Kirjahaku

There are two intertwined narratives in this book. The first story is that of Amelia, an educated Latin American woman who fell in love with a vacationing American schoolteacher and eventually followed him to the United States. It's not quite a love story. It's the story of what happens in a loving relationship after the Disney movie ends, after the prince carries away the princess on his white horse to live happily ever after. It's the story of Amelia's life before and after the great romantic connection faded and after the prince's great white horse had been put to pasture. It describes the healing of both the childhood wounds and post-marital wounds that had to heal in order for Amelia's marriage to work. Amelia's story reveals itself--sometimes in current events, sometimes in childhood experiences--over the course of 22 months of psychotherapy.The second narrative describes how Parts and Memory Therapy works--as it heals Amelia and reveals the fascinating details of her inner world. This world, like the inner worlds of other normal people, contains many selves: angry, sad, lonely, loving and nurturing, young, old, caring and uncaring. As Amelia visualizes her many Parts, or subpersonalities, some appear exactly as she remembers herself at different ages of her life. Others have no resemblance to her at all--in fact they seem to be products of a vivid and sometimes strange imagination.The story of discovery and work with personified Parts of the self forms the core of the book. (The Disney/Pixar movie Inside Out has already introduced the larger public to the idea that we all have internal thinking and feeling Parts of ourselves that sometimes act on their own.) Amelia's internal Parts of self included Postpartum Me, Old Woman, Head-Banging Little Girl, The Witch, Gypsy, Love, Old Man, Monster-Head, the Hippie, and more.Parts and Memory Therapy is currently the only psychotherapy that focuses on the traumatized Parts of the self as targets for healing while also explicitly grounding the healing interventions in the neuroscience of memory reconsolidation.Amelia's therapy healed or brought remission to her overwhelming rage, her stubborn, long-lasting postpartum depression, as well as that depression's apparent side effect of failure in maternal bonding with her daughter. Additionally, and surprisingly, the therapy also brought remission to Amelia's PMS (Premenstrual Syndrome) and more severe PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder).An important theme throughout the book was Amelia's question about having another child. She wanted to do so but wasn't sure she should, given her rocky marriage and her doubts about whether her husband would be there for her if her depression returned. But following her success in the first five months of therapy, and the major reduction in most of her symptoms, Amelia and her husband decided to have another child. Unfortunately, that decision brought on an internal rebellion of personified Parts of self--led by The Witch--almost violent in their rejection of the idea of another child with an untrusted and sometimes hated husband. Previous gains were lost and symptoms returned. The remainder of the book tells the story of the rebellion and final resolution of Amelia's original question about a new baby.

This book provides a clinical guide for psychotherapists and counselors in the use of Parts and Memory Therapy (P&MT) to treat emotional or psychological problems. Additionally, the book aims to present a clear and compelling narrative for lay persons who wish to know about the latest cutting-edge developments in psychotherapy. For both audiences, this clinician's guide provides a brief introduction to the basic P&MT concepts, tools, and techniques. They are the foundation for the treatment protocols that follow in the later chapters of the book. A "Part" with a capital "P" is the term I use to reference what other scholars call parts, ego states, sides, subpersonalities, voices, self-states, and many more. I will sometimes use the word "subpersonality" or "ego state" in place of "Part" to avoid monotony and also to make specific grammatical issues easier to negotiate. These terms refer to natural subdivisions in what we usually call our personality or our self. The bottom line is that the self or personality is not unitary; it's made up of many Parts...The Guide describe many other variations in how Parts present themselves. But Parts are only half of the elements need to make P&MT work. The other half is the visualization of change that leads to permanently neutralizing the emotional memories that maintain the problem. Our interventions take advantage of memory reconsolidation, a recently discovered natural neurological process in memory formation and reformation. As utilized in our model, it permits us to neutralize the disturbing emotional memories (such as fear, grief, anger) without changing the factual, autobiographical narrative that lies at the heart of our patients' difficulties. Previously, such emotional memories were thought to be indelible. In the therapy, we confront the wounded Part of the self that carries the pain of the trauma with information or action that contradicts or creates a mismatch with the Part's expectation of continuation of its pain. That neutralizes the memory.The major assumption made in this guide to psychotherapy is that all or nearly all mental health problems are the result of traumatic or other disturbing experiences during childhood and growing up. Since we know of these experiences only because of our memories, it follows that the solutions to mental health problems must involve the study of those memories. Beyond the rather normal memories of experiencing childhood distress such as rejection by friends or family, abandonment by a parent following divorce, being victimized by bullying, or ostracized by peers into the unpopular group, there are more than a thousand formal diagnoses recognized by the American Psychiatric Association. This guide to treatment addresses only a few widely recognized issues and provides protocols for their treatment. But these protocols can be easily adapted to many other issues that readers might wish to work with. The protocols provide guidelines for working with addictions, compulsions like trichotillomania, excoriation, and nail-biting, pain syndromes like IBS and fibromyalgia, women's issues like PMS and PMDD, and utilizing a parent surrogate to help a mute child break free of a school phobia. There is even a protocol for letting go of romantic love when that love brings only pain and a hopeless future.