The Good Enough Therapist

Book excerpt: The Good Enough Therapist is a guidebook—not an instruction manual—written for beginning, intermediate, and experienced clinicians. It encourages readers to explore, accept, and embrace their flaws and failings in a way that promotes effective treatment as well as personal growth. It focuses both on craft and process—craft related to the tools, the strategies, and the tactics of treatment, and process related to the session-by-session struggle to implement these tools in ways that speak to and illuminate the experience of living and struggling as a human being. It does not endeavor to transmit a method, but a sensibility, a way of being with patients that results in a deeper recognition of the therapist’s, and the patient’s, vulnerability, resilience, imagination, and integrity.