Bookshelf

This text and professional resource offers an alternative approach to thinking about and working with “difficult” families. From a nonpathologizing stance, William C. Madsen demonstrates creative ways to help family members shift their relationship to longstanding problems; envision desired lives; and develop more proactive coping strategies. Anyone working with families in crisis, especially in settings where time and resources are scarce, will gain valuable insights and tools from this book.

In this groundbreaking book, John Winslade and Gerald Monk -- leaders in the narrative therapy movement-introduce an innovative conflict resolution paradigm that is a revolutionary departure from the traditional problem-solving, interest-based model of resolving disputes. The narrative mediation approach encourages the conflicting parties to tell their personal "story" of the conflict and reach resolution through a profound understanding of the context of their individual stories. The authors map out the theoretical foundations of this new approach to conflict resolution and show how to apply specific techniques for the practical application of narrative mediation to a wide-variety of conflict situations.

How to apply the definitive postmodern therapeutic technique in a variety of situations, including treating alcoholics, counseling students, treating male sexual abuse survivors, and more. Written with scholarship, energy, practicality, and awareness.

Working with clients who abuse drugs or alcohol poses formidable challenges to the clinician. Addicted persons are often confronting multiple, complex problems, from the denial of the addiction itself, to legacies of early trauma or abuse, to histories of broken relationships with parents, spouses, and children. Making matters more confusing, the treatment field is too often splintered into different approaches, each with its own competing claims. This eloquently written book proposes a narrative approach that builds a much-needed bridge between family therapy, psychodynamic therapy, and addictions counseling. Demonstrated are innovative, flexible ways to help clients form new understandings of what has happened in their lives, explore their relationships to drugs and alcohol, and develop new stories to guide and nourish their recovery.

This volume presents a unique and powerful brief therapy approach that combines the best elements of the strategic and narrative traditions in family therapy. Highly effective in treating a broad range of clinical problems, this integrative model enables therapists to alter meanings while working toward behavior change in a goal-directed framework. Taking readers step by step through the process of change, the book shows how problems develop from the mishandling of ordinary life events and how therapists can map problem cycles, reframe problems with respect, and work with clients to create simple and elegant solutions.

All couples go through challenging times: some survive and thrive, others don't. How can we understand and use this distinction in the practical application of therapy?

In their solution-oriented, competency-based approach to couples therapy, Phillip Ziegler and Tobey Hiller answer this question. In Recreating Partnership, an innovative, theoretically sound, and practical handbook for clinicians, Ziegler and Hiller present a bold and clinically useful concept, the good story/bad story dichotomy. The book shows clinicians how to use this narrative concept in conducting effective and efficient relationship therapy that will help couples build solutions collaboratively, invigorate partnership, and thrive, each in their own unique ways. The book covers issues such as establishing rapport with antagonistic partners; developing therapeutic goals; hosting conversations that reinvigorate the couple's good story; how, when, and whether to offer task assignments; addressing issues such as domestic violence; and how to bring therapy to a close, as well as many cogent and helpful transcripts. Written for psychologists, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and anyone who works with couples, Recreating Partnership will be exciting and useful to both the novice and experienced practitioner.

For decades, health care providers have worked as though there were a monolithic wall dividing the ailments of the mind from those of the body. Theorists on either side developed separate languages and philosophies to explain symptoms. This distinction has left many clinicians unable to treat successfully patients whose symptoms—such as headaches, conversion paralysis, and seizures—arise from the place where mind and body meet. In this book, the authors describe a powerful narrative therapy, one that relies on the wisdom and everyday language of patients’ real-life stories instead of the expert knowledge and professional language of the clinician. This approach can be used across all categories of somatic symptoms, from factitious ones to medical illnesses such as asthma or migraine headaches.

This volume offers clinicians and students an inside view of several new competency-based approaches that are transforming the field of psychotherapy. Showing how to build on client strengths, the book details a collaborative process in which the therapist and client co-construct meaning in the therapeutic conversation. In-depth clinical examples and question-and-answer exchanges between the editor and the chapter authors provide the reader with a uniquely personal view of the process of therapy. This book will be of great interest to psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, marriage and family therapists, mental health counselors, psychiatric nurses.

Using the new narrative approach, this book presents work centring around the idea that psychotherapy is primarily a special kind of conversation that elicits clients' strengths, competencies and solutions. The therapist is seen as an expert in creating conversations that reveal clients' expertise and empower them to change. Contributors include Bill O'Hanlon, Steve de Shazer, Michael White, David Epston, Stephen Gilligan and Michele Weiner-Davis.

This volume offers the first in-depth and comprehensive view on the reflecting team process, a new and original set of ideas and practices that is transforming the field of family therapy. Bringing together an international group of pioneering contributors, this book advances a concept of therapy as a public and participatory forum in which many voices are heard and affirmed. Therapeutic teams and audiences provide a wealth of creative possibilities as client and therapist collaborate to find new meanings and options for action, opening space for family (and community) change. Through both theoretical presentations and detailed clinical transcripts, the contributors illustrate the benefits and utility of applying the reflecting team approach in a wide variety of clinical contexts.

This collection of articles from constructivist, narrative and social constructionist theorists and therapists describes alternatives to dia gnoses and treatment that humanize the assessment process and allow for therapeutic change. This book focuses on the question of how psycho therapists can think of human distress in a way that gives direction to the course of therapy without stigmatizing or pathologizing their clients. The approaches in this volume emphasize the personal and social processes of language and meaning making in creating and resolving problems. The authors focus on such techniques as the experiential exploration of the client's tacit processes of self-construction and the deconstruction of oppressive cultural discourses. The result is a book that explores the relevance of postmodern clinical theory and fleshes out emerging alternatives to diagnosis that are more personally viable, contextually sensitive, and ethically defensible.

Yaletown Family Therapy Publication

Praxis: Situating Discourse, Feminism & Politics, in Narrative Therapies
Edited by Stephen Madigan and Ian Law

To Order:
Email: info@yaletownfamilytherapy.com
Call toll free: 888-684-8244, Call Vancouver B.C.: 604-688-7860, or Fax: 604-688-7865