Co-creating safety : healing the fragile patient [E-book]

Introduction. When the Center Cannot Hold
Part One. Building a Secure Attachment
Chapter One. Anxiety: The Signal of Danger
Chapter Two. Declaring a Problem: Is It Safe to Depend?
Chapter Three. Declaring One’s Will: Is It Safe to Have a Separate Will?
Chapter Four. Psychodiagnosis: Co-Creating an Effective Focus
Chapter Five. Co-Creating a Therapeutic Alliance: Making the Unconscious Will to Health Conscious
Part Two. Strengthening the Patient
Chapter Six. Systems of Self-Protection: The Hierarchy of Affect Thresholds
Chapter Seven. Declaring One’s Feelings: Is It Safe to Share Feelings?
Chapter Eight. Restoring Lost Capacities
Part Three. Integrating the Patient
Chapter Nine. Denial: Learning to Face Reality
Chapter Ten. Splitting: Learning to Tolerate Complex Feelings and Realities
Chapter Eleven. Projection: Learning to Feel Inside What We Placed Outside
Chapter Twelve. Severe Fragility: Pseudohallucinations and Pseudodelusions
Chapter Thirteen. Projective Identification and Countertransference: Learning to Bear What Is Inside Ourselves

Some patients are crippled by fear and anxiety. To help the 50 percent of patients who drop out of therapy before they have received its full benefits, therapists must know how to make therapy a safe place. Only if patients feel safe in their body and with the therapist can they feel safe enough to change. Co-Creating Safety provides clear, systematic steps for assessing and meeting patients' needs.

Every technique is illustrated with a vignette. Representing hundreds of therapeutic impasses taken from actual sessions, the vignettes show therapists what to say so they can assess and respond to patients' needs moment by moment, help patients develop and keep an effective focus that leads to change, help regulate patients' anxiety, deactivate misperceptions of the therapist and therapy, help patients see and let go of defenses that cause their symptoms, help them overcome their fears and face their feelings, and help them let go of insecure attachment strategies to form a healing relationship.