Traditional psychotherapy approaches, focusing on working with and correcting mental events and conditions, have placed little importance on the fundamentally physical nature of the person. Yet many of the problems people bring to therapy are linked with or manifested in the body--such as obesity, psychosomatic distress, chronic tension, and sexual problems. This book provides a therapeutic approach that addresses both the physical and mental nature of clients. In this book, James Kepner shows that a client's posture, movements, and bodily experiences are indeed relevant to therapy, and he offers an insightful framework for incorporating these aspects into a therapeutic framework. This comprehensive treatment explains how body work can be integrated with the aims, methods, and philosophy of psychotherapy, offering a framework within which practitioners of different theoretical approaches can better appreciate body processes in the context of the whole person, rather than as isolated events. This book, including an updated introduction by the author, explores the range of body work in psychotherapy, from the development of body awareness to intensive work with physical structure and expression. And it demonstrates how this approach can be particularly effective with a range of clients, including survivors of sexual abuse, recovering drug addicts or alcoholics, or those suffering from chronic illness.

This groundbreaking book presents a new model for working with survivors of abuse and other trauma. The Healing Tasks Model, based on developmental stages of healing with specific tasks for each stage, offers the clinician new support for threading through the sometimes overwhelming complexities of the survivor's experience. At the same time, Kepner's model helps to avoid some of the common pitfalls and risks of work in this most challenging of clinical areas, such as pushing clients to express and remember before they have developed the capacity to manage such intensity, or encouraging confrontation and interpersonal interactions that the survivor doesn't yet have the developmental underpinnings to support. Using the Healing Tasks Model the clinician will find techniques for helping clients develop emotional and systemic supports, manage feelings, and set appropriate boundaries. Readers will also find a guide to dealing with the difficult and troubling issues of memory: how to approach abuse memories, when and how to take action based on abuse memories, when to defer action pending the development of more supports and capacities for the survivor, and then how to develop those essential supports and capacities. Written for psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, counselors, pastoral counselors, and adult survivors of childhood abuse, Healing Tasks provides a therapeutic model that can be used to help abuse survivors develop the emotional skilles to lead richer and more fulfilling lives.

Traditional psychotherapy approaches, focusing on working with and correcting mental events and conditions, have placed little importance on the fundamentally physical nature of the person. Yet many of the problems people bring to therapy are linked with or manifested in the body--such as obesity, psychosomatic distress, chronic tension, and sexual problems. This book provides a therapeutic approach that addresses both the physical and mental nature of clients.
In this book, James Kepner shows that a client's posture, movements, and bodily experiences are indeed relevant to therapy, and he offers an insightful framework for incorporating these aspects into a therapeutic framework. This comprehensive treatment explains how body work can be integrated with the aims, methods, and philosophy of psychotherapy, offering a framework within which practitioners of different theoretical approaches can better appreciate body processes in the context of the whole person, rather than as isolated events.
This book, including an updated introduction by the author, explores the range of body work in psychotherapy, from the development of body awareness to intensive work with physical structure and expression. And it demonstrates how this approach can be particularly effective with a range of clients, including survivors of sexual abuse, recovering drug addicts or alcoholics, or those suffering from chronic illness.