Douglas Flemons

This essential guide for helping professionals offers an insightful, conversational approach to mastering empathic communication with clients. Douglas Flemons invites readers to join him in a dialogue that incorporates voices from multiple disciplines, including clinical research and practice, philosophy (both Eastern and Western), neuroscience, and the arts. He explains what empathy is and offers guidelines for how to make sense of the client's thoughts, feelings, and choices from inside their worldview. He also shows how the clinician, with compassion, curiosity, and an empathic imagination, can create a heartfelt connection that allows the client to feel respected and understood and that opens the way for collaboration and therapeutic change. Innovative strategies for therapist self-care are also thoroughly explored. Practitioners learn how to effectively engage in and safely disengage from close empathic relationships, even with clients who are deeply suffering or who present complex emotional challenges.

In the popular imagination, hypnosis is misconstrued as something done to people, as if the hypnotist hypnotises them. And hypnotherapy is similarly misconceived as something done to clients’ problems, as if the therapist could unilaterally counter or cure them. In a refreshing departure from conception-as-usual, Douglas Flemons offers another view, articulating relational ideas about how minds and bodies communicate and learn. In his characteristically casual and concise way, Flemons explains and illustrates how hypnosis, like meditation, is invited, not induced, and how hypnotherapy entails the altering and unravelling of knotted strands of problematic experience, not the controlling and abolishing of labelled afflictions. The therapist gets in sync with clients so they can, together, extemporaneously facilitate changes to undesired thoughts, urges, emotions, sensations or behaviours. This book takes you to the heart of hypnotherapy, to the respectful, playful practice of utilising clients’ flow experience to collaboratively discover and create opportunities for embodied learning and therapeutic change.

Quickies demonstrates that the best sex therapy is often the briefest, presenting readers with a refreshing array of time-efficient, client-focused approaches to sexual problems. The third edition includes new chapters on the impact of the Internet in relationships, infidelity, and same-sex and transgender affirming therapy.

Given the isolating nature of suicidal ideation and actions, it’s all too easy for clinicians conducting a suicide assessment to find themselves developing tunnel vision, becoming overly focused on the client’s individual risk factors. Although critically important to explore, these risks and the danger they pose can’t be fully appreciated without considering them in relation to the person’s resources for safely negotiating a pathway through his or her desperation. And, in turn, these intrapersonal risks and resources must be understood in context—in relation to the interpersonal risks and resources contributed by the client’s significant others. In this book, Drs. Douglas Flemons and Leonard M. Gralnik, a family therapist and a psychiatrist, team up to provide a comprehensive relational approach to suicide assessment. The authors offer a Risk and Resource Interview Guide as a means of organizing assessment conversations with suicidal clients. Drawing on an extensive research literature, as well as their combined 50+ years of clinical experience, the authors distill relevant topics of inquiry arrayed within four domains of suicidal experience: disruptions and demands, suffering, troubling behaviors, and desperation. Knowing what questions to ask a suicidal client is essential, but it is just as important to know how to ask questions and how to join through empathic statements. Beyond this, clinicians need to know how to make safety decisions, how to construct safety plans, and what to include in case note documentation. In the final chapter, an annotated transcript serves to tie together the ideas and methods offered throughout the book. Relational Suicide Assessment provides the theoretical grounding, empirical data, and practical tools necessary for clinicians to feel prepared and confident when engaging in this most anxiety-provoking of clinical responsibilities.

With the casual grace of an entrancing storyteller and the dry humor of an experienced therapist and teacher, he recasts the theory of hypnosis within a relational understanding of language, self, and mind. He then transports his ideas to the worlds of hypno-and brief therapies, offering fresh insights about how to connect with clients and help them change.