Geared toward practicing therapists and supervisors who help novice psychotherapists deal with the potential harmful emotions they may experience in their training, The book draws on integrative and relational psychotherapy, research on the therapeutic alliance, and social psychology research on the reattribution of motive.

This book identifies which characteristics make therapists more or less effective in their work and proposes guidelines to improve their effectiveness.

Countertransference and the Therapist’s Inner Experience explores the inner world of the psychotherapist and its influences on the relationship between psychotherapist and patient. This relationship is a major element determining the success of psychotherapy, in addition to determining how and to what extent psychotherapy works with each individual patient. Authors Charles J. Gelso and Jeffrey A. Hayes present the history and current status of countertransference, offer a theoretically integrative conception, and focus on how psychotherapists can manage countertransference in a way that benefits the therapeutic process. The book contains completely up-to-date data from existing research findings, and illuminates the universality of countertransference across all psychotherapies and psychotherapists. Contents include: *the operation of countertransference across three predominant theory clusters in psychotherapy; *leading factors involved in the management of countertransference; and *valuable recommendations for psychotherapy practitioners and researchers. Professionals in clinical and counseling psychology, psychiatry, social work, and counseling will benefit from this volume. The book is also appropriate for graduate students in these fields.

Although the impact that clients can have on therapists is well-known, most work on the subject consists of dire warnings: mental health professionals are taught early on to be on their guard for burnout, compassion fatigue, and countertransference. However, while these professional hazards are very real, the scholarly focus on the negative potential of the client-counselor relationship often implies that no good can come of allowing oneself to get too close to a client's issues. This sentiment obscures what every therapist knows to be true: that the client-counselor relationship can also effect powerful positive transformations in a therapist's own life. The Client Who Changed Me is Jeffrey Kottler and Jon Carlson's testimony to the significant and often life-changing ways in which therapists have been changed by their patients. Kottler and Carlson draw not only upon their own extensive experience - between them, they have more than fifty years in the field - but also upon lengthy interviews with dozens of the country's foremost therapists and theorists. This novel work presents readers with a truly unique perspective on the business of therapy: not merely how it appears externally, but how practitioners experience it internally. Although these stories paint a complex and multi-layered portrait of the client-counselor relationship, they all demonstrate the profound and unexpected rewards that the profession has to offer.

This book is intended for psychotherapists working with depressed clients. In particular, it focuses on how working with depressed clients affects the therapists themselves, and elaborates on how therapists can care for themselves in such demanding work to prevent burnout, or process it meaningfully as part of their professional development. Based on the results of the author’s own long-term experience, qualitative research and theoretical concepts describing psychopathology from the humanistic-existential perspective of Gestalt therapy, this book describes a paradoxical way of working in which therapists transform their own experience in the presence of a depressed client. Using the example of working with depression, the book introduces how the field theory approach can be used in clinical practice. The book provides a conceptual framework, practical skills and case examples illustrating what a field theory approach brings new to the table. This will be a useful guide for psychotherapists and Gestalt therapists who regularly come into contact with depressive clients, as well as for therapists who are themselves experiencing professional exhaustion and are at risk of reaching burnout.

This book presents a classic examination of transference phenomena and focuses on the development of psychoanalytic technique and theory. It addresses a perceived gap between psychoanalytic knowledge and its capacity to effect psychological transformation in a patient.

Helping clients control their own emotional reactivity. When conditions like anxiety and depression are experienced chronically, they condition neural pathways and shape a person’s perception of and response to life events. As these pathways are reinforced, unhealthy neural networks turn on with increasing ease in the presence of conscious and unconscious triggers. In this groundbreaking book, Kershaw and Wade present Brain Change Therapy (BCT), a therapeutic protocol in which clients learn to manage their emotions and behaviors, and thus reduce stress and control emotional reactivity. Drawing from the latest neuroscientific research as well as integrative principles from hypnosis, biofeedback, and cognitive therapy, BCT helps clients reach stable neurological and emotional states and thus shift perspectives, attitudes, beliefs, and personal narratives toward the positive. BCT starts with the working assumption that effective therapeutic change must inevitably include a repatterning of neural pathways, and employs “self-directed neuroplasticity” through the active practicing of focused attention. As an adjunct to these methods, it helps clients create new, empowering life experiences that can serve as the basis for new neural patterns. The book begins by laying the foundation for body–mind and brain–body interventions by exploring the basics of the brain: its anatomy, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, electrochemical processes, and the rhythms of the brain and body and nature. The authors set forth a detailed protocol for neuroassessment and evaluation of new clients, with particular attention to assessing a client’s habitually activated emotional circuits, neural imprints, state flexibility, level of arousal, and any relevant neurobiological conditions. The authors go on to outline BCT and its interventions geared toward stress reduction and state change, or the capacity to shift the mind from one emotional state to another and to shift the brain from one neural pattern to another. Protocols for specific presenting problems, such as fear, anxiety, and life-threatening and chronic illnesses are outlined in detail. Because of the breadth of the BCT approach, it is effective in working with individuals who are interested in shifting and conditioning peak performance states of consciousness, and the authors offer protocols for helping their clients reach peak professional performance as well. With this book, clinicians will be able to empower their clients to find their way out of a wide range of debilitating mental states.