Product Description: This very practical book offers no-nonsense instructions for pastors, chaplains, and ministers whose real specialty is the practice of relational wisdom. Patton provides a helpful, step-by-step template for pastoral counseling sessions and clear guidelines for understanding when to defer and how to refer—all while remaining faithful to the basic pastoral calling to connect persons seeking help with the relationships and resources they need to deal with their lives...read more

Product Description: This book explores the suffering of social class and how traditional biomedical models for mental illness do not adequately account for the stresses of poverty. Turning to mental health user testimonies, this book equips ministers and counsellors to become working class advocates...read more

Product Description: Professors Snodgrass and Maynard have done their field a service in bringing together all that is here. The American Association of Pastoral Counselors now has a splendid contemporary text to present themselves to other fields whose members may yet wonder 'What has religion (or spirituality) or pastoral counseling have to do with the healing arts?' There was in a past era the critique and complaint that the pastoral care and counseling field did not have a literature and history that allowed it to stand as intellectually serious colleagues with others in more traditional theological disciplines...read more

Product Description: What would it mean for Christian counseling and pastoral care to take seriously the idea that God intervenes in the world? What would it look like for therapists and pastors to see themselves as opening the door to a miraculous divine encounter? How would counseling change if the intervention of God was not merely a theoretical idea but a lived experience? In this volume more than twenty of the best pastoral counselors, clinicians, and counselor educators introduce us to the models that they use to integrate the Scriptures and the work of the Holy Spirit into their daily practice...read more

Product Description: The focus of this text is on the clinical aspects of pastoral psychotherapy that is, those psychological understandings and approaches that provide the pastor, however he or she is defined, with the skills to understand the underlying dynamics of specific behavioral disorders people bring to them, as well as the art of working with and reeducating those in distress as to healthier, less self-defeating choices they can make in life...read more

Product Description: What is complex traumatic stress disorder (CTSD)? How do Christian counselors help complex trauma survivors live the "abundant life"? Are we inadvertently retraumatizing our counselees? The challenge of counseling survivors of complex trauma is one that many Christian counselors are not adequately equipped to handle...read more

Product Description: Couples can make significant progress toward resolving their own problems when they receive appropriate guidance from a caring person. This book outlines five tasks focused on identity, agency, and meaning that spiritual caregivers can use to empower couples for significant change in just three to five conversations...read more

Product Description: Grace is the credential that lets us park close to people's hearts.When Christ calls a pastor He instills a kind of heightened instinct for grace; what we call a shepherd's heart. However, pastors often become disoriented by leadership demands, congregational expectation, and the wounds of ministry...read more

Product Description: Every pastor knows that each community of faith consists of individuals who may be in crisis at any given moment, for a multitude of reasons. However, it’s essential that church leaders also view their congregations as a single organism in need of looking after as a whole...read more

Product Description: What if we are more multiple as persons than traditional psychology has taught us to believe? And what if our multiplicity is a part of how we are made in the very image of a loving, relational, multiple God? How have modern, Western notions of Oneness caused harm-to both individuals and society? And how can an appreciation of our multiplicity help liberate the voices of those who live at the margins, both of society and within our own complex selves? Braided Selves explores these questions from the perspectives of postmodern pastoral psychology and Trinitarian theology, with implications for the practice of spiritual care, counseling, and psychotherapy...read more

Product Description: Here's a twist: This book opens by wondering out loud whether premarital counseling is even effective. Is there a point to meeting with couples a few times before they marry --- only to watch them get divorced later?This honest, no-holds-barred book is written for counselors, ministers and others who work with dating and engaged couples...read more