Search results for ""Author William J. Doherty""

All couples walk to the altar dreaming of happily-ever-after, but many forces in our society work against healthy lifelong commitment. Renowned family therapist William J. Doherty reveals how cracks can develop in even a rock-solid marriage, and what steps you can take to keep your love strong. Learn ways to break free of common traps like confusing desires with needs, comparing your spouse to your fantasies of other relationships, or becoming overtime parents instead of full-time partners. You'll get suggestions for creating relationship rituals--from mundane to celebratory, sexy to silly--that build closeness and connection every day. The updated second edition incorporates Dr. Doherty's ongoing experience counseling couples, plus the latest information on marriage and health, how divorce affects kids, the impact of new technologies on family life, and more.Winner--Best Self-Help Book, ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards

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Clients often seek therapists’ input for dealing with ethical dilemmas in their lives, but there is little guidance for therapists in how to do this. This book shows therapists how to serve as ethical consultants who help clients balance their personal needs with their sense of responsibility to others. Dr. Bill Doherty blends decades of clinical experience with personal and philosophical insights to frame the skills and knowledge therapists need to act as ethical guides while respecting client autonomy. He calls for a shift from psychotherapy’s individualistic focus towards a more relational one that includes ethical connections to others. Doherty presents the LEAP‑C model, a framework for ethical consulting that utilizes the traditional therapeutic skills of listening, exploring, affirming, and offering perspective, while also challenging clients to recognize ethical issues they don't perceive. Using detailed case examples, Doherty provides a roadmap for addressing common client dilemmas, such as keeping and ending commitments, having affairs, lying and deceiving, and causing psychological or physical harm to others. He also provides guidelines for citizen therapists to lend their expertise to help solve larger societal concerns, such as political polarization and police–community relations.

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This book shows therapists how they can impact their communities by engaging their fellow citizens in addressing broad-based health and social problems. The greatest untapped resources for improving our health and social well-being are the knowledge, energy, and first-hand wisdom of the individuals, families, and communities who have dealt with challenges in their everyday lives. Mental health professionals can learn how to leverage these relationships to enact broader, community-wide change, using practices that fall outside of traditional methods of mental health service delivery. This book presents insights from the authors' two decades of work in the citizen health care model, in which they have partnered with leaders from a wide range of communities on initiatives designed to improve health and remove social barriers. Readers will learn big-picture strategies for identifying and developing community-level initiatives, from disease prevention to broader cultural challenges, as well as common problems that arise when doing this work. Includes in-depth discussions of successful, real-world programs co-created by therapists and community members, including: diabetes education anti-smoking campaigns political depolarization police interactions

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In Family Therapy, William J. Doherty and Susan H. McDaniel discuss the history, theory, and practice of this systems-oriented therapy. There are many different types of family therapy, but at the heart of each is systems theory, a model that arose from the fields of biology, physics, chemistry, and cybernetics. The main clinical precept of family systems theory is that individual problems must be understood within their larger family and environmental systems, which often provide the key to successful treatment. Family therapy provides a way of thinking in systemic, relational terms, and a set of strategies for intervening with individuals, couples, families, and other systems. Whether the client is a large family or a single person, family therapy focuses on changing relational interactions. In addition to this relationship focus, family therapy considers biological, environmental, and cultural influences on the client. Ultimately, this systemic way of thinking—essentially a model for understanding the complex relations that make up the world—can help therapists of all orientations in their practice. In this book, Dr. Doherty and Dr. McDaniel present and explore this approach, its theory, history, the therapy process, primary change mechanisms, empirical basis, and future developments. This essential primer to family therapy, amply illustrated with case examples, is perfect for graduate students studying theories of therapy and counseling as well as for seasoned practitioners interested in understanding this approach.

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New in paperback, this book presents a five-session protocol for distressed couples to learn about what has happened to their relationship and each person’s contributions to the problems, with the goal of clarifying a direction for their marriage. Therapists and counselors can find themselves at an impasse when working with “mixed-agenda” couples—where one partner is considering divorce, while the other wants to preserve the marriage and start therapy. Such couples are a common and difficult challenge in clinical practice. To help confirm each partner’s agenda before taking decisive steps toward either reconciliation or divorce, this book presents a richly-illustrated protocol called discernment counseling, for helping couples understand what has happened to their relationship and each person’s contributions to the problems. The goal is to gain clarity and confidence about a direction for their marriage. Discernment counseling generally ends with a decision to divorce or a decision to engage in six months of couples therapy. Chapters cover special topics such as affairs and when one spouse has “fallen out of love” with the other. Discernment counseling features individual conversations with the leaning-in and leaning-out spouse, along with carefully orchestrated times for each partner to share what they learned in the individual conversations. A special feature of the protocol is its short-term nature, with an initial commitment to just one session and a decision each time whether to do another session, up to five. This strategy invites both spouses to keep making choices to continue the work.

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Is marriage an endangered institution in America? Does America's high divorce rate represent a danger to the lives of American children? These are some of the questions explored in this path-breaking volume of essays. The contributors to Marriage in America, inspired by the philosophy of communitarianism, consider an extensive roster of innovative policies and practices that are intended to promote a more supportive atmosphere for American marriages. A wide range of viewpoints are represented, with essays by legal scholars, social scientists, public policy advocates, family activists, and government program administrators. The range of influences affecting marriages is similarly broad, with essays critically probing the role of law and the courts, religious institutions, family therapists, employers, and government programs in either supporting or undermining the institution of marriage in America. In this volume the debate over 'family values' in America is removed from the polemics of partisan politics and replaced by thoughtful consideration of options for the future by some of America's best thinkers on family issues. Marriage in America is an essential text for all of those who care about the health of American families and children.

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