Blue Nights (Enhanced Edition)

Joan Didion

This enhanced eBook edition of Blue Nights includes three short films directed by Griffin Dunne and starring Joan Didion. Each film blends Didion's incisive prose with images and mementos from her daughter's life. From one of our most powerful writers, Blue Nights is a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old. Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhood—in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced. “How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?” Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept. Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profoundly moving.

The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy

Irvin D. Yalom, Molyn Leszcz

Dive into this educational and entertaining work on group psychotherapy and see firsthand how it has been helping patients learn and grow for years. Hailed by Jerome Frank as "the best book that exists on the subject," Irvin D. Yalom's The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy has been the standard text in the field for decades. In this completely revised and updated fifth edition, Dr. Yalom and his collaborator Dr. Molyn Leszcz expand the book to include the most recent developments in the field, drawing on nearly a decade of new research as well as their broad clinical wisdom and expertise. New topics include: online therapy, specialized groups, ethnocultural diversity, trauma and managed care. At once scholarly and lively, this is the most up-to-date, incisive, and comprehensive text available on group psychotherapy.

The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds

John Bowlby

Helping both parents and psychologists to arrive at a better understanding of the inner emotional world of the infant, this selection of key lectures by Bowlby includes the seminal one that gives the volume its title. Informed by wide clinical experience, and written with the author's well-known humanity and lucidity, the lectures provide an invaluable introduction to John Bowlby's thought and work, as well as much practical guidance of use both to parents and to members of the mental health professions.

Posttraumatic Growth

Theory, Research, and Applications

Richard G. Tedeschi, Jane Shakespeare-Finch, Kanako Taku

Posttraumatic Growth reworks and overhauls the seminal 2006 Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth. It provides a wide range of answers to questions concerning knowledge of posttraumatic growth (PTG) theory, its synthesis and contrast with other theories and models, and its applications in diverse settings. The book starts with an overview of the history, components, and outcomes of PTG. Next, chapters review quantitative, qualitative, and cross-cultural research on PTG, including in relation to cognitive function, identity formation, cross-national and gender differences, and similarities and differences between adults and children. The final section shows readers how to facilitate optimal outcomes with PTG at the level of the individual, the group, the community, and society.

Momma And The Meaning Of Life

Tales From Psychotherapy

Irvin D. Yalom

As the public grows disillusioned with therapeutic quick fixes, people are looking for a deeper psychotherapeutic experience to make life more meaningful and satisfying. What really happens in therapy? What promises and perils does it hold for them? No one writes about therapy - or indeed the dilemmas of the human condition - with more acuity, style, and heart than Irvin Yalom. Here he combines the storytelling skills so widely praised in Love's Executioner with the wisdom of the compassionate and fully engaged psychotherapist. In these six compelling tales of therapy, Yalom introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters: Paula, who faces death and stares it down; Magnolia, into whose ample lap Yalom longs to pour his own sorrows; Irene, who learns to seek out anger and plunge into it. And there's Momma, old-fashioned, ill-tempered, who drifts into Yalom's dreams and tramples through his thoughts. At once wildly entertaining and deeply thoughtful, Momma and the Meaning of Life is a work of rare insight and imagination.

The Spiritual Lives of Bereaved Parents

Dennis Klass

This book describes how parents lose, find, or relocate spiritual anchors after the death of their child. It describes how ordinary people reconstruct their lives after their foundations have shifted, and how they make sense of their world after one of their centers of meaning has been removed. Klass grounds his descriptions of spirituality in his scholarly study of comparative religions, and in his two decades studying the lives of bereaved parents. He argues that continuing bonds with their dead children can give parents a new transcendent reality. Deceased children, like saints or bodhisattvas, can offer a bridge between the profane and sacred worlds, support parents as they find meaning in a world made forever poorer, and bind together a community adequate to parents' grief. The book reports Klass's clinical practice and his work as advisor to a bereaved parents self-help support group.

