ABSTRACT

The Good Enough Therapist is a guidebook—not an instruction manual—written for beginning, intermediate, and experienced clinicians. It encourages readers to explore, accept, and embrace their flaws and failings in a way that promotes effective treatment as well as personal growth. It focuses both on craft and process—craft related to the tools, the strategies, and the tactics of treatment, and process related to the session-by-session struggle to implement these tools in ways that speak to and illuminate the experience of living and struggling as a human being. It does not endeavor to transmit a method, but a sensibility, a way of being with patients that results in a deeper recognition of the therapist’s, and the patient’s, vulnerability, resilience, imagination, and integrity.

chapter |4 pages

Introduction

Socioeco-Location

chapter 1|6 pages

The Vandal

chapter |2 pages

Interlude 1

What Is the Point of My Writing This Book?

chapter 3|9 pages

Good Enough or Good-for-Nothing?

chapter |5 pages

Reflection Point 1

Good Enough and Not Good Enough

chapter 4|9 pages

A Place to Start

On the Importance of Treatment Failure When Treating a “Failure-to-Launch”

chapter 5|4 pages

Two Powerful Lessons in Powerlessness

chapter 6|4 pages

Three Births …

chapter |5 pages

Reflection Point 2

“Why Is S/he Here and What Does S/he Want?”

chapter |1 pages

Interlude 2

Pull Up a Chair

chapter 9|12 pages

Reduced Sentences

chapter |8 pages

Interlude 3

In the Company of Shadows: Visions of Grief

chapter 10|9 pages

Cash in the Cup

chapter |3 pages

Interlude 4

The Adolescent (and Adult) Saboteur

chapter 11|12 pages

Here and Not Here, There and Not There

chapter |3 pages

Interlude 5

Hard Winter

chapter |2 pages

Reflection Point 3

Blame, Responsibility, and Credit

chapter 12|4 pages

Tough Love—And Why It’s so Tough

chapter |1 pages

Reflection Point 4

Ascending the Ladder of Therapy

chapter 13|6 pages

The Ambivalent Tango of Hope

chapter 14|10 pages

Narcissism and Its (Occasional) Nobility

chapter |7 pages

Interlude 6

Unsolvable Love

chapter 15|12 pages

Nowhere but the Dark

chapter |3 pages

Interlude 7

Wandering Down Dream Avenue

chapter 16|7 pages

Punishing the Punitive Therapist

chapter |2 pages

Interlude 8

“Tell Me a Story”

chapter 17|5 pages

On Hating a Patient

chapter 18|10 pages

What Do We Want When We Want Out?

chapter |4 pages

Reflection Point 5

Creativity as an Antidote to Failure

chapter 19|11 pages

Defeated by Success

chapter 20|6 pages

The Diagnostic Dragnet

chapter |1 pages

Reflection Point 6

Learning From Your Patient

chapter |3 pages

Interlude 9

Plumbing the Depths of Power

chapter 22|5 pages

“I Am Beside Myself”

chapter |2 pages

Reflection Point 7

Kryptonite Time

chapter |3 pages

Reflection Point 8

Nostalgia and Empathy

chapter 24|6 pages

“Why Am I Doing This?”

chapter 25|14 pages

The Good Enough Supervisor

chapter |2 pages

Interlude 10

“How Is It That I Am Not Myself?”

chapter 26|6 pages

Giving What You Never Got

chapter |1 pages

Reflection Point 9

How Telling

chapter 27|6 pages

Loops

chapter |1 pages

Reflection Point 10

Take a Walk

chapter |5 pages

Conclusion

“Going Grandfather”: The Good Enough Therapist in Twilight

chapter |2 pages

Epilogue

In Praise of Defeat