This book is a reassuring guide both for novice therapists and those further along in their journey, normalizing, validating, and empathizing with the human aspects of the profession and supporting readers to feel empowered and confident managing real-life situations with real-life clients. Dr. Ménard shares lessons she learned in her early training years as well as those learned as a "grown- up" psychologist, addressing the perils and pitfalls of connecting with clients, working in diverse settings with different supervisors, balancing work and home life, and, perhaps most importantly, repairing and recovering from therapeutic stumbles and missteps with humor and compassion. Chapters address topics such as internship and licensure, therapist self-care, professionalism, diversity, supervision, and teletherapy and include important questions about clinical training and professional development like "What do I do when my client isn’t making progress?", "How do I know when I’m too sick to work?", "Is it okay to curse in session?", "Do I even belong in this program?", and "What should I do if there is a wildlife invasion of my office?" This book will provide mental health professionals with the tools and skills they need to problem-solve these situations and others on the road from graduate school and licensure to independent practice.

Lessons from the personal experience and reflections of a therapist. The difficulty and cost of training psychotherapists properly is well known. It is far easier to provide a series of classes while ignoring the more challenging personal components of training. Despite the fact that the therapist's self-insight, emotional maturity, and calm centeredness are critical for successful psychotherapy, rote knowledge and technical skills are the focus of most training programs. As a result, the therapist's personal growth is either marginalized or ignored. The Making of a Therapist counters this trend by offering graduate students and beginning therapists a personal account of this important inner journey. Cozolino provides a unique look inside the mind and heart of an experienced therapist. Readers will find an exciting and privileged window into the experience of the therapist who, like themselves, is just starting out. In addition, The Making of a Therapist contains the practical advice, common-sense wisdom, and self-disclosure that practicing professionals have found to be the most helpful during their own training.The first part of the book, 'Getting Through Your First Sessions,' takes readers through the often-perilous days and weeks of conducting initial sessions with real clients. Cozolino addresses such basic concerns as: Do I need to be completely healthy myself before I can help others? What do I do if someone comes to me with an issue or problem I can't handle? What should I do if I have trouble listening to my clients? What if a client scares me?The second section of the book, 'Getting to Know Your Clients,' delves into the routine of therapy and the subsequent stages in which you continue to work with clients and help them. In this context, Cozolino presents the notion of the 'good enough' therapist, one who can surrender to his or her own imperfections while still guiding the therapeutic relationship to a positive outcome. The final section, 'Getting to Know Yourself,' goes to the core of the therapist's relation to him- or herself, addressing such issues as: How to turn your weaknesses into strengths, and how to deal with the complicated issues of pathological caretaking, countertransference, and self-care.Both an excellent introduction to the field as well as a valuable refresher for the experienced clinician, The Making of a Therapist offers readers the tools and insight that make the journey of becoming a therapist a rich and rewarding experience.

This text explores how psychotherapists can use deliberate practice to improve their clinical effectiveness. By sourcing through decades of research on how experts in diverse fields achieve skill mastery, the author proposes it is possible for any therapist to dramatically improve their effectiveness. However, achieving expertise isn’t easy. To improve, therapists must focus on clinical challenges and reconsider century-old methods of clinical training from the ground up. This volume presents a step-by-step program to engage readers in deliberate practice to improve clinical effectiveness across the therapists’ entire career span, from beginning training for graduate students to continuing education for licensed and advanced clinicians.

In this book of lessons learned from working as a psychotherapist for over 40 years, Dr. Chamberlain shares her varied expertise and experiences, bestowing the wisdom she has gleaned throughout her career from patients, students, teachers, and colleagues. The text examines three core themes: How helping clients is often intertwined with the therapist's own life journey; the experience of building intimate relationships with vulnerable populations; and the process of accepting loss, letting go, and moving forward, both for the client and the therapist. Prioritizing personal narratives, case examples, professional research, and discussions with experienced clinicians, this book marks the significant impact psychotherapy has on not just patients and clients but also the mental health professional. Offering enlightenment for readers ranging from longstanding psychotherapists to former patients, this unique book provides a particularly valuable resource for beginning therapists and therapists-in-training who seek a greater understanding of what it means to be a successful and effective therapist. .

