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The Gift of Therapy : An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients :: 0060938110
Description
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| Speaking directly to the current generation of counselors, The Gift of Therapy lays out simple suggestions that blend personal experience with professional objectivity. This is a book that will remind you why you entered the field in the first place. With tips on avoiding diagnosis (except for insurance purposes), when to disclose personal information, and why it's important to leave time between patient appointments, the recommendations are aimed at therapists, but they may be useful to patients who want to know what to expect from their counselors. Some references to the DSM-IV may be a little over the layperson’s head, but in general the writing is clear and understandable for lay readers as well as professionals. Each chapter is just a few pages long, a nice format for busy folks whose reading time occurs in snippets. A single topic is addressed in each chapter, and author Irvin Yalom doesn't waste any time in getting to the point. Many of the sections revolve around balancing the "magic, mystery, and authority" that come with the job of freeing your clients of their reliance on you. From when to offer an occasional hug to finding the perfect time for deeper questioning, Yalom's experienced observations will help you achieve even greater professional effectiveness while avoiding some of the more obvious traps in this HMO-directed age of mental health care. --Jill Lightner Editorial Descriptions are usually submitted by the manufacturers, publishers and authors. Contact us if you are one of them, and wish to change the above description. |
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Author: Guest
Although I'm not currently working as a therapist, I still enjoy reading books about therapy from time to time. I read Yalom's Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy in graduate school and highly enjoyed it, so I hoped I would find this book interesting as well.
In this text Yalom offers advice to therapists that he has gleaned through his years of work as a therapist and as a client. Some of the main things he discusses here are how important it is for a treatment provider to have experienced their own time as a client, how to use the "here and now" in treatment and how vital it is to his own theory of change, and the use of dreams in treatment. Obviously these are just a few of the things he focuses on, but these are what stood out as important and resonated with my own theories of change. The style of the book is great - each chapter discusses one small aspect of the treatment process and some of the chapters flow together as a good lecture in "how to..." should. I think that the best thing about this book is that the chapters are short - they range from one page to at the most four or five pages. This format gives the reader the ability to read the chapter then sit and think about the implications of what was said and how it can be useful to them. As a reader you don't feel the need to go on to the next "part" immediately because the "chapter line" so clearly delineates a new thought or suggestion.
I highly suggest this book to all treatment providers and students of therapy practices. I wish that there were more books like this that gave the reader a view into the minds of eminent scholars in different fields.
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Author: Guest
If you're thinking of entering the psychotherapy experience this book will help you develop awareness of what to look for. It will also really help you recognize red flags that will help you run - not walk - from some of the garbage that is being presented as psychotherapy today. However, it is definitely not a cookbook. As a therapist, I found it's premises validating and helpful. It felt good to know that some of my therapy values are shared by someone of Dr. Yalom's stature. I came away thinking that I have been very privileged and fortunate to have had some of the teachers that I've had.
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Author: Guest
I liked Yalom's Love's Executioner a lot, but was disappointed in this platitudious book. It read like a professional therapist's version of Tuesdays with Morrie, only Morrie was a lot more interesting even though he didn't have much to say either. I'm not quite sure why Yalom chose to fill this book with some pretty obvious things like a therapist should be himself or herself or "stay in the moment" or "no 'school' of therapy is as important as the therapist." This is what he's figured out after 35 years as a psychiatrist? My mother told me commensurate things about treating people in everyday life; she never graduated from college. Maybe we have such an obsession with "experts" that any of their platitudious remarks seem as brilliant as relativity theory, and have lost plain common sense while needing to be reminded of the tenets of basic human dignity, but it's pretty sad if even professionals in the mental health field have to be reminded of things that should be an authochthonous part the basic equation of encountering others. The other problem I have with this book is the title. What part of therapy is the gift? The skills and intuition of the therapist? The providing of care for the needy? In the U.S. at least, you pay for therapy. I don't consider something a gift if it costs money. That's not to say mental health professionals shouldn't earn a decent living. They should, considering the nature of the work, but it seems Yalom was getting his literary proclivities confused with his professional ones. The only trouble is that getting a licence to practice therapy isn't a poetic license. James Baldwin once said, "the price of love is the price of life." That says it all.
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Author: Guest
Yalom is helpful but at times settles into the grandfatherly role too easily, failing to interrogate his own beliefs as thoroughly as he should. Bad therapists could take some of his good ideas and use them to unhelpful purposes because the vagueness of the writing at times borders on sentimentality. A more rigorous approach would have avoided this and allowed Yalom's common sense a deeper coherence.
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Author: Guest
If all of my psychotherapy patients read this book at the start of therapy, I think that treatment would progress faster and go deeper. This is a perfect book for therapists to give to their patients, friends, and families, to promote understanding of just what goes on in the consulting room. One caveat (which Irv acknowledges himself): this book is about patients who are very high functioning. Serious mental illness, suicide, etc. are mentioned only in passing. Young clinicians who unthinkingly apply Dr. Yalom's advice not to use psychiatric diagnoses could find themselves in a lot of trouble when working with a less fortunate patient population.
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