The Art of Empathy

Our unique audioteach method features the voices of real tutors Christine Wilding and Pauline O'Driscoll. They will guide you through your course over five hours of audio material, giving you tips and advice based on their many years of teaching experience and helping you avoid common mistakes and pitfalls. This audio product also contains real-time recordings of role-played counselling sessions to help you to grasp key techniques.

The difficulty and cost of training psychotherapists properly is well known. It is far easier to provide a series of classes while ignoring the more challenging personal components of training. Despite the fact that the therapist's self-insight and emotional maturity are critical for successful psychotherapy, knowledge and technical skills are the focus of most training programs. As a result, the therapist's personal growth is either marginalized or ignored. The Making of a Therapist counters this trend by offering therapists a personal account of this important inner journey.

An updated revision of Jeffrey Kottler's classic book On Being a Therapist reveals the new realities and inner experiences of therapeutic practice today.

This course is ideal for those that are either complete beginners to the field of counseling and are considering making a career change to become a counselor, with the aim of getting an insight and understanding of counseling, or existing counselors, teachers, coaches, or parents looking to reinforce their knowledge or to pick up some new skills. This course is also ideal if you are interested in a career in counseling, though are unsure if you want to commit yourself financially and time wise to a full counseling qualification.

"Toad", the famous character in Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows, is in a very depressed state, and his good friends Rat, Mole, and Badger are "worried that he might do something silly"…. Robert de Board’s engaging account of Toad's experience of counselling will capture the imagination of the growing number of people who are interested in counselling and the counselling process. In this sequel to the story of lifeon the riverbank, Toad and his friends come to life all over again.

This eloquent book translates attachment theory and research into an innovative framework that grounds adult psychotherapy in the facts of childhood development. Advancing a model of treatment as transformation through relationship, the author integrates attachment theory with neuroscience, trauma studies, relational psychotherapy, and the psychology of mindfulness.

Research suggests that the presence of the therapist, and how the therapist truly forges a connection with the client in therapy, are the most crucial factors affecting the client’s healing process. An engaged, committed, caring therapist who is mindful of his or her own self - and how that self relates to the client - is the key determinant of how well that client will respond to therapy.

The collection of 10 absorbing tales by master psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom uncovers the mysteries, frustrations, pathos, and humor at the heart of the therapeutic encounter. In recounting his patients' dilemmas, Yalom not only gives us a rare and enthralling glimpse into their personal desires and motivations but also tells us his own story as he struggles to reconcile his all-too-human responses with his sensibility as a psychiatrist.

Explaining that an impaired capacity for connection to self and to others underlies most psychological and many physiological problems, clinicians Laurence Heller, PhD, and Aline LaPierre, PsyD, introduce the NeuroAffective Relational Model™ (NARM), a unified approach to developmental, attachment, and shock trauma that emphasizes working in the present moment. NARM is a somatically based psychotherapy that helps bring into awareness the parts of self that are disorganized and dysfunctional.

Irvin D. Yalom has made a career of investigating the lives of others. In Becoming Myself, his long-awaited memoir, he turns his therapeutic eye on himself, delving into the relationships that shaped him and the groundbreaking work that made him famous. The first-generation child of immigrant Russian Jews, Yalom grew up in a lower-class neighbourhood in Washington, DC. Determined to escape its confines, he set his sights on becoming a doctor. An incredible ascent followed.

In Trauma and Memory, best-selling author Dr. Peter Levine (creator of the Somatic Experiencing approach) tackles one of the most difficult and controversial questions of PTSD/trauma therapy: Can we trust our memories? While some argue that traumatic memories are unreliable and not useful, others insist that we absolutely must rely on memory to make sense of past experience. Dr. Levine suggests that there are elements of truth in both camps.

Waking the Tiger offers a new and hopeful vision of trauma. It views the human animal as a unique being, endowed with an instinctual capacity. It asks and answers an intriguing question: Why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatized? By understanding the dynamics that make wild animals virtually immune to traumatic symptoms, the mystery of human trauma is revealed.

Never before has world-renowned psychoanalyst Alice Miller examined so persuasively the long-range consequences of childhood abuse on the body. Using the experiences of her patients along with the biographical stories of literary giants such as Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust, Miller shows how a child's humiliation, impotence, and bottled rage will manifest itself as adult illness - be it cancer, stroke, or other debilitating diseases.

This book is based on real-life counselling sessions with various clients who were suffering with low mood or depression. The book shows a scripted conversation between counsellor and client over five counselling sessions. There are also counsellor notes throughout each session to help the listener understand why the counsellor asked particular questions or responded in a certain way. The therapy used is called "Solution-Focused Therapy". It is a brief therapy that is designed to focus on the resources of the client.

Many people grapple with destructive thought processes or a "critical inner voice" that directs their behavior and, to varying degrees, limits their lives. Using deeply personal and very human stories based on his own clinical practice, noted psychologist Robert W. Firestone illustrates the struggles of his clients to give words to this "enemy within", and in the process overcome its damaging influence.