The Good Enough Therapist: Futility, Failure, and Forgiveness in Treatment

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.