In this part memoir, part mental health resource and how-to guide, Jo Love throws opens the door of her therapist's office and shines a light on what exactly goes on in the therapy room. With the help of experts, including her very own therapist, Jo opens a rare window into the real world of therapy, unpicking the magical powers that enabled her to re-find her own voice, restored her resilience through the cloudiest days and ultimately saved her from her own mind. Each chapter includes: - A therapy list where Jo shares her knowledgeable insights into therapy - Inspirational voices in the mental health space on the life-changing effects of therapy - A 'From the Other Chair' section featuring expert opinions from mental health professionals - 'Need Help Now' suggestions Therapy is ... Magic moves away from the stigma sometimes associated with seeking help, and shines a light on the emotional and physical benefits of talking therapies. Jo Love shows us that with professional guidance we can heal ourselves and the relationships we have, tackle addictions and trauma, and save our minds.

Therapeutic metaphor and stories have long been used within modalities such as hypnotherapy, play therapy, narrative therapies, and expressive therapies. Metaphorical interventions reduce client defensiveness. They provide an 'aha' that leads to insight and change, as the client's identification with one or more characters in the stories springboards him or her into treatment activity. Metaphorical Stories for Child Therapy: Of Magic and Miracles is a book for practitioners, including psychologists, social workers, special education or school therapists, counselors, and expressive therapists. The book uses metaphorical stories and interventions to address issues central to child and adolescent treatment. Each story addresses a particular issue or theme, gives examples of how the story may be used, and includes a set of 'take-it-home' questions that may be assigned between sessions. These stories become core metaphors to be referred to throughout treatment, and children find them enjoyable and memorable. There have been a number of books published in recent years on metaphor and therapeutic stories. This volume sets itself apart, in that the stories are richer character-wise and many are more universal in their themes. The book is divided into two sections: Part I focuses on general treatment themes, such as self-esteem, affect-regulation, lowering defenses, and so on. Part II addresses specific DSM-IV diagnoses such as panic disorder, ADHD, OCD, divorce adjustment, fear of the dark, and eating disorders. The depth and versatility of the stories ensure that the practitioner will find him or herself using them over and over again.

These seminal works in neurolinguistic programming (NLP) help therapists understand how people create inner models of the world to represent their experience and guide their behavior. Volume I describes the Meta Model, a framework for comprehending the structure of language; Volume II applies NLP theory to nonverbal communication.

In this part memoir, part mental health resource and how-to guide, Jo Love throws opens the door of her therapist's office and shines a light on what exactly goes on in the therapy room. With the help of experts, including her very own therapist, Jo opens a rare window into the real world of therapy, unpicking the magical powers that enabled her to re-find her own voice, restored her resilience through the cloudiest days and ultimately saved her from her own mind. Each chapter includes: - A therapy list where Jo shares her knowledgeable insights into therapy - Inspirational voices in the mental health space on the life-changing effects of therapy - A 'From the Other Chair' section featuring expert opinions from mental health professionals - 'Need Help Now' suggestions Therapy is ... Magic moves away from the stigma sometimes associated with seeking help, and shines a light on the emotional and physical benefits of talking therapies. Jo Love shows us that with professional guidance we can heal ourselves and the relationships we have, tackle addictions and trauma, and save our minds.

Highly practical and user friendly, this book presents 58 play therapy techniques that belong in every child clinician's toolbox. The expert authors draw from multiple theoretical orientations to showcase powerful, well-established approaches applicable to a broad range of childhood problems. Activities, needed materials, and variations of each technique are succinctly described. Of critical importance for today's evidence-based practitioner, each chapter also includes a historical perspective on the technique at hand, a rationale explaining its therapeutic power, and a review of relevant empirical findings. The book enables readers to determine which strategies are appropriate for a particular child or group and rapidly incorporate them into practice.

