Reddit reviews The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)

I posted this for another thread. You may find it of use:

A person's self-concept is at the core of many psychological experiences, and pretty much every therapy will tackle the subject in some way. However, different therapies have different ideas about what exactly the best course of action with regard to low self-esteem will be.

My own personal experience is that it is a natural process of the human mind to engage in some degree of continuous self-appraisal; that is, to some extent, we're always arriving at some opinion of ourselves based on how we're doing in any given moment. As a result, people's opinions of themselves are constantly changing, and vary greatly from day to day (and even from moment to moment). While some cognitive therapies aim to change a person's self-esteem through disputing negative conclusions about oneself, my clinical (and personal) experience is that this only really changes the person's opinion temporarily -- you can come to a more flattering opinion of yourself for a time, but then it generally changes as the circumstances around your life change. More long-term shifts in a person's self-concept occur through "reality testing" -- that is, through having life prove your former opinion wrong or outdated over the course of months or years of having positive experiences.

That is why some more modern therapies (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Compassion-Focused Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, etc.) don't focus so much on the content of self-referential thinking, but rather on noticing its ever-changing nature, and nurturing self-compassion instead of self-esteem. Learning self-compassion is usually sufficient for most people with "normal" levels of low self-esteem. A booklet that I use with my patients is the one released by The Compassionate Mind Foundation in the UK by Dr. Paul Gilbert, which I've uploaded here. Gilbert has also put up some very good videos on Youtube, including a 4-part workshop, but here is a nice little shorter summary of the approach from his colleague Chris Irons.

The most robust and lasting changes I've seen in people with REALLY low and intractable self-esteem (such as those experienced by people with Avoidant or Borderline Personality Disorders, addictions, or extreme forms of social anxiety) have come from therapists that use some form of therapy that has a strong foundation in attachment theory. The reason for this is that these levels of low self-esteem are essentially subtle forms of PTSD, stemming from early childhood experiences. These people usually require long-term therapy with a therapist who can help them become aware of the basic emotions that are fueling their relentless self-criticism. (In traditional psychodynamic therapy, an overactive "super-ego" is often a defense against more basic, impermissible emotions, such as fear, sadness, anger, etc.) A modern and scientific approach that does this is Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP). You can read an example of this at work in this NYTimes article. A good book on this therapy is The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice.

No problem and thank you for the compliment. Overall, I love experiential and psychodynamic theories but I try to approach any theory as a means to an end. Any clinician that becomes too dogmatic risks missing the point (that is, helping the client and not serving your own ends). I like playing between affect and behavior with clients and attachment theory is behind it all for me.

In any case, why don't you ask an easier question? Haha. There is so much material out there for each modality that I could recommend plenty.

Strengths-focused

• 1001 Solution-Focused Questions by Fredrike Bannink
  
  
• Positive CBT by Fredrike Bannink
  
  
• Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman
  
  Experiential
  
  
• Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy by Robert Elliott
  
  
• Emotion-Focused Therapy, 2nd ed. by Les Greenberg
  
  
• Focusing in Clinical Practice by Ann Cornell
  
  Attachment
  
  
• Attachment in Psychotherapy by David Wallin
  
  
• Affect Regulation Theory by Daniel Hill
  
  
• The Healing Power of Emotion by Diana Fosha, Daniel Siegel, & Martin Solomon, ed.
  
  Psychodynamic
  
  
• The Transforming Power of Affect by Diana Fosha
  
  
• Treating Affect Phobia by Leigh McCullough
  
  
• Psychodynamic Therapy: A Guide to Evidence-Based Practice by Richard Summers and Jacques Barber
  
  
• Time-Limited Dynamic Psychotherapy by Hanna Levenson
  
  
• Negotiating the Therapeutic Alliance by Jeremy Safran
  
  Hope that helps! Feel free to PM me too. I wonder if /u/evilqueenoftherealm would have any suggestions too.