Main description:

The Good Enough Therapist is a guidebook-not an instruction manual-written for beginning, intermediate, and experienced clinicians. It encourages readers to explore, accept, and embrace their flaws and failings in a way that promotes effective treatment as well as personal growth. It focuses both on craft and process-craft related to the tools, the strategies, and the tactics of treatment, and process related to the session-by-session struggle to implement these tools in ways that speak to and illuminate the experience of living and struggling as a human being. It does not endeavor to transmit a method, but a sensibility, a way of being with patients that results in a deeper recognition of the therapist's, and the patient's, vulnerability, resilience, imagination, and integrity.

Contents:

Introduction: Socioeco-location Chapter 1 The Vandal Interlude 1 What is the Point of Writing This Book? Chapter 2 On Writing about the Clinical Without Being Too Clinical Chapter 3 Good Enough or Good-for-Nothing? Reflection Point 1 Good Enough and Not Good Enough Chapter 4 A Place to Start: On the Importance of Treatment Failure when Treating Failure-to-Launch Chapter 5 Two Powerful Lessons in Powerlessness Chapter 6 Three Births... Chapter 7 ...And a Fourth, the Birth of Forgiveness Reflection Point 2 "Why is S/he Here and What Does S/he Want?" Chapter 8 The Joy of Thwarting...and of Being Thwarted Interlude 2 Pull Up a Chair Chapter 9 Reduced Sentences Interlude 3 In the Company of Shadows: Visions of Grief Chapter 10 Cash in the Cup Interlude 4 The Adolescent (and Adult) Saboteur Chapter 11 Here and Not Here, There and Not There Interlude 5 Hard Winter Reflection Point 3 Blame, Responsibility and Credit Chapter 12 Tough Love...and Why It's So Tough Reflection Point 4 Ascending the Ladder of Therapy Chapter 13 The Ambivalent Tango of Hope Chapter 14 Narcissism and Its (Occasional) Nobility Interlude 6 Unsolvable Love Chapter 15 Nowhere but the Dark Interlude 7 Wandering Down Dream Avenue Chapter 16 Punishing the Punitive Therapiste Interlude 8 "Tell Me a Story" Chapter 17 On Hating a Patient Chapter 18 What Do We Want When We Want Out? Reflection Point 5 Creativity as an Antidote to Failure Chapter 19 Defeated by Success Chapter 20 The Diagnostic Dragnet Reflection Point 6 Learning from the Patient Chapter 21 We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident...Without Any Real Evidence Interlude 9 Plumbing the Depths of Power Chapter 22 "I Am Beside Myself" Reflecvtion Point 7 Kryptonite Time Chapter 23 What We Give Our Patients When We Give Up...and When We Don't Reflection Point 8 Nostalgia and Empathy Chapter 24 "Why am I Doing This?" Chapter 25 The Good Enough Supervisor Interlude 10 "How Is It That I Am Not Myself?" Chapter 26 Giving What You Never Got Reflection Point 9 How Telling Chapter 27 Loops Reflection Point 10 Take a Walk Conclusion "Going Grandfather": The Good Enough Therapist in Twilight Epilogue In Praise of Defeat