Love and Loss

The Roots of Grief and its Complications

Colin Murray Parkes

Loving and grieving are two sides of the same coin: we cannot have one without risking the other. Only by understanding the nature and pattern of loving can we begin to understand the problems of grieving. Conversely, the loss of a loved person can teach us much about the nature of love. Love and Loss, the result of a lifetime's work, has important implications for the study of attachment and bereavement. In this volume, Colin Murray Parkes reports his innovative research that enables us to bring together knowledge of childhood attachments and problems of bereavement, resulting in a new way of thinking about love, bereavement and other losses. Areas covered include: patterns of attachment and grief loss of a parent, child or spouse in adult life social isolation and support. The book concludes by looking at disorders of attachment and considering bereavement in terms of its implications on love, loss, and change in a wider context. Illuminating the structure and focus of thinking about love and loss, this book sheds light on a wide range of psychological issues. It will be essential reading for professionals working with bereavement, as well as graduate students of psychology, psychiatry, and sociology.

Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society

Bridging Research and Practice

Robert A. Neimeyer, Darcy L. Harris, Howard R. Winokuer, Gordon Thornton

Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society is the authoritative guide to the study of and work with major themes in bereavement. The classic edition includes a new preface from the lead editors discussing advances in the field since the book’s initial publication. The book’s chapters synthesize the best of research-based conceptualization and clinical wisdom across 30 of the most important topics in the field. The volume’s contributors come from around the world, and their work reflects a level of cultural awareness of the diversity and universality of bereavement and its challenges that has rarely been approximated by other volumes. This is a readable, engaging, and comprehensive book that shares the most important scientific and applied work on the contemporary scene with a broad international audience. It’s an essential addition to anyone with a serious interest in death, dying, and bereavement.

Death Is But a Dream

Finding Hope and Meaning at Life's End

Christopher Kerr, Carine Mardorossian

The first book to validate the meaningful dreams and visions that bring comfort as death nears. Christopher Kerr is a hospice doctor. All of his patients die. Yet he has cared for thousands of patients who, in the face of death, speak of love and grace. Beyond the physical realities of dying are unseen processes that are remarkably life-affirming. These include dreams that are unlike any regular dream. Described as "more real than real," these end-of-life experiences resurrect past relationships, meaningful events and themes of love and forgiveness; they restore life's meaning and mark the transition from distress to comfort and acceptance. Drawing on interviews with over 1,400 patients and more than a decade of quantified data, Dr. Kerr reveals that pre-death dreams and visions are extraordinary occurrences that humanize the dying process. He shares how his patients' stories point to death as not solely about the end of life, but as the final chapter of humanity's transcendence. Kerr's book also illuminates the benefits of these phenomena for the bereaved, who find solace in seeing their loved ones pass with a sense of calm closure. Beautifully written, with astonishing real-life characters and stories, this book is at its heart a celebration of our power to reclaim the dying process as a deeply meaningful one. Death Is But a Dream is an important contribution to our understanding of medicine's and humanity's greatest mystery.

Man's Search For Ultimate Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl

Viktor Frankl, bestselling author of Man's Search for Meaning, explains the psychological tools that enabled him to survive the Holocaust Viktor Frankl is known to millions as the author of Man's Search for Meaning, his harrowing Holocaust memoir. In this book, he goes more deeply into the ways of thinking that enabled him to survive imprisonment in a concentration camp and to find meaning in life in spite of all the odds. He expands upon his groundbreaking ideas and searches for answers about life, death, faith and suffering. Believing that there is much more to our existence than meets the eye, he says: 'No one will be able to make us believe that man is a sublimated animal once we can show that within him there is a repressed angel.' In Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning, Frankl explores our sometimes unconscious desire for inspiration or revelation. He explains how we can create meaning for ourselves and, ultimately, he reveals how life has more to offer us than we could ever imagine.

Alone Together

Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Sherry Turkle

A groundbreaking book by one of the most important thinkers of our time shows how technology is warping our social lives and our inner ones Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends, and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. But this relentless connection leads to a deep solitude. MIT professor Sherry Turkle argues that as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down. Based on hundreds of interviews and with a new introduction taking us to the present day, Alone Together describes changing, unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, and families.

