Counselling Psychology

If you’re a survivor of sexual harm, recovering your sexuality is possible. You are worthy of good care. The toxic effects of sexual trauma and abuse can be devastating and lasting. Victims’ ability to experience healthy sexuality, even if they free themselves from the abuse, is often shattered. If sexual abuse, violence, or coercive control is part of your story, certified sex addiction therapist (CSAT) and trauma specialist Tabitha Westbrook wants you to know: you are not alone, and healing is possible.

When treating a client who has suffered from interpersonal trauma - whether chronic childhood abuse or domestic violence, for example - talk therapy isn't always the most effective course. For these individuals, the trauma and its effects are so entrenched, so complex, that reducing their experience to a set of symptoms or suggesting a change in cognitive frame or behavioral pattern ignores a very basic but critical player: the body.

Raising empathetic and unselfish young people in today’s “all about me” world might seem impossible, but parents can take meaningful action to protect children from these harmful influences. Written by a psychologist with decades of clinical experience, Childhood Narcissism: Strategies to Raise Unselfish, Unentitled, and Empathetic Children explains how selfish, entitled behavior can take root in a child and shows parents how to stop it before it’s too late.

Analyst and author Ann Belford Ulanov draws on her years of clinical work and reflection to make the point that madness and creativity share a kinship, an insight that shakes both analysis and analyst to the core, reminding us as it does that the suffering places of the human psyche are inextricably -- and, often inexplicably -- related to the fountains of creativity, service, and even genius. She poses disturbing questions: How do we depend on order, when chaos is a necessary part of existence?

In Process-Oriented Hypnosis, internationally recognized psychologist Michael D. Yapko provides clinicians with a new framework for utilizing hypnosis with clients. Yapko encourages clinicians to take a broader perspective, in which patterns rather than individual symptoms are the emphasis of therapy. He offers numerous insights into ways clinicians can home in on the process of how people come to suffer various types of emotional distress.

Have you ever had a conversation with a friend or relative that’s hit a nerve and you can’t figure out why it bothered you so much? Over the course of her 15-year career, Emma has discovered that the root of this pain and confusion often lies in a blind spot: a gap in our awareness that distorts how we perceive ourselves and our loved ones which, left unchallenged, can leave us feeling unloved, insecure or overwhelmed. Emma reveals the four blind spot profiles along with client case studies to demonstrate how they show up in daily life, and exercises to help us see past them.

Que se passe-t-il dans la tête d’un psy ? Ce journal croisé entre Irvin Yalom et sa patiente éclaire les mécanismes de la thérapie et le chemin de la guérison. Lorsque Ginny Elkin, jeune écrivaine prometteuse mais très perturbée, vient le consulter, le Dr Yalom, pour encourager sa patiente à écrire, trouve une tout autre approche de la thérapie que ses confrères : Ginny, qui n’a pas d’argent, paiera ses séances avec des écrits, tandis que le thérapeute consignera, lui aussi, ses notes impressionnistes et non cliniques après chaque séance. Guérir à deux voix est l’aboutissement littéraire de ce pacte.

“If only I could get some closure…” If you’ve found yourself saying these words, you’re not alone. When you’ve lost a relationship, a job, or a loved one, closure can seem as elusive as it is necessary. Psychotherapist and relationship coach Gary McClain says it’s one of the most common—and important—issues his clients bring up. In this empathetic and insightful guide, Dr. McClain explains why the promise of closure is so appealing—and why it’s not always all it’s cracked up to be.

Burnout is more widespread than ever before, and it's time to do something about it. Rooted in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), this book delves into the systemic, cultural, and economic contexts that contribute to burnout, and gives you the tools to exit the cycle. Exercises and reflection questions help you reconnect with your values to find what's really important, and disentangle yourself from unhelpful thought patterns. By engaging with your emotions rather than avoiding or suppressing them, ACT allows you to respond more effectively and become re-engaged in your own life again.

