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| Document Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| All Authors / Contributors: |
James L Griffith; Melissa Elliott Griffith |
| ISBN: | 0465007163 9780465007165 |
| OCLC Number: | 28844810 |
| Description: | xi, 235 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. |
| Contents: | Mind-body problems : the costs of failed solutions -- Understanding mind-body problems -- When symptoms appear -- Language and emotional postures -- A telling that heals -- When speaking one's story is not enough -- Reauthoring stories that bind -- Seeking competence in language skills -- A complete therapy -- Ethological pharmacology -- Using language in the treatment of medical illness. |
| Responsibility: | James L. Griffith, Melissa Elliott Griffith. |
| More information: |
Abstract:
In this book, the authors describe a powerful narrative therapy, one that relies on the wisdom and everyday language of patients' real-life stories instead of the expert knowledge and professional language of the clinician. This approach can be used across all categories of somatic symptoms, from factitious ones to medical illnesses such as asthma or migraine headaches.
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The authors show how somatic symptoms are often related to unspeakable dilemmas, as in the case of a child who, after discovering a parent's marital infidelity, is afraid to disclose the secret and begins having blackout spells for which a neurologist can find no physiological basis. These dilemmas can be understood only if a clinician creates the kind of relationship in which privately held stories of fear, shame, and threat can be told safely.
Detailed case studies and numerous brief examples vividly illustrate techniques for helping patients escape the dilemmas that bind their bodies by finding new language and stories that can free them.
In an innovative section, the authors rethink the current ideas and practices of psychopharmacology. Rather than "treating" a brain disease, a clinician uses medications to recalibrate brain systems that register alarm, thereby opening new possibilities for therapeutic change through speaking, listening, reflecting, and relating.
This book offers all clinicians - psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, nurses, physicians, and family therapists - a way to use language to help patients resolve bodily symptoms. It avoids the stigmatization that patients and families so often experience - and the frustration clinicians feel - when struggling to find answers for mind-body problems.
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