Many people with depression believe they are defective, unwanted, or inferior, and this feeling of being flawed and inadequate often leads to a strong sense of shame. Written by experienced clinicians, this workbook provides readers with practical, proven-effective skills based in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), so they can identify and alleviate shame-based, self-defeating beliefs, and learn to create a more fulfilling life.

There are hundreds of books that will try to help you ''overcome'' or ''put an end to'' depression. But what if you could use your depression to change your life for the better? Your symptoms may be signals that something in your life needs to change. Learning to understand and interpret these signals is much more important than ignoring or avoiding them - approaches that only make the situation worse. This workbook uses techniques from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to offer a new treatment plan for depression that will help you live a productive life by accepting your feelings instead of fruitlessly trying to avoid them. The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Depression will show you, step-by-step, how to stop this cycle, feel more energized, and involve yourself in pleasurable and fulfilling activities that will help you work through, rather than avoid, aspects of your life that are depressing you. Use the techniques in this book to evaluate your own depression and create a personalized treatment plan. You'll enrich your total life experience by focusing your energy not on fighting depression, but on living the life you want.

Introducing the first self-help workbook for moral injury, featuring a powerful approach grounded in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to help you heal in the midst of moral pain and connect with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. If you’ve experienced, witnessed, or failed to prevent an act that violates your own deeply held values—such as harming someone in an automobile accident, or failing to save someone from a dangerous situation—you may suffer from moral injury, an enduring psychological and spiritual pain that is often accompanied by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, substance abuse, and other mental health conditions. In order to begin healing, you need to (re)connect with your values and what really matters to you as a human being. Written by a renowned team of PTSD and trauma professionals, this workbook can help. The Moral Injury Workbook is the first workbook of its kind to offer a powerful step-by-step program to help you move beyond moral pain. With this guide, you’ll learn to work through difficult thoughts, emotions, and spiritual troubles; (re)connect with your deeply held sense of self, values, or spiritual beliefs; and gain the psychological flexibility you need to begin healing and live a full and meaningful life. Links to downloadable worksheets for veterans and clinicians are also included. Whether you’ve experienced moral injury yourself, work in the field of mental health, or are a pastoral advisor seeking new ways to help facilitate moral healing, this workbook is an effective and much-needed resource.

Don’t let anxiety and depression keep you from living life to the fullest. If you suffer from co-occurring anxiety and depression, you may experience an overwhelming urge to avoid difficult emotions and emotional experiences. The last thing you want to do is kick the hornet’s nest you carry around with you. However, the latest research in psychology emphasizes the importance of approaching—rather than avoiding—your emotions. Avoiding emotions works in the short term, but in the long term it only teaches you to believe you can’t handle your feelings. What you need is a solid set of tools that will allow you to feel a full range of emotions with confidence. This book will provide just the tool set you require. In this workbook, psychologist Michael Tompkins offers evidence-based cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) skills to help you target and tear down the emotional avoidance barriers that drive your anxiety and depression. By engaging with the emotions you’ve been seeking to avoid, you’ll learn, “I can handle this feeling.” You’ll also find strategies to help you stay calm during emotional situations; and discover relaxation and mindfulness techniques to deal effectively with difficult thoughts and feelings, and improve your mood and well-being. The tools in this workbook help you learn this important lesson: You can handle emotions, even unpleasant ones. When you believe you can handle feeling anxious and depressed, you’re less likely to avoid those feelings, creating space for you to be more willing to do the things that you want to do in your life.

Psychological research suggests that cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), used alone or in combination with medical therapy, is the most effective treatment for depression. Recent finding, though, suggest that CBT for depression may work through different processes than we had previously suspected. The stated goal of therapeutic work in CBT is the challenging and restructuring of irrational thoughts that can lead to feelings of depression. But the results of recent studies suggest that two other side effects of CBT may actually have a greater impact that thought restructuring on client progress: Distancing and decentering work that helps clients stop identifying with depression and behavior activation, a technique that helps him or her to reengage with naturally pleasurable and rewarding activities. These two components of conventional CBT are central in the treatment approach of the new acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). This book develops the techniques of ACT into a session-by-session approach that therapists can use to treat clients suffering from depression. The research-proven program outlined in ACT for Depression introduces therapists to the ACT model on theoretical and case-conceptual levels. Then it delves into the specifics of structuring interventions for clients with depression using the ACT method of acceptance and values-based behavior change. Written by one of the pioneering researchers into the effectiveness of ACT for the treatment of depression, this book is a much-needed professional resource for the tens of thousand of therapists who are becoming ever more interested in ACT.

We all have our own ways of handling stressful situations without letting emotions get the best of us, but some ways of coping work better than others. Short-term fixes that help us avoid or numb our emotions may temporarily alleviate sadness and anger, but can also end up causing anxiety, depression, chronic anger, and even physical health problems. If you struggle with overwhelming emotions and feel trapped by unhealthy patterns, this workbook is your ticket out. Mind and Emotions is a revolutionary universal treatment program for all emotional disorders that helps you discover which of the seven problematic coping styles is keeping you trapped in a cycle of emotional pain. Instead of working on difficulties like anxiety, anger, shame, and depression one by one, you’ll treat the root of all your emotional suffering at once. Drawing on evidence-based skills from cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and dialectical behavior therapy, this workbook offers all the techniques you need to manage unwelcome feelings in effective and productive ways. Learn and practice the most effective coping skills: Clarifying and acting on your core values Mindfulness and acceptance Detaching from negative thoughts Self-soothing and relaxation exercises Assertiveness and interpersonal skills Gradually facing your strong emotions This book has been awarded The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Self-Help Seal of Merit — an award bestowed on outstanding self-help books that are consistent with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) principles and that incorporate scientifically tested strategies for overcoming mental health difficulties.

An innovative approach to help you maintain your high standards while also accepting mistakes with compassion and kindness. If you’re a perfectionist, you know there’s a helpful upside to pushing yourself toward excellence: achievement, success—and, hey, it can be fun and rewarding to work hard! But unhelpful perfectionism can just as easily work against you. It can prevent you from taking risks or trying new things out for fear of failure, judgment, or rejection; cause you to procrastinate; and make you feel like no matter what you achieve, you’ll never be good enough. Grounded in evidence-based acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), this workbook will help you discover what drives this ‘dark side’ of perfectionism, and develop the skills you need to overcome it—without lowering your standards. By leaning in to your values and treating yourself with kindness and compassion, you’ll learn to put mistakes in perspective without wallowing in self-criticism. Most importantly, you’ll find that you can allow for imperfection, without losing your drive to achieve. If you’re ready to stop unhealthy perfectionism from paralyzing your personal growth—and start embracing yourself as perfectly imperfect—this book will introduce you to a whole new you!