher and theorist, Louis Sander: especially his concept of relational fittedness. Stern draws on the work of Freud, Bion, Winnicott, Kohut, and a broad spectrum of contemporary psychoanalytic authors, in fleshing out the therapeutic implications of Sander’s (and Stern’s own) vision. The result is a rich, humane, and accessible narrative. Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing offers diverse clinical examples in which you will find Stern engaging with each of his patients in idiomatic, spontaneous ways as he attempts to contour interventions to the evolving analytic situation. This case material will inspire therapist-readers to feel freer to find their own creative voices and idioms of participation, as they seek to meet each patient within the psychoanalytic space. The book is intended for psychoanalysts and psychodynamic therapists at all levels of experience, including those in training.

Over the past decade, scholars, practitioners, and leading diplomats have forcefully argued for the need to move beyond one-way, mass-media-driven campaigns and develop more relational strategies. In the coming years, as the range of public diplomacy actors grows, the issues become more complexly intertwined, and the use of social media proliferates, the focus on relations will intensify along with the demands for more sophisticated strategies. These changes in the international arena call for a connective mindshift: a shift from information control and dominance to skilled relationship management. Leading international scholars and practitioners embark on a forward-looking exploration of creative conceptual frameworks, training methods, and case studies that advance relational, networking, and collaborative strategies in public diplomacy. Light on academic jargon and rich in analysis, this volume argues that while relationships have always been pivotal to the practice of public diplomacy, the relational dynamics are changing. Rather than focus on specific definitions, the contributors focus on the dynamic interplay of influence in the public diplomacy environment. That environment includes state and non-state actors, public and private partners, competitors and collaborators, new and old media, and is conditioned by power, ethics, and cultures. This book is an essential resource to students and practitioners interested on how to build relationships and transform them into more elaborate network structures through public communication. It will challenge you to push the boundaries of what you think are the mechanisms, benefits, and potential issues raised by a relational approach to public diplomacy

For more than a decade, Short-Term Couples Therapy: The Imago Model in Action has been used regularly by therapists interested in this effective and now well-known model of working with couples. Building on the precepts of the Imago Relationship Therapy Model, as introduced in the pioneering work of Dr. Harville Hendrix, the book has made available to the professional therapist the technique and rationale of this evolutionary approach to working with couples in a brief therapy context. Now thoroughly revised and updated, Short-Term Couples Therapy offers a user-friendly, six-session format, laid out clearly and cogently, whose potential for application is immediately apparent. The essence of the Imago Model is distilled into a practical, workable methodology. The text presents a unique reality-based approach to facilitate effective couple interaction, updates the processes and theory that have proven so effective in the short-term approach to couples therapy, and incorporates the major advances in the practice of Imago Relationship Therapy.

This new edition of Couples Therapy tackles four challenges currently facing the field: (1) accountability and the increasing demands for demonstrating effectiveness as a condition for reimbursement, (2) the need for practitioners to reconfigure their practice patterns in an ever-involving health-care system, (3) training mental health practitioners who have not completed marital and family therapy (MFT) programs, and (4) integrating new couples approaches and interventions into everyday clinical practice. The book offers a focused vision and successful strategies for working effectively with couples, both today and tomorrow. It incorporates the best insights from the neurosciences as well as new couples theories, research, and evidence-based interventions, introducing approaches including psychoanalytic, systemic, cognitive behavioral, Adlerian, constructivist, third wave, integrative, and mindfulness-based. Chapters also present practical applications and professional considerations, with a comprehensive look at how to work with diverse issues in couples therapy, such as substance abuse, domestic violence, sexual dysfunction, infidelity, aging, and much more. This third edition of Couples Therapy is an essential resource for students as well as mental health practitioners, social workers, and family counselors who are keen to better meet the needs of couples and the demands of the changing healthcare landscape.