If you struggle with a highly sensitive personality, this memoir and collection of stories will help you heal and flourish. Benita A. Esposito is a licensed professional counselor and best-selling author with four decades of professional experience. Even smart high-achievers have themes on their hero’s journey to the authentic self, and these were hers. What unconsciously drew her to an emotionally distant relationship or an emotionally abusive relationship? Why did she feel so hurt when others judged her? Why was she so tired? What compelled her toward self actualization?

Whatever loss you have experienced, this book can help you to make sense of it; guiding you through those difficult and overwhelming emotions, explaining how these fit into the universal psychological process of grieving—and showing you a path to creating a more content life. Psychotherapist Christine Hopfgarten looks in detail at different reasons that we may encounter feelings of loss and grief, including bereavement, relationship break-up, losing a job, infertility, miscarriage and illness, and provides focused help.

Peter Fraenkel presents a practical, creative, integrative approach that combines action- and insight-oriented techniques to help last-chance couples manage conflict, modulate intense negative emotions, address power struggles, develop mutual compassion, and restore emotional intimacy and pleasurable connection. Special attention is paid to developing a collaborative therapeutic alliance when partners have little motivation for therapy or faith that it can be effective. Through engaging in "nonbinding experiments in possibility," partners can then better evaluate whether to "stay or go."

Counselors and psychotherapists are faced with ever-increasing complexity in their work with adolescents. In this book, Bronagh Starrs offers an understanding of developmental and therapeutic process from a relational-phenomenological Gestalt perspective. Starrs shows how the adolescent's presenting symptom issues are statements of compromised life space integrity and demonstrates therapeutic sensibility to the adolescent's first-person experience. Throughout the book, the clinician is offered extensive relational and creative strategies to support integrity repair for the adolescent.

Children and families burdened with attachment disruption, emotional distress, or psychological disorders need effective and immediate assistance. They do not have the time to wait for long-term interventions or developmental changes to improve the parent-child relationship. Here, psychologists Elizabeth A. Sylvester and Kat Scherer provide the most effective approach in such situations: interventions that impact the entire family at relational, emotional, and cognitive-behavioral levels.

When Dr. Brandy Engler opened her sex therapy practice for women in Manhattan, she got a big surprise. Most of the calls were from men. They wanted to talk about womanizing, porn addiction, impotence, prostitutes - and most of all, love.

The modern family is one of the most complicated systems we navigate as children and parents. In Home is Where the Start Is, Richard Hogan teaches you how to free yourself from negative experiences you have had in the past, to find true happiness and meaning in the future. Packed with fascinating case studies from Richard's clinical practice, he offers innovative, proactive and practical strategies for dealing with a wide range of issues. This book will give you the tools to recognise negative patterns from childhood, and avoid them when it comes to making your own family.

Sociometrics offers many small, incremental moments of healing that cumulatively help to peel back the layers of the onion, revealing ever deepening and widening aspects of both the self and the self in relation to others. Sociometrics is a therapeutic role-playing practice built upon the foundation of psychodrama and sociometry, the pioneering group-therapy concepts developed by fin-de-siecle Viennese psychiatrist Jacob Levy Moreno.

In the popular imagination, hypnosis is misconstrued as something done to people, as if the hypnotist hypnotizes them. And hypnotherapy is similarly misconceived as something done to clients' problems, as if the therapist could unilaterally counter or cure them. In a refreshing departure from conception-as-usual, Douglas Flemons offers another view. He explains and illustrates how hypnosis, like meditation, is invited, not induced, and how hypnotherapy entails the altering and unraveling of knotted strands of experience, not the controlling and abolishing of labeled afflictions.

Listen, your mind isn't broken—it's just doing what minds do when they get stuck in rigid, irrational thinking patterns. After decades of clinical practice, I've seen how OCD operates: it's not some mysterious force, but a pattern of demanding absolute certainty in an uncertain world. This book cuts through the mystification and gets to what works: learning to accept uncertainty, challenging perfectionist demands, and building tolerance for discomfort. No sugar-coating, no magical thinking—just evidence-based techniques for reducing your suffering.

The Mindfulness Approach to Health Behaviour Change (MATHC) takes the listener through a six stage experiential process that delves into the intricate landscape of change theory and therapeutic strategies to aid the transformative process.