Bill O'Hanlon

Features new and updated assignments and exercises to meet the changing needs of mental health professionals The Couples Therapy Homework Planner, Second Edition provides you with an array of ready-to-use, between-session assignments designed to fit virtually every therapeutic mode. This easy-to-use sourcebook features: 71 ready-to-copy exercises covering the most common issues encountered by couples in therapy, such as financial conflict, infidelity, work/home role strain, and separation and divorceA quick-reference format—the interactive assignments are grouped by behavioral problems including improving communications, handling parenting problems, and resolving sexual issuesExpert guidance on how and when to make the most efficient use of the exercisesAssignments are cross-referenced to The Couples Psychotherapy Treatment Planner, Second Edition—so you can quickly identify the right exercise for a given situation or problemDownloadable content that contains all the exercises in a word-processing format—allowing you to customize them to suit you and your clients' unique styles and needs Additional resources in the PracticePlanners® series: Treatment Planners cover all the necessary elements for developing formal treatment plans, including detailed problem definitions, long-term goals, short-term objectives, therapeutic interventions, and DSMTM diagnoses. Progress Notes Planners contain complete, prewritten progress notes for each presenting problem in the companion Treatment Planners. For more information on our PracticePlanners® products, including our full line of Treatment Planners, visit us on the Web at: www.wiley.com/practiceplanners

Recognized leaders in the solution-oriented movement, O’Hanlon and Weiner-Davis provide guidelines for clinicians in implementing solution-oriented language and explain how to avoid dead ends. Now available in paperback, including new material to bring the reader up-to-date on advances in this growing field.

"With little jargon and plenty of clarity," two esteemed family therapists "provide specific, sensible advice to parents who struggle with uncooperative children." (Publishers Weekly)

Multi-hit songwriter Clay Mills breaks down the mystery of melody writing to give your songs an edge with the PRA method. Learn how to write inspiring songs without waiting for inspiration. Highlighting personal stories, easy-to-understand method explanations, classic and modern song examples, Put It into Practice exercises, and a free companion website, Mills and O'Hanlon's Mastering Melody Writing is the perfect songwriting handbook, whether you are just getting started on your journey or looking to sharpen your skills. Mastering Melody Writing will help you: Write memorable melodies in any genre using pattern, repetition, and arc. Write songs that artists want to sing and audiences will remember.Write lyrics that are more musical.Eliminate getting stuck and complete songs faster.Feel confident in any writing or co-writing situation.Turn good melodies into great melodies.

“If you do one thing different, read this book! It is filled with practical, creative, effective, down-to-earth solutions to life’s challenging problems.”—Michele Weiner-Davis, author of Divorce BustingThe 20th anniversary edition of a self-help classic, updated with a new preface: Tapping into widespread popular interest in highly effective, short-term therapeutic approaches to personal problems, author Bill O’Hanlon offers 10 Solution Keys to help you free yourself from "analysis paralysis" and quickly get unstuck from aggravating problems.Tired of feeling stuck all the time when you’re trying to solve a problem or are facing conflict? Do you get easily flustered or angry when a negative confrontation arises? Have you ever wished you could communicate more easily with your spouse, kids, colleagues, or anyone else you have a difference in opinion with? In this newly updated edition of Do One Thing Different, Bill O’Hanlon will arm you with his ten easy Solution Keys so that you can move quickly from "stuck" to "smooth sailing" in all aspects of your life. Humorous, direct, and—most important of all—effective, these keys will help you change how you view and "do" your problems—from difficult relationships to enhancing sexuality and resolving conflicts of all kinds. The next time you have a problem, try one of these Solution Keys:Break Problem Patterns: Change any one of what you usually do in the problem situation by doing one thing different! Example: If you usually get angry and defensive, sit quietly and listen.Find and Use Solution Patterns: Import solutions from other situations where you felt competent. Examples: What do you know on the golf course that you forget when you get behind the wheel of your car? What do you say to resolve a problem with an angry customer that you don't say to your angry partner?Shift Your Attention: Focus on what you would like to have happen rather than on what is happening.Grounded in therapeutic practice, Do One Thing Different will put you back in control of your emotions and your life.

