Grief is the process that occurs before people come to acceptance. It can be a painful experience involving many different feelings. Losses includes health issues, loss of a career, loss of relationships, an unborn child, and/orability or desire to have children. Experiencing loss and grieving may include physical, emotional, social, and spiritual responses. Grieving is essential for coming to terms with and processing the trauma and resultant losses. Trauma and its accompanying sense of loss may result in a terrible sense of disappointment and failure. Working with mental health professionals and other survivors can be extremely helpful in working through the grieving process. The grieving process involves acknowledgment and acceptance of loss. Psychotherapy is a process of “re-parenting” the inner child who may have had less than ideal caretaking. The neural connections in the brain can heal and change with new experiences.

Children are exposed to distress, violence, and trauma even before they are born. In-utero and early childhood exposure can contribute to severe medical and psychological consequences. Children who have been exposed to such traumatic events often arrive at the psychotherapist’s office with emotional and behavioral symptoms suggestive of reactive attachment disorder (RAD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and dissociation. This chapter reviews relevant theories of dissociation integrated with theories of development to provide a summary of how attachment impacts dissociation. With a developmentally grounded theory of dissociation, the chapter describes clinical interventions for treating the dissociative sequelae of attachment trauma in children. This theoretical framework offers a developmentally grounded and integrative framework for working with children with complex trauma and dissociation. Symptoms of dissociation are common with PTSD, but an extreme response to trauma can be dissociation and dissociative disorders.

In the therapeutic community (TC), the therapeutic and educational component that focuses specifically on the individual consists of the various forms of group process. The groups that are TC-oriented, such as encounters, probes, and marathons, retain distinctive self-help elements of the TC approach. This chapter provides an overview of general elements and forms of group process in the TC. Conventional psychotherapy and group therapy have not been particularly effective with substance abusers entering TCs for various reasons. Group tools are certain strategies of verbal and nonverbal interchange that are employed by participants to facilitate individual change in group process. There are two main classes of group process strategies: provocative tools and evocative tools. Provocative tools, hostility or anger, engrossment, and ridicule or humor, are most pointedly used to penetrate denial and break down deviant coping strategies such as lying.

The importance of the functioning of mind and the limitations of medication has encouraged some clinicians to advance the use of psychotherapy. In the present period this is mostly in the form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for schizophrenia and psychosis, and this is strongly promoted in the British Psychological Society (BPS) publication “Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia: Why People Sometimes Hear Voices, Believe Things That Others Find Strange, or Appear Out of Touch With Reality, and What Can Help”. Although this document has not been received without criticism, it makes some very interesting reading for us as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapists and students of the Indicating Cognitions of Negative Networks (ICoNN) model. The meta-analyses that showed the most encouraging effect sizes were looking at two groups: treatment-resistant schizophrenia, and forms of psychotherapy that were highly specific and tailored according to case formulation, targeting delusions and auditory hallucinations.

The scripts included in this chapter exemplify how an Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapist might talk with a client when the focus is on positive psychology and performance enhancement: reaching for a goal not yet realized, looking for a way to strengthen a positive quality. The scripts accompany a model that has been taught in a number of countries to therapists, coaches, and human resource advisors. The model combines elements of coaching and psychotherapy. Even if there were sufficient time, it would be inappropriate to do Standard EMDR processing with a large group where the practitioner could not monitor the experiences of individual participants. The performance model can also be applied with clients not yet ready to undergo EMDR desensitization because of ego fragility, emotional latency, or any other feature that suggests they cannot yet handle the affective intensity that accompanies EMDR processing.

The eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) method represents a significant advance in psychotherapy. While most of the empirical research on EMDR demonstrates its efficacy as a treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including relational traumas. Dysfunctional patterns of relating in the family of origin can imprint themselves on the relational template of adults, only to be reenacted in the contemporary couples relationship. Because EMDR can be effective at transforming these earlier relational traumas, adults can become less reactive, enjoy greater distress tolerance, and have a more resilient ego boundary. Thus, EMDR is an invaluable tool in couples therapy. A 5-step protocol is proposed that can guide therapists to develop an EMDR treatment plan within the context of couples therapy. This protocol can and should be applied to both partners in most cases, but of necessity, the therapist must choose one partner to begin with.

This chapter outlines the basic practice of rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) and considers aspects of the therapeutic relationship between clients and therapists in REBT. It provides the major treatment techniques that are employed during REBT. REBT is an active-directive form of psychotherapy in that therapists are active in directing their clients to identify the philosophical source of their psychological problems and in showing them they can challenge and change their irrational musturbatory evaluations. REBT therapists tend to be appropriately humorous with most of their clients because they think that much emotional disturbance stems from the fact that clients take themselves and their problems. REBT therapists not only offer them “affective” empathy but also offer them philosophic empathy. Effective practitioners of REBT are usually comfortable with behavioral instruction and teaching and with providing the active prompting that clients often require if they are to follow through on homework assignments.

In this third category of presentations in the Indicating Cognitions of Negative Networks (ICoNN) model, the psychotic phenomena are evident, causing distress and a functional impairment. However, the psychological pathogen cannot be identified in the standard way and strong emotions cannot be tracked back across an affect bridge. The main phenomena that characterize this category of ICoNN cases are “heard voices” that can be spoken with. They act as a proxy for the dysfunctional memory network (DMN). Reprocessing is ultimately accomplished using an ego-state approach/voice dialogue approach with the facilitation of the dual attention stimulation/bilateral stimulation (DAS/BLS) elements of the eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy method. It is vitally important that the therapist work to develop the first three features of effective psychotherapy: an emotionally charged relationship, a therapeutic environment, and a rationale/myth that provides a plausible explanation for the symptoms.