Mental Health Counselling

Discover the innovative intersection of somatic therapy and Internal Family Systems (IFS), featuring 5 core practices to transform modern therapeutic approaches. Enhance your clinical practice and patient outcomes by skillfully uniting body and mind through an evidence-based therapeutic modality—endorsed by leaders in the field, including Richard Schwartz.

An essential work that centers colonial and historical trauma in a framework for healing, Decolonizing Therapy illuminates that all therapy is—and always has been—inherently political. To better understand the mental health oppression and institutional violence that exists today, we must become familiar with the root of disembodiment from our histories, homelands, and healing practices. Only then will listeners see how colonial, historical, and intergenerational legacies have always played a role in the treatment of mental health.

IFS reveals how the subpersonalities or parts of each individual's psyche relate to each other like members of a family, and how - just as in a family - polarization among parts can lead to emotional suffering. IFS originator Richard Schwartz and master clinician Martha Sweezy explain core concepts and provide practical guidelines for implementing IFS with clients who are struggling with trauma, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, and other behavioral problems.

If you're looking for ways to optimize your client sessions, consider joining the many thousands of therapists and life coaches worldwide who are learning acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). With a focus on mindfulness, client values, and a commitment to change, ACT is proven-effective in treating depression, anxiety, stress, addictions, eating disorders, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder (BPD), and myriad other psychological issues. It's also a revolutionary new way to view the human condition.

Most people don't realize how much unresolved emotional pain they carry around. They don't know why they always feel depressed, anxious, victimized, or disappointed. They wonder why they keep making the same self-sabotaging impulsive decisions. These patterns often stem from their lost inner child, which carries a false narrative that has been on repeat since childhood.

Learn to get the most out of therapy to unlock your best self. Millions of Americans will go to therapy this year, but veteran psychotherapist Gary Trosclair believes the vast majority of them will start the process with little to no sense of how to best use their sessions to achieve their goals. Recent research has identified effective client participation as one of the most crucial factors in successful therapy.

Drawing on cutting-edge research on adult attachment—and providing an innovative roadmap for clinical practice—Susan M. Johnson argues that psychotherapy is most effective when it focuses on the healing power of emotional connection.

Questioning thousands of parents and educators, Dr. Wayne Dyer learned firsthand what people really want for their children. They don't particularly want their kids to go to fancy schools, acquire riches, or live "the good life". They do want them to have personal integrity and high self-esteem, and to grow up with love and peace in their hearts. Children raised the Wayne Dyer way feel useful and needed. They are inner- rather than outer-directed. They live a stress-free life naturally, without resorting to drugs.

Spirituality is an important part of many clients’ lives. It can be a resource for stabilization, healing, and growth. It can also be the cause of struggle and even harm. More and more therapists - those who consider themselves spiritual and those who do not - recognize the value of addressing spirituality in therapy and increasing their skill for engaging it ethically and effectively. In this immensely practical book, Russell Siler Jones helps therapists feel more competent and confident about having spiritual conversations with clients.

Kathy L. Kain and Stephen J. Terrell draw on 50 years of their combined clinical and teaching experience to provide this clear road map for understanding the complexities of early trauma and its related symptoms. Experts in the physiology of trauma, the authors present an introduction to their innovative somatic approach that has evolved to help thousands improve their lives. Synthesizing across disciplines - Attachment, Polyvagal, Neuroscience, Child Development Theory, Trauma, and Somatics - this book provides a new lens through which to understand safety and regulation.

Trauma recovery is tricky; however, there are several key principles that can help make the process safe and effective. This book gives self-help listeners, therapy clients, and therapists alike the skills to understand and implement eight keys to successful trauma healing: mindful identification of what is helpful, recognizing survival, having the option to not remember, creating a supportive inner dialogue, forgiving not being able to stop the trauma, understanding and sharing shame, finding your own recovery pace; mobilizing your body, and helping others.

This substantially revised fifth edition of a classic text includes an updated preface, new content on the therapeutic relationship, substantially revised chapters on the middle phase of counselling and reflections on the influence of other modalities and shared aspects of practice across approaches. Each chapter now includes an annotated further listening section to help deepen knowledge and reinforce learning of key aspects of the counselling process.

In this groundbreaking book, Eduardo Duran - a psychologist working in Indian country - draws on his own clinical experience to provide guidance to counselors working with Native Peoples and other vulnerable populations.

In Hauntings, James Hollis considers how we are all governed by the presence of invisible forms - spirits, ghosts, ancestral and parental influences, inner voices, dreams, impulses, untold stories, complexes, synchronicities, and mysteries - that move through us through history. He offers a way to understand them psychologically, examining the persistence of the past in influencing our present, conscious lives and noting that engagement with mystery is what life asks of each of us. From such engagements, a deeper, more thoughtful, more considered life may come.

Much has been written about trauma and neglect and the damage they do to the developing brain. But little has been written or researched about the potential to heal these attachment wounds and address the damage sustained from neglect or poor parenting in early childhood. This book presents a therapy that focuses on precisely these areas. Laurel Parnell, leader and innovator in the field of eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), offers us a way to embrace two often separate worlds of knowing.

The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy has been the standard text in the field for decades. In this completely updated sixth edition, Dr. Yalom and Dr. Leszcz draw on a decade of new research as well as their broad clinical wisdom and expertise. Each chapter is revised, reflecting the most recent developments in the field.

Echoing Socrates' statement that the unexamined life not worth living, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz draws on his twenty-five years of work and more than 50,000 hours of conversations to form a collection of beautifully rendered tales that illuminate the human experience. These are stories about everyday lives, and the resulting journey will spark new ideas about who we are and why we do what we do.

Traumatic experiences leave a “living legacy” of effects that often persist for years and decades after the events are over. Historically, it has always been assumed that retelling the story of what happened would resolve these effects. However, survivors report a different experience: Telling and re-telling the story of what happened to them often reactivates their trauma responses, overwhelming them rather than resolving the trauma.

The NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is an integrated mind-body framework that focuses on relational, attachment, developmental, cultural, and intergenerational trauma. NARM helps clients resolve C-PTSD, recover from adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and facilitate post-traumatic growth.

What is it that makes some therapists so much more effective than others, even when they are delivering the same evidence-based treatment? This instructive book identifies specific interpersonal skills and attitudes—often overlooked in clinical training—that facilitate better client outcomes across a broad range of treatment methods and contexts. Reviewing 70 years of psychotherapy research, the preeminent authors show that empathy, acceptance, warmth, focus, and other characteristics of effective therapists are both measurable and teachable.