Although a growing number of Americans are turning to spirituality to help explain and supplement their lives, and a vast majority identify as religious, psychotherapy has long been reluctant to work alongside clients’ sense of "something bigger". But what kind of resources might a spiritual sensibility offer from a mental health standpoint? How can therapists helpfully and respectfully integrate spiritual feelings into their work with clients? Bestselling author Bill O’Hanlon tackles these questions and others in this pioneering foray into the uses and pitfalls of spiritualities—both secular and religious—in a therapeutic setting. Here, spirituality is defined by its three integral components: a feeling of connection to something beyond oneself, a capacity for compassion or "feeling with", and a sense of responsibility to make a contribution to others and to the world.

For many years, mental health professionals have attended the seminars of Bill O'Hanlon. The author and co-author of over a dozen books has captivated audiences with his informative, humorous, and interactive teaching style. An Invitation to Possibility Land takes participants a step further. In the context of a week-long training limited to 10 participants, O'Hanlon moves to a new level of experience that cannot be duplicated in his large workshops. The author shares riveting stories, metaphors, interchanges with participants, transcripts of therapy sessions during the week, and many more teaching points that allow this book to read like a novel. The book explores many current issues facing therapists in today's climate such as how to make therapy briefer and how to work with abuse victims. It offers the reader a chance to experience, along with the participants, an in depth training where subjects such as hypnosis, brief, Ericksonian, solution-oriented, and narrative therapies, and the use of language, are explored. Welcome to Possibility-Land.

Depression is one of the most common issues that people bring to therapy. It is also a mental health condition with several well-known and readily available medications to treat it. That said, every clinician knows that medications do not work for all clients, and even if they do work they can often come with unwelcome side effects that are difficult and hard to bear. In short, medications are not foolproof. Fortunately today, with rising interest in non-drug approaches, effective and easy-to-implement alternative strategies exist for dealing with depression in your clients, either in conjunction with medication treatments or on their own. Six of the best are presented in this book. With his characteristic mix of insightful clinical anecdote and personal narrative, seasoned therapist Bill O’Hanlon lays out six of his go-to non-medication strategies for clinicians to use with their own depressed clients. These include “marbling” (training people to intersperse happy memories with sad ones so that over time they move away from a feeling of such negativity); challenging isolation in clients (helping them to see the benefits of the social world); and understanding neuroplasticity and how it can be used to your clients’ advantage. Bill O’Hanlon writes from a place of experience. As a youth, he was so severely depressed that he contemplated suicide. His successful rise from that dark place, some 30 years ago, can be seen as the starting point for this book. Many of the strategies he used to overcome his own illness he now puts forward here, with compassion and wisdom, so that other clinicians may benefit. Every depressed person experiences his or her own variety of the illness, and as therapists we need to help our clients discover their own paths to healing. Armed with the compelling, non-drug strategies in this book, clinicians will be able to do just that, opening up a new route to health and wellness. Whether you routinely prescribe psychotropic drugs or would never think of doing so, this book may offer just the advice you need to advance your therapy work and make a real difference in your depressed clients’ lives.

In this practical, witty, and no-nonsense book, Bill O’Hanlon provides all the essential information for readers interested in writing their own books. He discusses all the big issues: writer’s block; getting an idea; how to keep motivated; developing a platform; how to think about self-publishing; how to find a traditional publisher and what to do once you have one. Best of all, every piece of information in the book is written with the psychotherapy writer in mind. O’Hanlon helps readers learn how to leverage their own strengths as mental health professionals, providing worksheets and advice about finding a topic and making it your own. He gives suggestions about how to use your own clinical skills to stay on target for writing deadlines, and he cuts through the excessive information about social media to explain exactly what is relevant to your writing project. Any therapist who has given more than a passing thought to writing a book owes it to themselves to pick up this one.

This classic book, available in paperback for the very first time, explores why some people can successfully change their lives and others cannot. Here famed psychologist Paul Watzlawick presents what is still often perceived as a radical idea: that the solutions to our problems are inherently embedded in the problems themselves. Tackling the age-old questions surrounding persistence and change, the book asks why problems arise and are perpetuated in some instances but easily resolved in others. Incorporating ideas about human communication, marital and family therapy, the therapeutic effects of paradoxes and of action-oriented techniques of problem resolution, Change draws much from the field of psychotherapy.

Here, Bill O'Hanlon uses his characteristic breezy and inviting style to tackle a very difficult issue: trauma resolution. This book details a philosophy and methods of working briefly and effectively with traumatized clients. Simple examples and dialogue, whimsical illustrations, and O'Hanlon's classic reader-oriented approach make this book inviting to therapists and consumers alike.

