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Change for the Better: A Programme for Positive Change

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This is the Third Edition of the best-selling self help psychotherapy program for lay people and students of psychotherapy since first publication in 1990.

The book is based upon Cognitive Analytic Therapy, a focused short term intervention pioneered and researched at Guys and St. Thomas Hospitals in London since the early 1980s by Dr. Anthony Ryle, and now taught and practiced throughout the UK and abroad. The book describes in ordinary language how learned patterns of responses to relating and thinking contribute to psychological problems such as depression, anxiety, phobia, and relationship difficulty. The book shows the reader how they can identify their own different inner dialogues, and the traps, dilemmas, snags, and unstable states of mind that lead to things going wrong. It offers help with the creation of written narrative and diagrams based upon the readers own self reflection. Mindfulness-based experiential exercises are incorporated throughout the text to help nourish self awareness and change.

The new edition offers a therapeutic dialogic relationship between reader and author. It includes the most recent development in CAT practice and places greater emphasis upon the transformation of unhelpful learned reciprocal role procedures that underlie relationship to oneself and to others. Change in symptoms occur when new and beneficial reciprocal roles are created.

The book covers many areas of emotional distress, and the Third Edition also includes new chapters on unstable states of mind seen in people given a borderline personality diagnosis, on dissociation, eating problems, and stress.

208 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 1990

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About the author

Elizabeth Wilde McCormick

14 books4 followers

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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Profile Image for Amanda Copeland.
3 reviews2 followers
April 28, 2012
The 'bible' of Cognitive Analytic Therapy. A useful self help book that provides patients and quite a few therapists with an introduction to the basic principles of Cognitive Analytic Therapy in a readable and logically presented format.

Change for the Better is for everyone who has ever wanted to change, but has found that anything beyond superficial change is difficult. We may continue to feel stuck, helpless, and angry as old ways of thinking reassert themselves.

Presenting an easy-to-follow programme, this book helps to develop insights into the old patterns that govern our choices. It shows how to identify unhelpful patterns of behaviour and how to go about changing them in a realistic way.

Highly recommended ++++++
Profile Image for Emma.
7 reviews9 followers
August 15, 2014
Much more than a self help book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews

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