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Couples therapy has long been regarded as one of the most demanding forms of psychotherapy because of the way it challenges therapists to combine the insights of dynamic psychology with the power and clarity of systems dynamics. In this exciting new volume, Gordon Wheeler and Stephanie Backman, couples therapists with broad training and long years of experience, present dramatic new approaches that at last integrate the dynamic/self-organizational and the systemic/behavioral schools of thought. Building on the insights of Gestalt psychology and psychotherapy, the authors show us how a truly phenomenological approach, based on the clients' own experience and goals, holds the key to a dramatic increase in therapeutic power and flexibility. The fifteen engaging chapters demonstrate the application of this approach to issues of intimacy, self-construction, power and abuse, "resistance," growth, and shame - and to such diverse and challenging populations as abuse survivors and their partners, remarried couples, gay and lesbian couples, and couples with "personality" or "character" disorders. In the process, the authors offer a fresh perspective that will serve to re-energize the couples therapist's work in this challenging area. On Intimate Ground contributes new insights to many of the most timely and provocative questions in the field today.

This book contains powerful new insights for the therapist on a full-range of topics from intimacy in couples to fathering to politics to child development to gender issues to negative therapeutic reactions. Filled with anecdotes and case examples as well as practical strategies, The Voice of Shame will transform your ideas about the role of shame in relationships - and about the potential of the Gestalt model to clarify and contextualize other approaches. The Voice of Shame offers practical recommendations for working with shame, including: techniques for supporting couples in processing their individual and joint experiences of shame to break down destructive cycles and restore intimate process; perspectives on the effect of shame on women's identity formation, with particular reference to body image issues and eating disorders; methods for managing and healing painful shame issues in men's lives and father-son relations, and implications for a new understanding of development and gender; new analyses of the complex links between therapeutic issues and social/political process; tools for understanding and undoing the destructive shame and guilt that binds the "codependent" child; insight into the shame issues and struggles of living with chronic illness; methods for working with the potentially overwhelming shame experienced by gay, lesbian, and bisexual clients, and implications for all patients; and a creative, theoretical framework and practical guide for dealing with shame induced within the therapeutic relationship itself. The authors show how new perspectives on shame gained in one particular area transfer and generalize to other areas and settings. In so doing, they transformour fundamental understanding of psychotherapy itself. Grounded in the most recent research on the dynamics and experience of shame, this book is a practical guide for all psychotherapists, psychologists, clinicians, and others interested in self, psychotherapy, and relationship.

Creativity may be usefully defined as the capacity to generate novel solutions to problems, which includes of course the ability to see the world in problem-solving terms in the first place. Clearly, this creative capacity is the defining characteristic of our species, an extremely young branch of the primate order, which has managed to arise and then spread over the entire planet in the course of only 3000 or so generations, a mere blink of evolutionary time. This capacity, in turn, rests in some way on our biological history: specifically, the remarkably rapid expansion of brain tissue in our ancestral line, in which the neocortex together with its infoldings has multiplied some fourfold in surface area in the brief evolutionary window of only a couple of million years (Calvin, 2002). Plainly, a pace this rapid points to a strong positive feedback loop between adaptation and evolutionary pressure, one in which each new degree of development opens up new environmental territory, which then exerts strong selective pressure for expansion of that new capacity, in the recursive way of evolution. It is this expansion, together with accompanying reorganization, that has both permitted and been driven by the growth and elaboration of imaginal power and the nesting of active and long-term memory, which are key to our ability to experiment - i.e., to create and try out these novel solutions flexibly, both in our heads“ and in the ”real world“.