I M At The End Of My Rope And You Re Tugging At It

Is your first and second favorite animal a horse? Is your bedroom covered with horse posters on your walls and horse models on your shelves? Would you rather muck out a stall than clean your room? Then you are absolutely, undeniably horse crazy, and For Horse-Crazy Girls Only is the book for you! This is the only comprehensive book about everything a horse-crazy girl needs to know about horses. You'll learn everything from the different breeds of horses, to how a horse's body works, to the quirky little things that make the horse the BEST animal ever. Author Christina Wilsdon even shares ideas for horse-themed parties, and suggestions for the best horse movies to watch with your friends. And that's just the beginning.

Though a dystopian novel hovering over the imminent collapse of American civilization at the hands of a techno-authoritarian state, "Love in the Time of the Apocalypse" is also a book about the triumph of love and humor over the fatal gravitas of life and death. It is part future nightmare part whimsical farce of the present. Love in the Time of the Apocalypse is a work of playful conspiritorial pop-delirium and pastiche full of lovable terrorists, state run breeding houses, Amish casinos, vulgar action scenes, the antichrist, tongue and cheek hyper-masculinity ("perhaps sit-ups can save the world") and a bourgeois love story to top it all. Readers who love Science Fiction, Dystopian Literature, and Conspiracy Theory will find this book chock full of fresh and clever fare. The speculative details are much more subtle than works on the post-apocalypse. The reader can feel both drawn into a bit of a future shock while at the same time remain anchored in a familiar, albeit, terrifying present. Blecha has a way of pulling from current trends of government suppression of freedoms and stretching them ever so softly to their possible conclusion. Thus, rather than a world of utter totalitarianism such at Orwell's 1984, we are presented with a more plausible, more friendly fascism that a society founded on consumerism and entertainment might bring about. Without coming across as a writer with an agenda, Gregory Blecha offers a strong but playful critique of State power, the smothering inefficiency and corruption of bureaucracy, and the role of the over-stimulated, under-critical herd of middle class consumers and middle managers of a collapsing North America. Tramps,plague victims, nihilists and nymphomaniacs along with the main character, a WASP drawn into their exciting world, make for the heroes of the story. The villains are the lifeless and systematic processes of the Federal Government, the Department of Health, the Department of Overpopulation, and the technological control systems of modern life, and yet even these are rendered with an air of playfulness that allows the reader to smile as the world comes crumbling down.

Feeling better starts now. Dr. Kirren Schnack is here to tell you that your anxiety isn’t here to stay. Whether you’re going through something and need support to feel like yourself again, or if you have been dealing with anxious thoughts for a long time, Ten Times Calmer has the help you’ve been looking for. Dr. Kirren is an Oxford trained clinical psychologist with twenty years’ experience. In Ten Times Calmer she offers a first aid kit of tools to help you understand what you’re going through and change how you’re feeling – and it might just be easier than you think. Not everyone has access to therapy and not everyone needs it, but we could all do with a little more calm in our lives. The ten chapters cover everything from dealing with anxious thoughts and stress to managing uncertainty and safely tackling trauma, and each takes you a step closer to an anxiety-free life. Inside you’ll find short anxiety busting exercises with a big impact and a toolkit of well-researched and clinically proven tips that will help you find calm each and every day.

Many pastors and lay counselors have had minimal training in clinical methods of grief counseling. Helping Those in Grief is a biblical, practical guide to pastoral counseling written by one of the most respected Christian therapists of our time. This book is the next step after Wright’s best-selling The New Guide to Crisis and Trauma Counseling. Wright brings more than 40 years of clinical and classroom experience to this topic, and shares real-life dialogs from his private practice to demonstrate healthy, healing counseling sessions. Readers will learn how to counsel and coach both believers and non-believers who are grieving, how to walk alongside them and how to help them find the path to complete restoration.

Irksome Clouds is a book of African verse that approaches poetry with an open mind. Although the title of the book sounds like it will address the problems of global warming, it is just a book of free verse without the actual theme. Irksome Clouds is the poetry that endeavors to cherish the beauty of the South African national heritage and also questions whether the inter-racial post apartheid rainbow nation is ideal. The book also tries to mock the elite that enjoys the fruits of freedom and forgets the masses that elevated them to that upper stratum.

Acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT (pronounced as a word rather than letters), is an emerging psychotherapeutic technique first developed into a complete system in the book Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Steven Hayes, Kirk Strosahl, and Kelly Wilson. ACT marks what some call a third wave in behavior therapy. To understand what this means, it helps to know that the first wave refers to traditional behavior therapy, which works to replace harmful behaviors with constructive ones through a learning principle called conditioning. Cognitive therapy, the second wave of behavior therapy, seeks to change problem behaviors by changing the thoughts that cause and perpetuate them. In the third wave, behavior therapists have begun to explore traditionally nonclinical treatment techniques like acceptance, mindfulness, cognitive defusion, dialectics, values, spirituality, and relationship development. These therapies reexamine the causes and diagnoses of psychological problems, the treatment goals of psychotherapy, and even the definition of mental illness itself. ACT earns its place in the third wave by reevaluating the traditional assumptions and goals of psychotherapy. The theoretical literature on which ACT is based questions our basic understanding of mental illness. It argues that the static condition of even mentally healthy individuals is one of suffering and struggle, so our grounds for calling one behavior 'normal' and another 'disordered' are murky at best. Instead of focusing on diagnosis and symptom etiology as a foundation for treatment-a traditional approach that implies, at least on some level, that there is something 'wrong' with the client-ACT therapists begin treatment by encouraging the client to accept without judgment the circumstances of his or her life as they are. Then therapists guide clients through a process of identifying a set of core values. The focus of therapy thereafter is making short and long term commitments to act in ways that affirm and further this set of values. Generally, the issue of diagnosing and treating a specific mental illness is set aside; in therapy, healing comes as a result of living a value-driven life rather than controlling or eradicating a particular set of symptoms. Emerging therapies like ACT are absolutely the most current clinical techniques available to therapists. They are quickly becoming the focus of major clinical conferences, publications, and research. More importantly, these therapies represent an exciting advance in the treatment of mental illness and, therefore, a real opportunity to alleviate suffering and improve people's lives. Not surprisingly, many therapists are eager to include ACT in their practices. ACT is well supported by theoretical publications and clinical research; what it has lacked, until the publication of this book, is a practical guide showing therapists exactly how to put these powerful new techniques to work for their own clients. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Anxiety Disorders adapts the principles of ACT into practical, step-by-step clinical methods that therapists can easily integrate into their practices. The book focuses on the broad class of anxiety disorders, the most common group of mental illnesses, which includes general anxiety, panic disorder, phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Written with therapists in mind, this book is easy to navigate, allowing busy professionals to find the information they need when they need it. It includes detailed examples of individual therapy sessions as well as many worksheets and exercises, the very important 'homework' clients do at home to reinforce work they do in the office. The book comes with a CD-ROM that includes electronic versions of all of the worksheets in the book as well as PowerPoint and audio features that make learning and teaching these techniques easy and engagin

New Directions in the Treatment of PTSD Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) offers a promising, empirically validated approach to the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other trauma related problems. In this volume, you'll find a complete theoretical and practical guide to making this revolutionary new model work in your practice. After a quick overview of PTSD, the first part of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for the Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Trauma-Related Problems explains the problem of experiential avoidance as it relates to trauma and explores the verbal nature of post-traumatic stress. You'll learn the importance of mindfulness and acceptance in the ACT model, find out how to structure sessions with your clients, and examine the problem of control. The section concludes by introducing you to the idea of creative hopelessness as the starting point for creating a new, workable life after trauma. The book's second section offers a practical, step-by-step clinical guide to the six core ACT components in chronological order: •Creative hopelessness •The problem of control •Willingness and defusion •Self-as-context •Valued living •Committed action Each chapter explains how to introduce these topics to clients suffering from PTSD, illustrates each with case examples, and offers homework for your clients to use between sessions.

Sand Dollars is a romance-thriller set amongst CIA drug-running in Southeast Asia, the assassination of an Australian Prime Minister, and the trials and perils of his most astonishing daughter, ship-wrecked on a jungle island of pure, green terror. It deals with a world gone mad.