You don't have to check your humanity at the office door!Drawing on the teachings of Virginia Satir, this humane volume is designed to help therapists bring their full selves into the therapeutic relationship. The Personhood of the Therapist examines what happens when a therapist consciously enters the process of healing in an I-Thou relationship with the client. The techniques outlined in this volume will help you develop a greater sense of openness about yourself and your feelings, enabling you to offer clients more effective services.The Personhood of the Therapist explores the myriad ways in which a therapist's emotional responses and life experiences can contribute to the client's healing. This approach is a dramatic departure from the traditional Freudian ideal of the aloof, unresponsive analyst, but the case studies in this volume will persuade you that it is powerfully effective. In addition to case studies, this thoughtful, compassionate book offers dialogues, personal reminiscences, techniques, and discussions of psychological theory. The Personhood of the Therapist offers new ideas and fresh perspectives on such life-changing issues as: self-disclosure and self-awareness for therapists ways to respect and foster the full sacredness of the client the different roles of the therapist important new views on transference and countertransferenceIt also contains deeply moving accounts of individual experiences, including: how an oncotherapist was affected by her own family's experience with cancer using Integrity Therapy to heal old wounds for a troubled couple, along with the comments of the two clients a therapist's own emotional journey through a troubled marriage and the strange disappearance of her sister The Personhood of the Therapist will help you employ your knowledge about life, not just theories, to offer better services to clients and help you appreciate how clients can enrich your life.

Drawing from almost a decade of ethnographic research in largely Brazilian and Puerto Rican neighborhoods in Newark, New Jersey, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, in Street Therapists,examines how affect, emotion, and sentiment serve as waypoints for the navigation of interracial relationships among US-born Latinos, Latin American migrants, blacks, and white ethnics. Tackling a rarely studied dynamic approach to affect, Ramos-Zayas offers a thorough—and sometimes paradoxical—new articulation of race, space, and neoliberalism in US urban communities. After looking at the historical, political, and economic contexts in which an intensified connection between affect and race has emerged in Newark, New Jersey, Street Therapists engages in detailed examinations of various community sites—including high schools, workplaces, beauty salons, and funeral homes, among others—and secondary sites in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and San Juan to uncover the ways US-born Latinos and Latin American migrants interpret and analyze everyday racial encounters through a language of psychology and emotions. As Ramos-Zayas notes, this emotive approach to race resurrects Latin American and Caribbean ideologies of “racial democracy” in an urban US context—and often leads to new psychological stereotypes and forms of social exclusion. Extensively researched and thoughtfully argued, Street Therapists theorizes the conflictive connection between race, affect, and urban neoliberalism.

The techniques of psychotherapy are often given undue emphasis, slighting the importance of the psychotherapist. Research suggests that the same techniques are differently effective when used by equally trained and supervised therapists. Not only are some therapists more effective, irrespective of the type of therapy they practice, but some, because of their personal qualities, may actually harm those with whom they work. This research reflects the vast importance of the personality of the therapist, evoking the question of how a therapist may develop personhood. Aimed at training as well as practicing psychotherapists--social workers, counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists--this scholarly exploration of personhood includes various models for classifying the types of psychotherapy and the place of personhood in this context, as well as a review of existing theory and research literature on specific personal therapist variables as they relate to therapy outcome. The role of traditional spirituality in the development of personhood is given particular emphasis.

The Person of the Therapist Training Model presents a model that prepares therapists to make active and purposeful use of who they are, personally and professionally, in all aspects of the therapeutic process—relationship, assessment and intervention. The authors take a process that seems vague and elusive, the self-of-the-therapist work, and provide a step-by-step description of how to conceptualize, structure, and implement a training program designed to facilitate the creation of effective therapists, who are skilled at using their whole selves in their encounters with clients. This book looks to make conscious and planned use of a therapist’s race, gender, culture, values, life experience, and in particular, personal vulnerabilities and struggles in how he or she relates and works with clients. This evidence-supported resource is ideal for clinicians, supervisors, and training programs.

This book deals with what is perhaps the central question in therapy - who is the therapist? And how does that actually come across and manifest itself in the therapeutic relationship? A good deal of the thinking about this in psychoanalysis has come under the heading of countertransference. Much of the thinking in the humanistic approaches has come under such headings as empathy, genuineness, nonpossessive warmth, presence, personhood.

This book integrates postmodern theories of therapeutic research and practice to demonstrate how these approaches can be effectively integrated into methods of data collection and analysis. Drawing from theories of counseling, and marriage and family therapy, the book thoroughly explores the similarities between therapy and qualitative research. Chapters consider therapies which offer a humanistic "way of being," such as collaborative language systems, narrative therapy, and solution-focused brief therapy, and identify complementary philosophies and traits that can be used to guide the qualitative researcher’s practice. Transcripts and vignettes of the author’s practice as both a therapist and a researcher further help to illuminate how readers might enrich their processes of research and data analysis. Suitable for use on graduate-level qualitative research courses, as well as an adjunct to marriage and family therapy courses, Integrating Postmodern Therapy and Qualitative Research innovatively encourages readers to reflect on and develop their personal practice and approach to analyzing key information.

The Use of Self in Therapy discusses issues of transparency and self-disclosure; how can therapists use themselves effectively in their work without transgressing on professional regulations? The authors demonstrate how to train and develop the self and person of the therapist as a powerful adjunct to successful therapy, and examine the impact of the internet and social media on the conduct of therapy.