Selekman, a family therapist and addictions counselor, and Beyebach, a clinical psychologist and family therapist and family therapy supervisor who teaches psychology at the U. Pontificia de Salamanca in Spain, outline a collaborative, strengths-based brief family therapy approach for therapists to use to help couples and families change self-destructive behavior. They address the elements for creating a therapeutic climate for change, major therapeutic experiments and rituals for working with couples and families, and applying the approach to self-harm, substance abuse, eating-disordered behavior, gambling, and Internet and cyber sex abuse, with information on existing research on treatment, assessment questions and treatment planning, and case examples, as well as chapters on working with reluctant and complicated multi-habit-dependent clients and preventing relapse and maintaining goals. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
For the first time in one volume self-harm, substance abuse, eating-disordered behavior, gambling, and Internet and cyber sex abusefive crippling, self-destructive behaviorsare given a common conceptual framework to help with therapeutic intervention. Matthew Selekman and Mark Beyebach, two internationally-recognized therapists, know first-hand that therapists see clients who have problems with several of these habits in varying contexts. They maintain an optimistic, positive, solution-focused approach while carefully addressing problems and risks. The difficulties of change, the risk of slips and relapses, and the ups-and-downs of therapeutic processes are widely acknowledged and addressed.
Readers will find useful, hands-on therapeutic strategies and techniques that they can use in both individual and conjoint sessions during couple, family, and one-on-one therapy. Detailed case examples provide windows to therapeutic processes and the complexities in these cases. Clinical interventions are put in a wider research context, while research is reviewed and used to extract key implications of empirical findings. This allows for a flexible and open therapeutic approach that therapists can use to integrate techniques and procedures from a variety of approaches and intervention programs.
