The book explains and describes the pathways leading to neurotic behaviours, beginning from early years of life, when we set up behavioural patterns that turn out to be fallatious, as regard our needs as well as our interactions with others. There are dreams which are defensive constructions in the name of unsatisfied needs of our childhood; against realities and family dynamics too different and dangerous to cope with, in a developmental stage when a child has no instruments to face or deal with such "troubled waters". Certain fears in adulthood, overwhelming though irrational to intellect, are the outcome of those moments, when a child was unable to face reality, being at the mercy of oneself, impotent, thus in danger and without a protecting caregiver. In this healing process, shared with a psychotherapist, in a long and painful revisitation of what occured, the unveiling of an emotional world silenced long ago, we dismantle paths built with so much struggle. When we plough into the past with the "experiential" model, there will be a change in our way of being and an enrichment in our interactions with others. The book has a second part dealing with sex abuse in childhood and disruptive relationships.
About the Author: Born in Australia. Graduated in Psychology at University of Padova - Italy. Four years at the Facilitator Development Institute in Rome where I specialized in Rogerian Therapy. My teachers and tutors were Carl Rogers, Chuck Devonshire, George De Rita, Nat Ruskin, John Wood. During the four years in Rome, my tutor was Chuck Devonshire to whom I owe a great deal for his sensitivity and great capacity to convey the "non-directive" approach and the fundamental concepts of Person-Centred Therapy. These professors come from the Centre for The Study of The Person University at La Jolla in San Diego, California. For four more years, I attended a supervision group conducted by Chuck Devonshire, treasuring a great deal of experience firstly with him and later with George De Rita. In my profession I was able to get hold of those "threads" that lay deep within the person's history and that "desperately" surface from the depths and become protagonists of our way of being ("the distorted actualizing tendency"). From this experience comes my book of poems: "A psychotherapy?...No... A lifetime...". It is a collection of poems written by a client and is the witness that there is a pathway in the therapeutic process. How long and painful is the road to travel. For many years, I have been professor for Clinical Sexology at the Centro Italiano di Sessuologia in collaboration with the Clinical Sexology Service at the department of Psychology University of Bologna. For ten years, I taught sex education in secondary schools and later wrote a book: "The voyage of our sexual growth". I have written works on sexual topics for scientific reviews. With this book on psychotherapy, I am here with all the limits that I realize may emerge, but with the hope that someone will take them and use them in order to move forward with a scientific "hand" in the phenomenal "Being in the World". The last chapter is an attempt to give some theoretical evidence as regards child abuse. For this piece of work my thanks goes to Mariagnese Cheli, responsible for the "Centre against child abuse" of the Azienda Sanitaria of Bologna.