American Psychological Association

Unlock the science behind child custody evaluations. Psychologists today play a crucial role in providing court assessments for child custody cases. But, gone are the days of relying solely on clinical judgment—courts now demand a more scientific approach. This guide offers an evidence-informed framework for conducting child custody evaluations. It reviews critical components such as forensic interviewing, parent-child observation, document review, and accounting for one’s own personal biases. The authors explore the strengths and limitations of psychological testing and assessment, and demonstrate how custody evaluations require a dimensional approach that emphasizes behaviors over diagnoses. Extensive research is synthesized on all these critical topics, as well as more specific issues such as alienation, parent-child contact problems, domestic violence, and parental relocation requests. Whether you're a seasoned professional or new to the field, this book is an indispensable resource for conducting scientifically sound, legally defensible evaluations.

A fresh approach to understanding and engaging men in therapy Why do so many men avoid therapy—or never return after the first session? And how can clinicians better connect with them? In Clinical Work With Men, psychologist Andrew P. Smiler offers a groundbreaking guide for therapists seeking to better understand and engage with male clients by exploring masculinity from the inside out. Instead of pathologizing men's behaviors, this book helps clinicians see the world through their clients' eyes, examining the roles, values, and identities that shape how men understand themselves. Drawing on extensive research and clinical experience, Smiler introduces seven common masculinity types—from the breadwinner and the protector to the angry man and the player—each with its own strengths, struggles, and therapeutic implications. Through vivid clinical vignettes and actionable strategies, therapists will learn how to:Recognize the core values and identity themes that drive male clients' behavior. Build rapport by aligning therapeutic approaches with clients' self-understandings. Address emotional development, social connection, and intersectional challenges. Apply practical interventions tailored to diverse masculinities. With its unique focus on identity, values, and real-world clinical applications, Clinical Work With Men will deepen your insight, sharpen your skills, and help you create more meaningful, effective therapeutic relationships with men.

This second edition offers a session-by-session guide to discernment counseling, a specialized five-session intervention to help couples leaning different ways about divorce or separation find the best path forward for their troubled relationships. The authors have added new case examples that reflect different kinds of couples, as well as an additional chapter demonstrating the entire discernment counseling protocol in action. Updated scholarship and insights for learning to become a discernment counselor have also been included. Unlike traditional couples therapy, the goal of discernment counseling isn't to help the couple heal their relationship but rather to gain clarity and confidence about a direction for their relationship in terms of three potential paths: maintaining the status quo, getting divorced/separated, or entering couples therapy. Typically, one partner or spouse is invested in saving the relationship (leaning in) while the other is not (leaning out), so this book explores how to navigate these differing agendas and offers clinicians tools for interacting with both partners. It walks through the process of working with the couple together and with each partner individually, helping them to recognize their contributions to the relationship's problems and clarify what they would work on if they embark on couples therapy. Common challenges in discernment counseling are also explored, such as when neither partner is leaning in, when one partner is having an affair, and when there is lack of love or passion.

Transform the way children understand themselves and others. Mentalization—the ability to make sense of one’s own mind and the minds of others—is fundamental to developing emotional resilience, self-regulation, and successful relationships. Now in its second edition, this book presents mentalization-based treatment for children (MBT-C), a transdiagnostic, time-limited therapeutic approach designed to help children and their parents navigate emotional and behavioral difficulties, from anxiety and depression to interpersonal struggles. MBT-C blends psychodynamic principles, attachment theory, and empirical research on mentalization to provide practical, evidence-based strategies for clinicians. Written by an international team of pioneering clinician-researchers, this fully updated second edition guides practitioners through the entire process of MBT-C, from assessment and case formulation to therapy termination. This edition contains a promising new assessment tool, new theory and research on the interrelated aspects of trauma and culture, and groundbreaking findings from the first clinical trial of time-limited MBT-C for children with emotional and behavioral difficulties.

How does emotion arise in everyday settings? How can it be studied in the real world?In this book, authors Jonathan Potter and Alexa Hepburn offer their distinctive approach to the study of emotion. Emotionography explores emotion not through scales, experiments, or interviews, but as it actually occurs in natural interactions. Drawing on discursive psychology and conversation analysis, the authors' detailed analytic toolkit for representing talk, timing, and conduct makes visible how emotion is displayed, oriented to, and managed moment by moment. Step-by-step case examples show how crying and upset, laughter, and anger can be understood from an emotionographic perspective.Emotion is live, consequential, and interactional, and it can be studied with a level of accuracy that also has practical bite. Emotionography shows how the ways people display and describe feelings shape what others do next, including how they respond, align, resist, comfort, escalate, or redirect. That matters in everyday life, and it matters in high-stakes settings such as helplines, emergency calls, healthcare, and counselling. Emotionography offers practitioners a way to refine how they respond in real time, and offers researchers a rigorous analytic alternative to treating emotion as a private inner state.

