Highly practical and accessible, this unique book gives therapists powerful tools for helping patients learn to cope with feared or avoided emotional experiences. The book presents a menu of effective intervention options--including schema modification, stress management, acceptance, mindfulness, self-compassion, cognitive restructuring, and other techniques--and describes how to select the best ones for particular patients or situations. Provided are sample questions to pose to patients, specific interventions to use, suggested homework assignments, illustrative examples and sample dialogues, and troubleshooting tips. In a large-size format for easy photocopying, the volume is packed with over 65 reproducible handouts and forms. Purchasers also get access to a companion website where they can download and print the reproducible materials.

Highly practical and accessible, this unique book gives therapists powerful tools for helping patients learn to cope with feared or avoided emotional experiences. The book presents a menu of effective intervention options--including schema modification, stress management, acceptance, mindfulness, self-compassion, cognitive restructuring, and other techniques--and describes how to select the best ones for particular patients or situations. Provided are sample questions to pose to patients, specific interventions to use, suggested homework assignments, illustrative examples and sample dialogues, and troubleshooting tips. In a large-size format for easy photocopying, the volume is packed with over 65 reproducible handouts and forms. Purchasers also get access to a companion website where they can download and print the reproducible materials.

Emotions are the gift nature gave us to help us connect with others. Emotions do not come from out of nowhere. Rather, they are constantly generated, usually by stimuli in our interpersonal world. They bond us to others, guide us in navigating our social interactions, and help us care for each other. Paraphrasing Shakespeare, “Our relationships are such stuff as emotions are made of”. Emotions express our needs and desires. When problems happen in our relationships, emotions arise to help us fixing those problems. However, when emotions can become dysregulated, pathology begins. Almost all forms of psychopathology are associated with dysregulated emotions or dysregulatory mechanisms. These dysregulated emotions can become regulated when the therapist helps clients express, face and regulate their emotions, and channel them into healthy actions. This research topic gathers contributions from affective neuroscientists and psychotherapists to illustrate how our emotions become dysregulated in life and can become regulated through psychotherapy.

Emotion regulation difficulties are central to a range of clinical problems, yet many therapies for children and adolescents lack a focus on emotion and related skills. In a flexible modular format, this much-needed book presents cutting-edge strategies for helping children and adolescents understand and manage challenging emotional experiences. Each of the eight treatment modules can be used on its own or in conjunction with other therapies, and includes user-friendly case examples, sample dialogues, and engaging activities and games. Emotion-informed assessment and case conceptualization are also addressed. Reproducible handouts can be downloaded and printed in a convenient 8 1/2" x 11" size.

Emotion Regulation is currently one of the most popular topics in clinical psychology. Numerous studies demonstrate that deficits in emotion regulation skills are likely to help maintain various forms of psychological disorders. Thus, enhancing emotion regulation has become a major target in psychotherapeutic treatments. For this purpose, a number of therapeutic strategies have been developed and shown to be effective. However, for practitioners it is often difficult to decide which of these strategies they should use or how they can effectively combine empirically-validated strategies. Thus, the authors developed the Affect Regulation Training as a transdiagnostic intervention which systematically integrates strategies from cognitive behavior therapy, mindfulness-based interventions, emotion-focused therapy, and dialectical behavioral therapy. The effectiveness of ART has been demonstrated in several high-quality studies.

In recent years, a profound revolution in psychotherapy has brought affects to their rightful place. Along with cognitions, drives, and behavior, affects are one of the modalities that must be interpreted by theory and embraced by therapy in understanding both normal and pathological personality development. Here, John Omaha synthesizes a vast range of information about affect regulation and presents for readers an intervention, Affect Management Skills Training (AMST), that can be used with clients to regulate affects. The first four chapters of this book assemble current empirical and theoretical information about affect into an overall picture of how self-structure emerges in infancy, and what can happen when the infant-caregiver dyad malfunctions. The second part of the book is the center of Omaha's work where he presents clinical skills for psychotherapeutic interventions for affect regulation that are the focus of the book. The seven basic and several ancillary AMST interventions are designed to help clients remediate deficits in affect regulation and to promote the emergence of a more adaptive, positively functioning self. AMST, a bilateral stimulation protocol derived from EMDR, will be of interest to all clinicians working with clients who need to work on affect regulation.

In this innovative work which combines theory and practice, Suzanne Haeyen explores how art therapy can be useful to people with emotion regulation problems, or ‘personality disorders’, in diagnostic terms. Covering a number of basic themes encountered in clients with personality disorders, it offers insight into the theory behind art therapy techniques and discusses the current state of research in the field. In its second part the author provides a workbook based on aspects of dialectical behavioural therapy skill training developed by Marsha Linehan, including mindfulness, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness and distress tolerance. This section also discusses the use of schema-focused therapy; a method developed by Jeffrey Young, and offers a number of exercises for use in specific practice situations. Alongside summaries of the theory, the author explores the multidisciplinary nature of these therapeutic methods and provides 106 exercises which have been developed in practice. This book offers new ideas and practical tools that will be invaluable to all art therapists working with clients who have difficulties expressing, recognising or coping with their feelings, and who find expressing their feelings through creative work easier than with words.