Self Disclosure

Decisions about self-disclosure-whether to reveal one's thoughts, feel ings, or past experiences to another person, or the level of intimacy of such disclosure-are part of the everyday life of most persons. The nature of the decisions that a person makes will have an impact on his or her life. They will determine the kinds of relationships the person has with others; how others perceive him or her; and the degree of self knowledge and awareness that the person possesses. The study of self-disclosure has interested specialists from many disciplines, including personality and social psychologists, clinical and counseling psychologists, and communications researchers. Our book brings together the work of experts from these various disciplines with the hope that knowledge about work being done on self-disclosure in related disciplines will be increased. A strong emphasis in each of the chapters is theory development and the integration of ideas about self-disclosure. The book's chapters explore three major areas, including the interrelationship of self-disclosure and personality as well as the role of self-disclosure in the development, maintenance, and deterioration of personal relationships, and the con tribution of self-disclosure to psychotherapy, marital therapy, and counseling.

Concise, clear, and featuring numerous clinical examples, this is the first book to include empirical studies of supervisor/supervisee disclosure, plus extensive research on patient/therapist disclosure. Other unique topics include disclosure issues in child therapy.

Using both a theoretical argumentation and an empirical investigation, this book rationalizes the view that in order to understand people’s privacy perceptions and behaviors, a situational perspective needs to be adopted. To this end, the book is divided into three parts. Part I advances the theory of situational privacy and self-disclosure by discussing impacts of new information and communication technologies on traditional theories of privacy and self-disclosure. Based on five basic suppositions, it describes three major processes of the theory: pre-situational privacy regulations processes, situational privacy perception and self-disclosure processes, and post-situational evaluation processes. Next, Part II presents the application of the theory to smartphone-based communication. It first analyses how people choose certain communication environments on their smartphones, how they manipulate them, and how these external factors affect self-disclosure within these environments. It then details a multi-method study conducted to test the derived assumptions and discusses the obtained results. Part III reflects on the overall implications of the theory, summarizes the major findings and lastly considers possible extensions and perspectives on future research. Intended mainly for researchers in privacy and communication studies, the book offers privacy scholars a systematic review of both classic and contemporary theories of privacy and self-disclosure. At the same time, communication scholars benefit from an additional methodological discussion of the mobile experience sampling method, which provides an invaluable approach to measuring situational communication processes.

Therapist Self-Disclosure gives clinicians professional and practical guidance on how and when to self-disclose in therapy. Chapters weave together theory, research, case studies, and applications to examine types of self-disclosure, timing, factors and dynamics of the therapeutic relationship, ethics in practice, and cultural, demographic, and vulnerability factors. Chapter authors then examine self-disclosure with specific client populations, including clients who are LGBTQ, Christian, multicultural, suffering from eating disorders or trauma, in forensic settings, at risk for suicide, with an intellectual disability, or are in recovery for substance abuse.This book will very helpful to graduate students, early career practitioners, and more seasoned professionals who have wrestled with decisions about whether to self-disclose under various clinical circumstances.

Self-Disclosure in Psychotherapy and Recovery includes a unique mosaic of theoretical and practical clinical information, rich case studies, research findings, and a wealth of evidence-based practice guidelines related to therapist and client self-disclosure in the psychotherapeutic encounter. Experienced clinicians, neophyte therapists, and counselors in training will find this book provides a wealth of insight and useful information that will significantly benefit their therapeutic work. Gary G. Forrest elucidates a diversity of self-disclosure topics that pertain to a wide range of issues impacting every facet of the process and outcome of psychotherapy relationships. Self-Disclosure in Psychotherapy and Recovery represents a seminal contribution to the counseling and psychotherapy literature specific to chemical dependency counseling, addictions-focused therapy, and the self-help based recovery model. This book will be an essential resource for individuals pursuing graduate training and advanced education or supervision in the various behavioral health professions.

The editors of the present volume were also privileged to collaborate on an earlier book, Intimacy, also published by Plenum Press. In our pref ace to that volume, we described the importance and essence of inti macy and its centrality in the domain of human relationships. After reading the contributions to that volume, a number of issues emerged and pressed for elaboration. These questions concerned the nature and parameters of intimacy. The natural extension of these con cerns can be found in the current work, Self-Disclosure in the Therapeutic Relationship. The editors, after careful consideration of the theoretical, philo sophical, and technical literature, are impressed by the relationship between intimacy and appropriate self-disclosure. Self-disclosure, in this context, refers to those behaviors that allow oneself to be suffi ciently revealing so as to become available for an intimate relationship. Levenson has referred to psychotherapy as the demystification of expe rience wherein intimacy emerges during the time that interpersonal vigilance diminishes through growing feelings of safety. Interpersonal experience can be demystified and detoxified by disclosure, openness, and authentic relatedness. This is not an easy process. Before one can be open, make contact, or reach out with authenticity, one must be available to oneself. This means making contact with-and accepting-the dark, fearful, and of ten untouched areas within the person that are often hidden even from oneself. The process of therapy enables those areas to gain conscious ness, be tolerated, and be shared with trusted others.

The Self-Disclosure of God offers the most detailed presentation to date in any Western language of the basic teachings of Islam's greatest mystical philosopher and theologian. It represents a major step forward in making available to the Western reading public the enormous riches of Islamic teachings in the fields of cosmology, mystical philosophy, theology, and spirituality. The Self-Disclosure of God continues the author's investigations of the world view of Ibn al-ʿArabī, the greatest theoretician of Sufism and the "seal of the Muhammadan saints." The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the relation between God and the cosmos, the structure of the cosmos, and the nature of the human soul. A long introduction orients the reader and discusses a few of the difficulties faced by Ibn al-ʿArabī's interpreters. Like Chittick's earlier work, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, this book is based primarily on Ibn al-ʿArabī's monumental work, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah "The Meccan Openings." More than one hundred complete chapters and subsections are translated, not to mention shorter passages that help put the longer discussions in context. There are detailed indices of sources, Koranic verses and hadiths. The book's index of technical terminology will be an indispensable reference for all those wishing to delve more deeply into the use of language in Islamic thought in general and Sufism in particular.

First published in 1988. This text describes a type of psychotherapy designed to increase marital intimacy, thus improving family functioning. The focus of this book is marriage as a psychological relationship. This is, then, a book about the quality of the relationship between a woman and a man in marriage and an approach to helping couples and families who have problems with intimacy.