This rhyming book will help kids identify what it feels like to be sad and what they can do to respond to it. If It offers suggestions such as talking about what makes you feel sad, imagining happy things, or crying as a way to let the emotion out. The book lets kids know that it’s perfectly normal to feel sad—but offers a gentle reminder that the feelings won’t last for forever. Includes a Note to Parents and Caregivers about how to help children respond to strong feelings of sadness. Part of the Feel Better Books for Little Kids Series

New foods can be a BIG deal for a LITTLE kid! The acclaimed Feel Better Book series now offers an upbeat rhyming story that tackles the challenge many kids face when trying new foods. It uses principles of choice and encouragement, reminding kids that everything they love now was new once, and that food can be fun! Includes a Note to Parents and Caregivers with more information about ways to help support kids in expanding their comfort with different foods.  Read all of the Feel Better Books! A Feel Better Book For Little Worriers, A Feel Better Book for Little Tears, A Feel Better Book for Little Poopers, A Feel Better Book for Little Tempers, and A Feel Better Book for Little Sports. 

This book uses insights from psychological science along with illuminating anecdotes to present a framework for understanding our inner architecture and helping readers discover how to live their best lives. Author Noam Shpancer explores humans' fundamental psychological need for connection and need for autonomy and details how the fulfillment of these needs underpins robust mental health. In brief, accessible chapters, he offers ten guiding principles for achieving this fulfillment based on proven psychological findings. These principles--including trusting evidence, honoring your own experiences, being flexible, facing your fears, and trying to love--help readers develop new ways to think about themselves and others and to cope with life's challenges. Through engaging stories and explanations of human psychology, the book provides a path along which readers can explore their emotions, relationships, and ultimately what a meaningful life means to them.

A concise, hands-on guide to treating pediatric sleep problems. This second edition includes updated research and practice recommendations, a new chapter on disorders of hypersomnolence, and downloadable handouts in both English and Spanish. It also incorporates new information on sleep health equity, considering such factors as individual child differences, family circumstances, school start times, home environment, neighborhood differences, and sociocultural beliefs and practices. Sleep difficulties are very common in children, with 25-40% of youth experiencing them at some point during childhood or adolescence. Yet, most healthcare providers receive little if any training in pediatric sleep problems—and most training that does exist tends to emphasize medical, rather than behavioral interventions. This book presents highly effective behavioral interventions for common pediatric sleep problems such as sleep-related anxiety, insomnia, frequent night wakings, delayed circadian rhythm, sleep terrors, and nocturnal enuresis. Step-by-step instructions provide readers with the tools to clinically assess and treat children with sleep problems, and case examples show clinicians how to apply the instructions to real-life scenarios. To facilitate implementation, authors Lisa Meltzer and Valerie McLaughlin Crabtree also provide more than 30 downloadable handouts and worksheets that practitioners can share with parents and children.

The psychotherapy case formulation model is integrative, and takes an evidence-based approach to treatment by mental health practitioners. Formulating cases is an essential component of psychotherapy training and practice, yet beginning therapists often struggle to organize their ideas about the client and apply theory to the case. The model presented in this volume is designed to adapt to any theory of therapy, any treatment manual, and any component of a theory. The author emphasizes case formulation inferences that are based on theories with supporting evidence, expert knowledge about formulation, and steps to enhance sound reasoning in case formulation. This book incorporates a focus on culturally responsive therapy by presenting a cultural perspective, including consideration of race and ethnicity, sex and gender, socioeconomic status, and religion and spiritual orientation, on case formulation and providing guidance on incorporating culture into a case conceptualization. It draws heavily upon cognitive science research to support evidence-based practice in case formulation, and includes a case example and checklist to illustrate the principles and steps of formulation. Topics investigated include the slippery definitions of mental disorders, approaches to assessing behavior and selecting a treatment approach, and treatment planning. The book also explores the role psychiatric diagnosis plays in psychotherapy, its limitations, its societal impacts, and what it contributes uniquely to case formulation.