Essentials of Supervision presents, in the popular Essentials format, the key information students need to learn in a course on supervision. Utilizing pedagogical tools such as call-out boxes, Test Yourself questions, and case studies, the author provides step-by-step guidelines for effective planning, goal setting, and evaluation, along with tips for giving constructive feedback and applying coaching strategies to motivate supervisees. She also clearly explains how to manage paperwork and describes specialized techniques, such as using video in supervision. This informative text also includes a special section on ethics authored by a leading expert in the field.

This “rare and compelling” (New York Magazine) bestseller examines childhood trauma and the enduring effects it has on an individual's management of repressed anger and pain. Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound book has provided millions of readers with an answer--and has helped them to apply it to their own lives. Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents' expectations and win their "love." Alice Miller writes, "When I used the word 'gifted' in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb.... Without this 'gift' offered us by nature, we would not have survived." But merely surviving is not enough. The Drama of the Gifted Child helps us to reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth.

Do you ever find that you are less effective with clients who are provocative, angry, shut down, or emotionally labile? Would you like to be more effective helping clients with challenging problems, including trauma, addictions, and comorbid conditions? Clients can arouse strong emotional reactions in therapists, often termed experiential avoidance or countertransference. Therapists must build their psychological capacity to stay self-aware, attuned, and clinically flexible while having strong reactions. This manual provides clear and practical deliberate practice exercises to help you master these inner skills so you can be a more effective therapist and enjoy your work more. It features a training plan that ƒ‚‚[ƒ‚‚€ƒ‚‚[Is based on the principles of deliberate practice ƒ‚‚[ƒ‚‚€ƒ‚‚[Works with all major models of psychotherapy ƒ‚‚[ƒ‚‚€ƒ‚‚[Aids all levels of therapist development ƒ‚‚[ƒ‚‚€ƒ‚‚[Helps therapists be more effective with their most challenging clients ƒ‚‚[ƒ‚‚€ƒ‚‚[Protects the boundaries and privacy of trainees

The second edition of The Great Psychotherapy Debate has been updated and revised to expand the presentation of the Contextual Model, which is derived from a scientific understanding of how humans heal in a social context and explains findings from a vast array of psychotherapies studies. This model provides a compelling alternative to traditional research on psychotherapy, which tends to focus on identifying the most effective treatment for particular disorders through emphasizing the specific ingredients of treatment. The new edition also includes a history of healing practices, medicine, and psychotherapy, an examination of therapist effects, and a thorough review of the research on common factors such as the alliance, expectations, and empathy.

In the best therapeutic tradition, Louis Breger describes contemporary theories and research in the field of analytic psychotherapy. Through the framework of his personal experiences as a scholar, researcher, and therapist, he focuses on his relationships with patients over the span of his fifty-year career. He records their reactions, in their own words, to their experience with psychotherapy many years after its conclusion. The author surveyed over thirty former patients to see if their progress, begun in therapy, had continued, expanded, or regressed. They were asked to highlight what they remembered as being most helpful, therapeutic, or curative in their treatment. The book is a unique long-term follow-up demonstrating the effectiveness of modern analytic psychotherapy. Breger primarily deals with the connections between therapist and patient. This is a professional memoir of the life of the psychotherapist dealing with trials as a young practitioner, lessons learned, and personal reflections on the choices, including mistakes, made along the way. Young therapists, and those who are in or considering psychotherapy, will find it helpful to have access to this self-reflective approach. Extracts from the patients are extensive and informative, giving the reader the opportunity to see therapy from their perspectives. The book also centers on the development of the therapist over his career span. Breger acknowledges that his understanding of patient care has improved over time in the eyes of his patients. In a larger sense, the book contains lessons for all psychotherapists. This is an important, unique, and innovative work. *Click here for an interview with the author. *Click here for an interview with the author on KQED's Forum with Michael Krasny

An in-depth look at a much misunderstood practice, offering a fresh viewpoint on how this science can be a universally effective route to our better selves.