(26 reviews) Author: ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDFResearch 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 Mindful Therapist is a deep exploration of what it means to be mindful and how to cultivate mindfulness in the therapeutic relationship. Building on Siegel's influential work, The Mindful Brain, this book is written in a unique, relational style in which the author speaks directly to the reader as a fellow professional - an informal yet in-depth conceptual discussion about the mind, brain, and human relations.
Because creating positive outcomes in psychotherapy hinges on the presence of the clinician as a person, here Siegel explores the underlying science beneath this assertion and offers experiential strategies to cultivate mindful presence in the therapist's own life. Exercises offered throughout the book promote the development of "mindsight" - our ability to sense and shape the flow of energy and information within and between each of us. Mindsight promotes integration, a mindful presence, and the nurturing of empathic relationships - all of which are key to effective therapy.
The Mindful Therapist helps clinicians, both new and experienced in the healing arts, to dive deeply into how the mind interacts with the brain, and how disorder and rigidity can be transformed into integration and harmony.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 12 hours and 13 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Brilliance Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: October 25, 2011
- Language: English
- ASIN: B005Z9GJZG
The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration PDF
Although the title is the Mindful Therapist, a clinicians' guide, (and it is a breakthrough book for psychotherapists) this book is also valuable for anyone who is interested in deepening their understanding of how our minds work and how we affect the minds (and brains) of other people.
Dan Siegel is a remarkable teacher and this book is another in his series of books explaining interpersonal neurobiology. He is a gifted writer, often poetic in his explanations and descriptions of fundamental mental processes. He successfully addresses a multitude of crucial topics from exploring the experience of self, to what it means to be in resonance with another person or with oneself.
He introduces the reader to the latest brain science research, explores the nature of mind and neural integration in our brains and increases our depth of understanding of mindfulness and empathy. He opens up new ways of making sense of our inner world (the conscious and the unconscious) and he creates a framework to view what we may have seen and known previously but now with a new depth of knowledge he creates an entirely new level of understanding.
In previous work he had described a valuable human capability: "mindsight". He characterized it as "a type of focused attention that allows us to see the workings of our own minds and allows us to reshape our inner experience, to increase our freedom, as well as to be fully open to another person's inner experience". In this book he goes further in showing the components and workings of this ability and how to increase our capacity to use this in our clinical work and in our lives.
He wrote this book to be read as if the reader and he were having a conversation (and it is).
I have been enthusiastic about Dan Siegel's work since I read his article on non-verbal maternal influence on the developing infant's brain a decade ago. He'd clearly been influenced by Daniel Stern's work on maternal attunement, which has been one of the two or three most significant influences upon modern psychotherapy since the mid-1980s.
Figure this: the child whose mother is sufficiently relaxed, patient, conscious, empathic, supportive, compassionate and soothing will have the capability to provide the model of emotional attunement through which an infant can learn how to soothe =itself= when it is struck by sudden, need-driven, temporarily overwhelming emotional experiences. The child whose mother is =not= "good enough" (as Donald Winnicott so aptly put it some 60 years ago), is less likely to be able to learn how to modulate its emotions. And therein lies the truly =essential= issue.
Siegel, and his equally gifted brother, Ronald, seem to have "gotten" Winnicott, Margaret Mahler and Stern (as well as Alan Schore) as well or better than just about anyone publishing these days. Dan S. has knocked out several books that have transformed Stern's and Schore's profound research on emotional regulation -- or lack thereof -- into useful therapeutic technique. This particular book is the perfect complement to Ron's more mass-market-oriented =The Mindfulness Solution=, which for less-experienced and/or less "technical-minded" clinicians might be a better place to start into the whole "attunement" rubric.
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