Popular author Bill O’Hanlon offers an inviting and reassuring guide to the essentials of hypnosis, alleviating the newcomer’s anxieties about how to make the most of this clinical tool. This brief book illustrates the benefits of solution-oriented hypnosis, which draws on the work of the pioneering therapist Milton Erickson (with whom O’Hanlon studied) and emphasizes doing what is needed to get results—which, more often than not, means trusting that the client holds within him- or herself answers or knowledge that need only be tapped or released by the therapist. O’Hanlon covers the key aspects of hypnosis, including: using possibility words and phrases; using passive language; and inducing trance. O’Hanlon offers practical tips and friendly encouragement for the novice hypnotherapist—in his characteristic warm, reassuring, and humorous style.

Drawing on thirty years of clinical experience, Bill O’Hanlon—one of psychotherapy’s most innovative practitioners and teachers—examines this simple yet often elusive aspect of successful therapy: change. With his characteristic wit and style, O’Hanlon presents the key concepts and most powerful methods for achieving personal transformation. Readers are provided with the perspective and inspiration necessary to embrace the risk and reward of change.

This book is one of the first guides to applying solution-oriented approaches to mental illnesses such as severe depression, schizophrenia, and multiple personality disorder. Clinicians will learn techniques that can be incorporated into their practices in order to promote health, confidence, and a sense of possibility in their patients.

In this engaging book, O’Hanlon introduces the three main concepts of inclusive therapy: permission, inclusion of opposites, and inclusion of exceptions. Each of the 26 featured methods is immediately applicable to your own practice.

In this book, Bill O’Hanlon, a co-developer of solution-oriented therapy, and Bob Bertolino, provide clinicians with forward-looking, respectful therapy that taps into and honors people’s inherent learning abilities. Their treatment model is a major departure from most addressing sexual abuse victims: it is less traumatic, less painful, and less disruptive to people’s lives.

Solution-oriented therapy focuses on eliciting, evoking, and highlighting the strengths of clients, as opposed to their pathology and deficits. Here, Robert Bertolino explains his great success in applying this model to the treatment of adolescents. He describes how to work with these young clients to help empower them to change their life scripts.

The idea of brief, solution-oriented therapy for severe mental illness flies in the face of conventional wisdom. But then, so does almost everything else about the psychotherapeutic approach developed by Bill O'Hanlon, coauthor of this groundbreaking book. Concepts such as forming client/therapist partnerships and creatively engaging the person beyond the illness are at radical variance with the mainstream view that disorders such as schizophrenia are completely neurobiological in nature and, hence, impervious to all but a battery of debilitating psychopharmaceuticals. Nevertheless, the long and growing record of inspiring results obtained by the authors of this book and like-minded practitioners speaks for itself. Now, in the first practical guide to solution-oriented interventions with severe mental illness, therapists Tim Rowan and Bill O'Hanlon acquaint readers with the core principles of the solution-oriented model. Also, with the help of many vivid case examples, they describe the proven strategies and techniques they have developed for treating patients suffering from severe depression, schizophrenia, and other severe, chronic, and persistent mental illnesses. Unlike traditional psychotherapeutic models that focus on pathologies and limitations, the solution-oriented approach emphasizes health, competence, and possibilities. Its ultimate goal is to help clients learn to marshal their own resources to deal with their own problems. Consequently, the book describes several "unorthodox" methods such as mining moments of crisis for functional models; exploiting individual and family expertise with mental illness; externalization techniques for helping patients identify the effects of their illnesses and reclaim self-agency; and psycho-education for the prevention of relapses. The authors also provide helpful pointers on how to constructively manage psychotic experiences, as well as violence and the threat of suicide. Solution-Oriented Therapy for Chronic and Severe Mental Illness will make fascinating and instructive reading for all mental health practitioners, regardless of their current theoretical slant. A groundbreaking guide to solution-oriented interventions with severe mental illness Solution-Oriented Therapy for Chronic and Severe Mental Illness is the first guide to applying the increasingly popular solution-oriented approach to treating mental illnesses generally considered beyond the scope of "talking cures." In a series of brief, engagingly written chapters, studded with vivid case examples, authors Tim Rowan and Bill O'Hanlon demonstrate the solution-oriented approach in action with patients suffering from severe depression, schizophrenia, and other severe, chronic, and persistent mental illnesses. You'll learn their proven techniques for dealing constructively with severely ill clients, even during moments of extreme crises, and for helping them to cultivate the internal resources needed to successfully manage their own illnesses.