This is an accessible and user friendly guide to the theory and practice of relational counseling and psychotherapy. It offers a meta-theoretical framework for the integration of the three most popular counseling and psychotherapy modalities: humanistic, psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral including mindfulness and compassion based approaches.

This exciting new text: outlines the history of integration in the field of psychotherapy and counseling; clarifies the nature of psychotherapeutic integration; defines different models of integration; provides a clear and rich discussion of what it means to work relationally; outlines a coherent and flexible framework for practice, in terms of theory as well as technique; demonstrates how this framework can be successfully utilized both in brief and long term therapy for a wide range of client issues and problems; provides a detailed guide to working with the Relational-Integrative Model (RIM) for a range of professional issues, including ethics, research, supervision, therapist self-care and personal development

Brimming with vivid case examples, mind-maps and therapeutic dialogue, this invaluable book will help develop the theoretical knowledge and skills base of students, trainers and practitioners alike.

Introduction

Introduction

Impetus for the Book

Our current world may be characterised by a sense of alienation and separation on the one hand and a yearning for connectedness on the other. The phenomena of separation and connectedness are reflected in the fields of counselling and psychotherapy, where difference is sometimes emphasised more than similarity and common unifying principles are ignored or go unacknowledged. It is against this backdrop that we (the authors) wanted to develop a holistic and relational model that honours the perspectives from different theories.

As discussed in chapter 1 integration is a journey and a process rather than a final destination, not unlike the journey in the poem Ithaka (Cavafy, [1911] 1961). We are two psychotherapists from different orientations, who found ourselves charged with the ...

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