Beliefs: the heart of healing in families and illness (Families & Health)

In this seasoned and lucid book, a team of female clinicians offers professional practitioners and families a means for uncovering, distinguishing, and challenging a family's belief system to facilitate healing. Professionals often will privilege their own stories about illness, but the authors of this volume illustrate the power of recognizing and using the stories and experiences of families. Beliefs, they show, are at the heart of health and healing.Discovering and working with beliefs is not a process that requires a one time prescription or a twelve-step program. Rather, as Lorraine Wright, Wendy Watson, and Janice Bell convince us through their advanced clinical approach, rich with clinical examples and detail, this process is subtle, nuanced, and demanding. Throughout the book they integrate theory and research with key therapeutic moves and interventions. The result is an effective approach that allows the therapist-family team to open spaces for altering, challenging, and modifying constraining beliefs.Although physical illness can have a significant impact on individual and family functioning, this book describes how each family member--with his or her own particular beliefs--influences the health of the family. This book is the first to offer a specific method to explore, assess, and intervene with family members' beliefs. Nurses, social workers, psychologists, family therapists, family physicians, and other health professionals who assist families experiencing illness will appreciate the in-depth description of this clinical approach. Beliefs fills a void in family health care literature and sounds a convincing, compassionate voice within the community of professionals who work to alleviate emotional and physical suffering.