Drawn from the author’s experience as an internationally-recognised theorist, lecturer and practitioner, this practical book elucidates the notoriously difficult and distinctly different therapeutic approach, existential therapy. Balancing theory and practice, the book provides trainees with an accessible introduction to the author’s own three phase structural model for existential therapy, one which has become widely established and used in training and practice. Substantially revised and updated throughout, Part One examines the philosophical underpinnings, essential theory and distinctive features of existential therapy while Part Two goes on to present the author′s structural model for practice. Both parts are now prefaced by useful schematic overviews which introduce the content and pinpoint key themes in each chapter, helping readers to navigate the text with ease. Practical exercises encourage further engagement with the text and the themes, issues and practices under consideration. Seen by existential therapists across the world as one of the most influential books on the topic, this new edition is an essential read for all those training, practising or interested in existential therapy.

For more than 20 years, Crafts and Creative Media in Therapy, Fifth Edition has been an illuminating reference for the use of creative approaches in helping clients achieve their therapeutic goals. Carol Crellin Tubbs has included a range of craft and creative activity categories, from paper crafts, to cooking, to the use of recycled materials, and everything in between. Each chapter includes a brief history of the craft, several projects along with suggestions for grading or adapting, examples of related documentation, and a short case study. The text also features chapters on activity analysis, general strategies for implementation of creative activities, and documentation, as well as a chapter describing the relevance of this media from both historical and current occupation-based perspectives. In this updated Fifth Edition, the craft projects have been updated and numerous resources and links for more ideas have been added. There are new chapters on making therapy tools and crafting with a purpose, and the recycled and found materials chapter has been expanded in keeping with cultural trends. A flow chart has been added to each case study to help students better understand the process and rationale for tailoring activities for individual client needs, and project suggestions for working on specific performance skills or client factors are scattered throughout the chapters. Other additions include a behavioral observation checklist as an aid in evaluation and documentation, and several illustrations to help students distinguish between the use of occupation as means and occupation as end. This Fifth Edition also includes an updated instructors’ manual with additional resources and suggestions for lesson planning. Crafts and Creative Media in Therapy, Fifth Edition not only provides a wide assortment of craft ideas and instructions, but also provides multiple suggestions for therapeutic uses for activities in each category. It includes ways to grade activities to best achieve therapy objectives, and examples of documentation for reimbursement. For each craft category, there is discussion on precautions for use with certain populations, contextual limitations, and safety considerations. Information is presented in several different formats such as examples, tables, illustrations, and other formats to promote student understanding. Included with the text are online supplemental materials for faculty use in the classroom. . Crafts and Creative Media in Therapy, Fifth Edition is the foremost resource for using creative approaches in helping clients achieve their therapeutic goals and should be used by all occupational therapists, occupational therapy assistants, and recreational therapists.

A deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact. Albrecht Dürer's famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. Dubbed the “image of images” for being the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon, Melencolia I also presides over the origins of modern iconology, art history's own science of meaning. Yet we are left with a clutter of mutually contradictory theories, a historiographic ruin that confirms the mood of its object. In Perfection's Therapy, Mitchell Merback reopens the case file and argues for a hidden intentionality in Melencolia's opacity, its structural “chaos,” and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that Dürer's masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly resituates Dürer's image within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Dürer's therapeutic project in dialogue with that of humanism's founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths Dürer's ambition to act as a physician of the soul. Celebrated as the "Apelles of the black line" in his own day, and ever since as Germany's first Renaissance painter-theorist, the Dürer we encounter here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to the distress of souls, including his own. Melencolia thus emerges as a key reference point in a venture of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work designed to exercise the mind, restore the body's equilibrium, and help in getting on with the undertaking of perfection.

Blake Parker worked on this series of writings in the last year of his life while he lived with a terminal diagnosis of cancer. It is a mixture of poetry, dialogues, book reports, and short essays, formed as a sort of shorthand to a number of concepts, primarily from sociology and anthropology, which he saw as useful, if not actually essential, for understanding symbolic interpretation and the essence of the therapeutic process within a social and cultural context. He designed the psychoanalytic and therapeutic diagrams to clarify concepts and as teaching aids for art therapy students and therapists. Blake uses a phenomenological understanding of metaphor in order to throw light upon the process of social construction, creativity, and conceptions of mysticism or spirituality. The book includes some of his personal reflections regarding death, dying, creativity, and the meaning of life. The notes are essentially a hermeneutic of mysticism, a moving from the parts to the whole and the whole to the parts. It is a forest of ideas and ramblings in interpretive frameworks that emerged and is presented in a circular spiral.