This guide for mental health 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 clinical research and practice, philosophy (both Eastern and Western), neuroscience, and the arts. He explains the nuts and bolts of empathy, and offers guidelines for how readers can 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 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.

A practical, hands-on guide to understanding and resolving common ethical issues that arise in mental health practice. This book, intended for a broad range of professionals, is a practical, handy guide to ethical decision-making in one's daily work. Each chapter outlines key ethical issues that arise in mental health practice, cites relevant ethics code principles and standards, and illustrates the dilemmas with vignettes drawn from real life, followed by questions and answers to promote critical thinking. Common ethical challenges described by the authors include maintaining confidentiality, practicing within one's area of competence, and providing informed consent. Chapters cover work with special populations--including children, older adults, and individuals exploring their gender identity--as well as work in specialized areas such as assessment and forensic settings. This book provides readers with the framework they need to think through ethical challenges flexibly and make decisions that benefit and protect their clients and themselves.

A guide that teaches practitioners how to facilitate meaningful client change through the three stages of career construction counseling. This practical book blends career counseling theory with theoretical approaches to the narrative construction of the self, to support clients who are adapting to new career tasks and job transitions. Chapters explore why people experience difficulty making career decisions, and how their self-narratives can impede change. The authors emphasize narrative-based interventions that help clients author their own significant and coherent career stories. By developing these stories, clients connect self-concepts to work roles, discover how work fits into their lives, and make meaning through their work. The authors emphasize the importance of tailoring intervention approaches to clients’ needs. They include dialogue excerpts from real career construction counseling sessions, to give readers a moment-to-moment understanding of the counselor’s decision-making. These dialogues also include practical comments that clarify the counselor’s intentions, or describe performance errors that put therapeutic collaboration at risk.

Deliberate practice exercises provide trainees and students an opportunity to build competence in essential behavioral parent training skills while developing their own personal therapeutic style. These exercises present role-playing scenarios in which two trainees act as a client and a clinician, switching back and forth under the guidance of a supervisor. The clinician improvises appropriate and authentic responses to client statements organized into three difficulty levels—beginner, intermediate, and advanced—that reflect common client questions and concerns. Trainees will learn how to collaborate with parents to help them build positive relationships with their children as a foundation for creating behavioral change. They will learn how to teach parenting skills like praise to encourage positive behaviors, planned ignoring, establishing consequences that are respectful and developmentally appropriate, and strategies for parents to manage their own strong emotions. Step-by-step instructions guide participants through the exercises, identify criteria for mastering each skill, and explain how to monitor and adjust difficulty. Guidelines to help trainers and trainees get the most out of training are also provided.

Unlocking the Therapeutic Potential of Sexuality Sexuality is intricately woven into every facet of a person's life, often presenting unique challenges and amplifying other psychological issues. Despite its significance, many therapists shy away from addressing sexual topics in sessions, opting instead to refer patients to specialized sex therapists. This indispensable guide empowers mental health clinicians to seamlessly integrate discussions of sexuality into their therapeutic practice, dismantling the barriers that often leave this vital aspect of patients' lives unaddressed. Through compelling case studies, Kathryn S. K. Hall illustrates how core therapeutic skills such as empathy and active listening can be effectively employed to navigate sexual topics with confidence and sensitivity. Clinicians will learn how to introduce and respond to discussions about sex, maintain professional boundaries, and address common issues such as shame, desire discrepancies, sexual trauma, and atypical sexual interests. Whether the therapy is for individuals or couples, this book equips practitioners with the foundational knowledge and practical strategies necessary to incorporate sexuality into ongoing treatment. By doing so, clinicians can enhance patient outcomes and cultivate deeper, more meaningful therapeutic relationships.

This third edition offers an updated primer to the theory, history, research, and practice of existential amp ndash humanistic (EH) therapy, which merges existential philosophy with humanistic psychotherapy.   EH therapy blends the European heritage of self-inquiry, struggle, and responsibility with the American tradition of spontaneity, optimism, and practicality. This book helps therapists and trainees understand how to help people address critical life questions and attune to how clients relate to themselves and to others, appropriately reflecting back aspects of themselves that are evident but unnoticed.   New to this edition are significant updates to research and theory, including the work of Otto Rank, an often-overlooked pioneer in EH therapy, and new concepts like existential unconsciousness and life-enhancing anxiety. The cultivation of presence as a central component of the therapeutic relationship is also emphasized.