Gift of Therapy, The: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients (P.S.)

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Useful for therapists, coaches, facilitators and even educators. The author has 35 years of experience of working with patients. Life Meaning : Humans = meaning seeking creatures.Engagement is what counts.Our job as therapists is to remove obstacles to engagement.

Described by Yalom as both “a sequence of tips for therapists,” and “a nuts-and-bolts collection of favorite interventions or statements,” The Gift of Therapy is “long on technique and short on theory.”

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Entrepreneurial ventures are successful only when they communicate value to people with a concern that the business can take care of In groups, Yalom’s frame of reference is interpersonal and is based on the assumption that patients “fall into despair because of their inability to develop and sustain gratifying interpersonal relationships.” Existentialism is a philosophical study of the human being as a thinking, acting, feeling, and living being in search of authentic existence; (to understand this even better, we warmly suggest you read our summaries of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Carl Rogers’ On Becoming a Person) The Gift of Therapy is primarily a book targeting therapists: especially those who already know something about Yalom and existential therapy and are familiar with the theoretical aspects of the practice. The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.”

One other factor influenced my selection of these eighty-five items. My recent novels and stories contain many descriptions of therapy procedures I’ve found useful in my clinical work but, since my fiction has a comic, often burlesque tone, many readers are unclear if I am serious or not about the therapy procedures I describe. The Gift of Therapyoffers me an opportunity to set the record straight.

Except in extreme cases – and for insurance companies – avoid diagnosis: you are talking with a unique human being, not with a general concept; When I was finding my way as a young psychotherapy student, the most useful book I read was Karen Horney's Neurosis and Human Growth. And the single most useful concept in that book was the notion that the human being has an inbuilt propensity toward self-realization. If obstacles are removed, Horney believed, the individual will develop into a mature, fully realized adult, just as an acorn will develop into an oak tree.