Bringing Psychotherapy to Life Through Caring Connections

The health care system privileges specialized therapies designed to treat
psychiatric disorders, but many patients want to talk freely about troubles in
their lives, and therapists want to enable them do so. This common interest
requires a sense of safety promoted by a caring relationship.

The first
part of the book includes an evidence-based critique of short-term therapies
bearing scientific credentials that dominate the field. Do we really need
hundreds of them? Meanwhile, a half-century of research attests to the
overriding importance of the therapeutic relationship and therapists'
interpersonal skills. Our humanity looms large here; science's majesty does not
entitle it to a monarchy. Cognitive-behavior therapy is too narrow; we should
give full weight to the value of emotional experience and nonverbal connection
in therapy and in life.

The philosophical shift advocated in the first
part of the book includes a view of psychotherapy as ethical-moral work, setting
the stage for an ethic of care explicated in the second part of the book. This
ethic entails creating caring connections. The book integrates infant research
with attachment theory and relational psychoanalytic perspectives to elucidate
the development of a capacity to care. Therapists foster reciprocal emotional
connections through attention, empathy, and recognition. Verbal and nonverbal
connections play coequal roles. Much of care lies beyond words, from infancy
onward.

Conversational in tone and sufficiently broad in scope to apply to
therapists in many professional disciplines, Bringing Psychotherapy to Life
Through Caring Connections illuminates the common elements that form the
experience of connection in psychotherapy and beyond-experience that is
essential to flourishing in life.