Bereavement Groups and the Role of Social Support

Integrating Theory, Research, and Practice

William G. Hoy

All too frequently, clinical practice consists of repeating year after year the methods learned in graduate training, occasionally seasoned by a technique learned in a continuing-education workshop. Bereavement Groups and the Role of Social Support gives clinicians what they’ve been missing in other volumes: practical techniques that have a solid contemporary empirical basis. Deftly weaving together theory, research, and practice, this volume is a compendium of the latest practical thinking about bereavement support groups. Readers will learn when well-loved practices make sense and are supported by sound evidence, as well as which practices should possibly be discontinued. The book also contains the results of a qualitative study bringing together the best practices of experienced bereavement group leaders from around the world.

The Grieving Child

A Parent's Guide

Helen Fitzgerald

Making a Child's World Whole Again Explaining death to a child is one of the most difficult tasks a parent or other relative can face. The Grieving Child offers practical, compassionate advice for helping a child cope with the death of a parent or other loved one. Parents of children from preschool age to the teen years will find much-needed guidance, covering: • Helping a child visit the seriously ill or dying • Using language appropriate to a child's age level • Selecting useful books about death • Handling especially difficult situations, including murder and suicide • Deciding whether a child should attend a funeral With a new chapter devoted to the special issues of the bereaved toddler, The Grieving Child provides invaluable suggestions for dealing with a child's emotional responses (including anger, guilt, and depression) and helping a child adjust to a new life.

When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back

Carl's Book

Naja Marie Aidt

An unflinchingly raw and lyrical exploration of a mother’s grief and how it transforms her relationship to time, reality, and language. Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Translation In March 2015, Naja Marie Aidt’s twenty-five-year-old son, Carl, died in a tragic accident. When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back chronicles the few first years after that devastating phone call. It is at once a sober account of life after losing a child and an exploration of the language of poetry, loss, and love. Intensely moving, When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back explores what is it to be a family, what it is to love and lose, and what it is to treasure life in spite of death's indomitable resolve.

Death, Society, and Human Experience

Robert Kastenbaum, Christopher M. Moreman

The 13th edition of Death, Society, and Human Experience provides a panoramic overview of the ways that we are touched by death and dying, both as individuals and as members of society. A landmark text in the field, the authors draw on contributions from the social and behavioral sciences as well as the humanities, including perspectives offered through history, philosophy, religion, literature, and the arts, to provide thorough coverage and understanding of topics associated with the end of life and death and dying. By approaching the subject from multiple angles, the authors explain the various ways that individual, cultural, and societal attitudes influence both how and when we die and how we live and deal with the knowledge of death and loss. Originally written by Robert Kastenbaum, a renowned scholar who developed one of the world’s first death education courses, Christopher M. Moreman, who has worked in the field of death studies for two decades, has updated this edition. In addition to infusing his close areas of focus, both in afterlife beliefs and experiences and how these might affect how people live their lives, he’s weaved in new coverage of current affairs, including: The impact of COVID-19 on experiences of death, bereavement, mourning, and more Expanded legalization of physician-assisted dying in the United States and several countries Changes in bereavement rituals and traditions stemming from technology use and social media With additional content and classroom extensions available online, Death, Society, and Human Experience remains a thoughtful, exploratory, and impressively comprehensive overview for undergraduate and graduate courses in death, dying, and bereavement.

It's OK That You're Not OK

Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand

Megan Devine, LPC

Challenging conventional wisdom on grief, a pioneering therapist offers a new resource for those experiencing loss When a painful loss or life-shattering event upends your world, here is the first thing to know: there is nothing wrong with grief. “Grief is simply love in its most wild and painful form,” says Megan Devine. “It is a natural and sane response to loss.” So, why does our culture treat grief like a disease to be cured as quickly as possible? In It’s OK That You’re Not OK, Megan Devine offers a profound new approach to both the experience of grief and the way we try to help others who have endured tragedy. Having experienced grief from both sides—as both a therapist and as a woman who witnessed the accidental drowning of her beloved partner—Megan writes with deep insight about the unspoken truths of loss, love, and healing. She debunks the culturally prescribed goal of returning to a normal, “happy” life, replacing it with a far healthier middle path, one that invites us to build a life alongside grief rather than seeking to overcome it. In this compelling and heartful book, you’ll learn: • Why well-meaning advice, therapy, and spiritual wisdom so often end up making it harder for people in grief • How challenging the myths of grief—doing away with stages, timetables, and unrealistic ideals about how grief should unfold—allows us to accept grief as a mystery to be honored instead of a problem to solve • Practical guidance for managing stress, improving sleep, and decreasing anxiety without trying to “fix” your pain • How to help the people you love—with essays to teach us the best skills, checklists, and suggestions for supporting and comforting others through the grieving process Many people who have suffered a loss feel judged, dismissed, and misunderstood by a culture that wants to “solve” grief. Megan writes, “Grief no more needs a solution than love needs a solution.” Through stories, research, life tips, and creative and mindfulness-based practices, she offers a unique guide through an experience we all must face—in our personal lives, in the lives of those we love, and in the wider world. It’s OK That You’re Not OK is a book for grieving people, those who love them, and all those seeking to love themselves—and each other—better.

Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?

Julie Smith

Give your mind the one thing it needs in 2024 with the book everyone is STILL talking about, from clinical psychologist and TikTok sensation Dr Julie Smith 'A brilliant book' Steven Bartlett, Diary of a CEO podcast 'Full of sound, helpful advice with life skills, from building confidence to managing stress' Sunday Times AS FEATURED IN THE OBSERVER, STYLIST, EVENING STANDARD, WOMEN'S HEALTH, MARIE CLAIRE AND GRAZIA ________ Drawing on years of experience as a clinical psychologist, online sensation Dr Julie Smith shares all the skills you need to get through life's ups and downs. Filled with secrets from a therapist's toolkit, this is a must-have handbook for optimising your mental health. Dr Julie's simple but expert advice and powerful coping techniques will help you stay resilient no matter what life throws your way. Written in short, bite-sized entries, you can turn straight to the section you need depending on the challenge you're facing - and immediately find the appropriate tools to help with . . . - Managing anxiety - Dealing with criticism - Battling low mood - Building self-confidence - Finding motivation - Learning to forgive yourself This book tackles the everyday issues that affect us all and offers easy, practical solutions that might just change your life. ________ 'Sound wisdom, easy to gulp down. I'm sure this book is already helping lots of people. Great work, Dr Julie' Matt Haig, bestselling author of Reasons To Stay Alive 'I'm blown away by her ability to communicate difficult ideas with ease, simplicity and practicality. Amazing. Go and buy it now!' Jay Shetty 'It's real, it's authentic . . . Very practical and very, very helpful' Lorraine Kelly 'Relatable, real and easy to digest . . . As if your wise best friend is chatting to you. An essential mental-health bible for adults and teenagers' YOU Magazine, Daily Mail 'If you want to feel like you have a therapist sitting across from you, empowering you with how to be your best self, this book is for you!' Nicole LePera, New York Times bestselling author of How to Do the Work Sunday Times bestseller, June 2024 Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? has sold over one million copies across all formats, The Bookseller, January 2024

Handbook of Social Justice in Loss and Grief

Exploring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Darcy L. Harris, Tashel C. Bordere

The Handbook of Social Justice in Loss and Grief is a scholarly work of social criticism, richly grounded in personal experience, evocative case studies, and current multicultural and sociocultural theories and research. It is also consistently practical and reflective, challenging readers to think through responses to ethically complex scenarios in which social justice is undermined by radically uneven opportunity structures, hierarchies of voice and privilege, personal and professional power, and unconscious assumptions, at the very junctures when people are most vulnerable—at points of serious illness, confrontation with end-of-life decision making, and in the throes of grief and bereavement. Harris and Bordere give the reader an active and engaged take on the field, enticing readers to interrogate their own assumptions and practices while increasing, chapter after chapter, their cultural literacy regarding important groups and contexts. The Handbook of Social Justice in Loss and Grief deeply and uniquely addresses a hot topic in the helping professions and social sciences and does so with uncommon readability.

A Way of Being

Carl Ransom Rogers

"Rogers, founder of the humanistic psychology movement and father of client-centered therapy ... traces his professional development from the sixties to the eighties and ends with a person-centered prophecy in which [he] calls for a more humane future."--Back cover.

The Many Faces of Bereavement

The Nature and Treatment of Natural, Traumatic, and Stigmatized Grief

Ginny Sprang

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.